Dangling between Terror and Trauma: A Psychoanalytic Study of Humans' Tormenting Moments in Emma Donoghue’s Room and Chevy Stevens' Still Missing[Latin Thesis]

Nahid Seyfi

The present study examines the aftermath of trauma in the novels of Emma Donoghue’s Room and Chevy Steven’s Still Missing in the light of Jacques Lacan’s theories. Lacan’s significant contribution to literary studies testifies the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis. Through meticulous observation of these captivity narratives, the study offers a vast ground to investigate how the very oppressive strata of violence trigger the traumatic destruction in the subject. This research strives to analyze how in a post-traumatic experience, the victims cannot maintain coherence between their newly-traumatized identities and their former ones. Lacan calls this phase the second death, that is, the impotency to find meaning in symbolic space. That is the death in the symbolic space in which the characters struggle with a deep disinclination toward life and relinquish their libidinal fantasy to the extent that the death drive is the only motivation in them. Through a retroactive attitude, the research detects the repetition traces of a mal-functioned father’s signifier that insists on the chain of misery in the life of victims before and after the abduction. Despite the fail of the father’s name in the victim’s symbolic manifestation, there is an invocation of the Name-of-the-Father to return and re-generate the signifier for the traumatized subject in symbolic space and ward off the intrusion of the death drive. The result will depict that the death drive comes from the fusion of life drive which is the drive of unity. In a sense, death drive is not a pure embodiment of self-destruction of an impoverished subject but as a subject wrapped in struggles to gain recognition, the recognition of its lost desire in the symbolic order. Keywords: Trauma, Jacques Lacan, Symbolic Space, Repetition, Fantasy, Name-of-the-Father