A Lacanian Reading of the “Story of King Shahryar and His Brother Shah Zaman”

Interdisciplinary studies and psychoanalytic criticism have recently opened up new horizons for researchers. The Thousand and One Nights has been evaluated in various ways so far, but what has been overlooked is the psychoanalytical dimension of the stories. The context of the “Story of King Shahryar and His Brother Shah Zaman” illustrates a problem unique to civilization, whose examination can provide the readers with insight into latent meanings. Although Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, used to read the works of poets and writers, including fantastic and suprarealist stories and claimed that he and those writers were both inspired by the same origin, albeit in two different ways (Shariat Kashani, 2014: 13), psychoanalytic criticism does not have the prominent place it deserves in contemporary literature, or is harshly criticized by those who do not support theorists such as Freud, Lacan, and others. The analytical power of psychoanalysis and its amenity to interpretation led us to decipher the core story of The Thousand and One Nights according to Lacan’s theories. Despite their difficulty, Lacan’s theories contain neither the misunderstandings around Freud’s concepts nor the sense of superiority one finds in Jung’s antirealist and mystical psychology. This paper deals with the origins of the story of Shahryar and his brother Shah Zaman from a Lacanian perspective.