Lacanian Dream and Desire in Sakharam Binder

Introduction

This study attempts to analyse the patterns of Dream and Desire in Tandulkar’s play

Sakharam Binder through Lacanian lens. The play was written in the age of transition, social

and political scenario was changing so that human psyche patterns. It is embodied with the

desire of being dominant, sexually superior, socially acknowledged. Burman, R. Indulekha in

Man-Woman Relationship in the Sakharam Binder (2006) discussed about how men and

women are knitted in the play referring to further research.

Research framework

The Lacanian notion of desire is applied to Sakharam Binder. To him a child’s early years

are the years to go through the registers; Imaginary, Symbolic, and the Real. Lacanian

analysis presents specific impact of each register. The first stage is rooted with structure

of images. The Symbolic order starts with the beginning of the subject into language and

finally, The Real is in anywhere apart from where we be capable of taking insight.

Placing the desire in all these registers, each with its concept particularity obligates to

other ones, Lacan makes an irregular model of the configuration of desire. He, then,

believes that “desire is always the desire of the other” (Seminar, Bk. XI 235). Process of

Alienation and Separation is part of Lacan’s model that gives rise to his/her desire is a

lack in being. Lacan’s famous statement “the unconscious is structured like a

language”(Seminar, Bk. VII 12), implies, among other things, the way in which

unconscious desire is always seeking our lost object of desire (Lois Tyson 2006, p.31).

Winnicott states “Should an grown-up make assertion on us for our approval of the

impartiality of his subjective occurrence, we tell the difference or make a diagnosis of

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madness” (Winnicott 1953, p. 14). In more Lacan in Book XI clutch, ―the object of

desire is the reason of the desire (1981, p.243).

Lacan rejects Freud‘s idea about locating the roots of dream in the wishes and

considering the dream as their fulfilment. For Lacan, dream is the ―expression of an

unconscious desire not just the embodiment of a conscious wish ‘‘Lacanian Dream and

Desire in A Streetcar Named Desire’’ [PP: 76-84]. As such, Ragland comments, ―the

dream is distorted not only because desire is not sanctioned by the superego of the public,

conscious life, but also because the Real of sexuality and loss covered over in the dream

(2000, p.65). It would acquire us far afield to complex these difficult ideas, which in

some ways became the root of Lacan’s later writings. It may be adequate to memo

Freud’s suggestion of Kant’s “thing in itself” as beyond the restrictions of human

understanding (1915, p. 17).

For Lacan, the dream is putting the signifying language of the Symbolic order in an

abstract scope. The dream does not follow the rules and structures of the language. On the

surface, it is more akin to the gestalt and seemingly meaninglessness of the Imaginary. In

Lacan’s idiom, we would say there is “no prediscursive reality” (1972–1973, p. 72).

Argument:

The analysis of a dream starts in the present and rooted in the past. On the contrary desire

seems to attach with present. All the three characters in the play seems to be incarnation of

various prevailing desires. In very first scene champa looks at house as to be her that shows

her desire inside but at the middle of the play she had to left the house that refers her desire to

remain unfulfilled.