| خلاصه مقاله | Obedience, Defiance, and the Psychiatric Gaze in Iran
Psychiatry, both as an institution and a site of interpersonal engagement, operates within larger structures of power that shape the subject’s relationship to authority, submission, and agency. In societies where hierarchical power is deeply entrenched in social and familial life, the psychiatrist-patient relationship often becomes a theatrical stage upon which authority is rehearsed, negotiated, and contested. This paper examines how psychiatric practice in Iran is shaped by these embedded dynamics of submission and defiance, producing a therapeutic encounter that simultaneously mirrors and refracts broader sociocultural structures.
Drawing from clinical encounters while maintaining strict professional confidentiality, this paper interrogates how patients’ unconscious investments in psychiatric authority often translate into compulsive repetitions of submission and transgression. Patients demand that the psychiatrist assume an omnipotent role— “tell me what to do,” “save me”—only to retaliate against the very authority they have constructed later.
Through a psychoanalytic and Foucauldian framework, this paper argues that the psychiatrist occupies the position of 'the subject supposed to know' (Lacan), an authority onto whom patients project their anxieties, desires, and resentments toward power. In contexts where repressive structures govern, the psychiatric encounter becomes an arena in which patients oscillate between seeking absolute authority (masochistic submission) and rebelling against it (sadistic defiance). This duality reveals the ambivalence toward power that governs not only clinical relationships but also the broader psychic economy of subjectivity.
By situating the therapeutic encounter within a larger cultural analysis, this paper demonstrates that psychiatry is not merely a medical practice but a discursive field where power, knowledge, and submission are continuously reconfigured. Understanding the sadomasochistic underpinnings of psychiatric transference not only reveals the unconscious structuring of authority in therapy but also offers a critical framework for analyzing the broader psychic formations of sadomasochism in contemporary Iran. |