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In sync with Gohar Homayounpour's Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012), a delightful study that shows how psychoanalysis can operate in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I hope to demonstrate that Turkish literature invites and rewards psychoanalytic interpretation. The romantic, Nabokovian, postmodern creation of Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's premier, Nobel Prize winning novelist, The Museum of Innocence (2009) emerges in the end as a Lacanian novel par excellence. The Museum of Innocence is a psychoanalytically complicated story catalyzed by the ungrasped moment of lovemaking stunningly described on the first page. Kemal, the central character, exhausts himself to keep this moment of timeless happiness from slipping away, indirectly through fetishistic objects of mediation. His obsession, though, leads to the novel's balanced psychoanalytic stance that embraces the rich history of Turkey even as it critiques Turkish sexist rigidity, along with Western capitalist encroachment (both of which align with Kemal's fetishism).
The Museum of Innocence begins as a novelistic fetish that plants itself in the place of the Real, an encounter with which, Kemal unconsciously believes, has the power to engulf him in the threatening experience of aphanisis (desubjectification).1 The very morphology of the novel's plotlines presents a passion that resists turning into active desire. Kemal pursues two women and consequently wins neither. He needs both women to enjoy sex with either one, a requirement of his unconscious that leads to none. About to be engaged, Kemal falls in love with eighteen-year-old Füsun who soon thereafter becomes alienated and inaccessible; Kemal blows his relationship with his fiancée, Sibel, by cavorting with Füsun. The object-filled novel, like the Museum with which it is correlated, offers a substitute world