One Thousand and One Nights is presented in this paper as a superb example of Bakhtinian, carnivalesque literature, and of marginalized, subversive Persian literature, as a means of searching for lost or repressed images of women within contemporary Iranian discourse.

Where has Shahrazad gone? A possible precursor of Freud, who discerned the secrets of the mind so well that she altered the fate of a nation and set the feminine soul free? Why has she disappeared from the theatres of young contemporary Iranian women's minds? Was she repressed and resurrected in a disfigured manner? What remains of Shahrazad is a complete exoticisation of her as the ultimate erotic, eastern figure.

Through a psychoanalytic textual analysis of the Nights, the author uncovers various archetypes of women that have been completely extinct from a more mainstream Iranian discourse. The archetypes of Persian women populating the Shahrazad's tales night after night have been lost as sources of female identifications. The paper sets out to tell a story, and within it wishes to re-find a whole and integrated Shahrazad as an object of female identification, hoping to bring a new articulation to the female Oedipus complex, allowing the emergence of new possibilities of loving.