This text was first published in English on the website of the New Lacanian School (NLS), following the call “The Diversity of Truth in Psychoanalysis,” held in Paris on 27 and 28 June 2026; the Persian version of this text is also published for the first time on the website Psychoanalyst.ir.
“The woman does not exist”¹; this statement does not deny the existence of women; it marks a limit within language. “Woman” cannot be fixed as a universal totality in the symbolic order. Something always escapes this formulation; and what escapes is not erased, but returns in the guise of the symptom.
From this perspective, “woman” is not an identity but a position in which a specific relation to truth takes shape; not a fixed body but a place where (if one can speak of “appearance” at all) something unresolved still insists on appearing. In Persian myth, especially in the Shahnameh, female figures appear in a distinctive way.² These figures are often idealized, yet never fully captured by meaning. They do not represent an essence or nature of the feminine; they are the site of the return of what resists being stated outright. Through these figures, culture enters into a kind of exchange with what cannot be directly symbolized.
This tension can be seen, for example, in the figure of Rudābeh. Rudābeh stands at the limit between law and transgression; her desire does not resolve the contradiction but sustains it. Something appears in this position, but only in a displaced form: neither outside the symbolic order nor fully containable within it.
Freud’s notion of the “screen memory” makes it possible to read this movement. A screen memory does not simply conceal; it displaces and may even constitute what it seems to cover. What appears on this surface is not an immediate, untouched truth, but the displaced, deflected return of what can appear only through this distortion.³ From this perspective, the “screen” is not merely a veil over truth but one of the conditions of its formation. In this sense, the feminine also functions as a screen: it marks an encounter with structural lack and at the same time displaces it, making it appear indirectly on the surface of the symbolic.
Perhaps the issue is not “depth” at all. Structure remains closer to a surface: folded and twisted, without a fixed inside and outside. What seems hidden returns on that same surface—displaced, yet still in continuity with what distorted it.⁴
If we follow the logic of “not-all” (pas-toute), the symptom neither simply reveals truth nor simply hides it. The symptom speaks as a lie—not opposed to truth, but in its place.⁵ What returns in the figure of “woman” is not a truth hidden behind a curtain waiting to be discovered, but something that insists precisely at the point where truth fails to appear “as truth”—or perhaps more precisely: at the point where truth can never fully appear as truth.
References:
¹ Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, 1972–1973, trans. B. Fink, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 58.
² Ferdowsi, Shahnameh [The Book of Kings], c. 977–1010; see also Dick Davis, trans., Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.
³ Freud, S., “Screen Memories” (1899), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, III, London: Hogarth Press, 1962.
⁴ Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, 1969–1970, trans. R. Grigg, New York: Norton, 2007.
⁵ Miller, J.-A., “The Seminar of Barcelona”, Psychoanalytical Notebooks 1, 1998, pp. 11–65.