Psychology of the Revolutionary Subject in Iran

So far, numerous works including original writings and translations have been presented about the events of the 1979 Iranian Revolution from various approaches. Some of these approaches have been mainly limited to mere historiography, others restricted to the role of specific individuals, and finally some confined to class analysis from Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives. Although these approaches, limited to the aforementioned frameworks and imposed upon the 1979 events, have been somewhat successful in analyzing and explaining aspects of the revolution, they have not been very successful in providing a relatively accurate analysis and explanation of the revolution’s occurrence or understanding the mindset of revolutionary subjects and their lifeworlds. What distinguishes the author’s approach in this work from the aforementioned perspectives is the effort to present a psychoanalytic analysis of the revolution and the mentality of religious and non-religious revolutionary actors, relying on Lacanian and Kristevan psychoanalytic theories regarding how revolutionaries break away from their lifeworld to organize their revolutionary world.