In this piece, I want to approach the U.S./Israeli assault—and that of their allies—on Iran through a Lacanian lens. In the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the prominent French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and one of the most influential figures in modern philosophy, the human subject is formed not in “wholeness,” but in “lack.” From the very beginning, the individual is confronted with an internal split between what is experienced and what can be expressed in language.
These days, the sound of explosions and air raids is no longer distant news; for many, it has become part of everyday life. A sound that arrives suddenly, tightens the body, and then lingers—even in silence.
What is less visible, however, is what becomes inscribed in the psyche of children—something that reveals itself not in the moment, but over the years.
A child who wakes up to the sound of sirens, a child who is frightened by every loud noise, a child who learns to always be ready to “run”— is not merely passing through an experience, but is shaping their very way of b eing in the world.
Sometimes I think that what we lose in childhood never truly returns, even if life goes on.
In the film Life, and Nothing More… by the late Abbas Kiarostami, we see children who, after an earthquake, still play—yet something in their gaze has changed, as if the world is no longer a safe place for them.
This condition can be understood as an encounter with the “Real”—a realm where experience is so intense that it cannot be fully contained within language, and therefore remains raw and unresolved.
In the film Bashu, the Little Stranger, the remarkable work of the late Bahram Beyzaie, Bashu has reached a place of safety, yet he is still startled by every sound, looking around in fear and anxiety.
This can be understood as the persistence of trauma at the level of the body—where a painful and shocking experience continues to live on in sensory and physical reactions, even after external conditions have changed.
Here, trauma operates not merely as memory, but as a repetitive structure—something that has not been fully symbolized and therefore keeps returning.
In Where Is the Friend’s House?, this anxiety takes another form: the fear of making a mistake, of punishment, of failing to respond to “the law.”
This can be understood in relation to the child’s entry into the symbolic order and their encounter with the structure of law.
And in J by Jafar Panahi, the child faces a different kind of tension—one that is everyday yet profound: an encounter with lack, with desire, and with the gap between wanting and obtaining.
Now, if we look at children today, in the midst of air raids, the issue becomes even more complex.
By briefly referring to these films—which have been echoed in hundreds of other war-related works—I wanted to bring you closer to Lacan’s hypothesis, which he articulates through three registers:
the Imaginary,
the Symbolic,
and the Real.
Among these, the “Real” refers to that which resists symbolization—where experience exceeds the capacity of language and cannot be fully expressed.
Within this framework, trauma is not merely a memory, but an experience that is never fully integrated into the symbolic order; therefore, it returns in the form of repetition, symptoms, or bodily reactions.
At this point, it is no longer just a “traumatic event” that has occurred, but a continuous condition of insecurity has taken shape—a world in which the collapse of order is always possible. In such circumstances, the child is not only confronted with the Real but is also exposed to its constant repetition.
Now, in this horrifying, reckless, and predatory condition—where blind missile fire falls day and night not on battlefields but on homes, destroying them—perhaps the most important question is this:
How will these children experience the world in the future?
If an innocent child experiences the world through insecurity, sudden noises, and loss, will they later be able to attain stability, trust, and continuity of meaning?
Lacan argued that since the human subject is formed through lack, if that early lack is severe and violent, what emerges is a person who lives with a deeper internal fracture—someone for whom the world remains unstable,
and security becomes only a temporary condition.
And perhaps cinema can make this condition visible:
That war destroys not only physical spaces, but also the structure of experience and the mental future of children.
Now, in these same horrifying, reckless, and predatory conditions, I would like to raise this question once again:
“How will these children experience the world in the future?”
