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Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science

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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.01.028

Tripartite Register of 1900 in The Legend of 1900

Lingjing Yang

Shanghai Ocean University, Shanghai 201308, China.

*Corresponding author: Lingjing Yang

Published: February 27, 2025

Abstract

The Legend of 1900, a film miracle created by Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore in 1999, has provoked people to contemplate deeply about modern civilization. The main character, 1900, a child abandoned on a giant ship at sea and never setting foot on land, became a legendary pianist with a natural gift, but his death was silent and anonymous. Though a great deal of research has been done regarding this film, the perspective of psychology is an unknown domain. Therefore, based on Jacques Lacan's Tripartite Register of the subject, in this essay, I assumed that 1900's spiritual world can be divided into the imaginary register of the sea, the symbolic register of the land, and the real register of the invisible to explore the 1900’s self. 1900's "ideal ego" is the embodiment of perfect art that transcends the mundane without discrimination on the basis of class, race, and religion. However, his obsession with the "ideal self" and the desire for or knowledge of the "object a" inspired the death drive, which ultimately led him to self-destruction.

Keyword

The Legend of 1900; Jacques Lacan; Tripartite Register; ideal self; "object a"

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Copyright

© 2025 by the author(s).
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) license, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not modified or adapted.
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How to cite this paper

Tripartite Register of 1900 in The Legend of 1900

How to cite this paper: Lingjing Yang. (2025) Tripartite Register of 1900 in The Legend of 1900. Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science9(1), 204-210.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2025.01.028