Fantasy, symptom, and multimodal semiosis: introducing psychoanalytic MCDA

This article introduces Psychoanalytic Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (P-MCDA), a text-centered interpretive framework that systematizes Lacanian-Žižekian psychoanalysis within multimodal critical discourse analysis. It does not claim that Critical Discourse Studies has ignored affect, subjectivity, or the unconscious; those concerns already have substantial precedents. Its narrower contribution is procedural. P-MCDA links three dependent operations. Multimodal description documents the semiotic evidence through which ideology is organized. Psychoanalytic interpretation develops evidence-bound hypotheses about fantasy, symptom, contradiction, and positions of enjoyment offered by the text. Contextual explanation then situates those hypotheses within historically specific relations of capitalism, coloniality, and geopolitical power. The framework does not infer actual unconscious states or audience reception without separate reception data. A worked reconstruction of The 8 Show, followed by briefer analyses of Pinay, American Style, and Attack on Titan, shows how the procedure can be applied across audiovisual forms. P-MCDA integrates semiotic evidence, psychoanalytic interpretation, and contextual critique while keeping interpretive claims traceable, contestable, and explicitly limited in scope.