Bipolar Disorder and Drug Abuse: A Psychoanalytic Study of Suicidal Ideation and Perception of Women as the ‘Other’ in Leonard Cohen’s “Dress Rehearsal Rag”

Pragati Das^1*  & Mita Bandyopadhyay² ,
¹Research Scholar, Techno India University, West Bengal & Faculty, PG Dept of English, Bhatter College, Dantan. *Corresponding author.
^2,Assistant Professor, Techno India University, West Bengal.

^{Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 17, Issue 3, 2025. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v17n3.05g
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Abstract

Leonard Cohen’s lyric “Dress Rehearsal Rag” from the album Songs of Love and Hate (1971) presents an existential crisis of an artist caught up in the post-war turmoil of the counter-culture in the 1960s. Though not particularly successful as a song in the popular context, the lyric deserves scholarly attention because it can reveal many issues concerned with the general and personal contexts of pop culture. Following this line, this paper will try to investigate how the combination of bipolar disorder and narcotic drug abuse leads the poet to a suicidal rehearsal. It will also explore how this kind of positioning influences his negative perception of women as the ‘Other.’ We will apply Freud’s concepts of the death drive and repression, alongside Lacan’s theories of the Symbolic Order and the “Other” to expose the psychological and relational complexities. Recent research on bipolar disorder and narcotic drug abuse will also be used to illuminate the conditions further.

Keywords: Bipolar Disorder, Drug Abuse, Suicide, Other, Psychoanalysis.