本文從拉岡的精神分析理論來研究楊德昌的整體電影創作，觀察他影片中的主體是如何欲望著現代性他者欲望的，而他者又是如何無法實現其社會象徵法則的。在楊德昌的電影中，決定了家庭或社會象徵秩序的現代性大他者往往變異為絕爽的他者，暴露出淫穢或暴力的面貌。楊德昌聚焦在對社會、教育與政治體制的批判上，揭示出它們的殘暴與荒誕。因此，總是有一個欲望的小它物顯露出（拉岡意義上的）真實層的鬼臉，引向象徵構築的崩坍。儘管現代性問題是楊德昌電影的永恆主題，他一直致力於呈現社會或文化現代性所陷入的困境。楊德昌常常試圖探索傳統儒家和現代性社會範式的關係，二者作為文化象徵層卻在當代社會面臨著嚴重的危機。那麼，楊德昌電影中的角色顯示出匱乏主體的面貌，在「穿越幻想」的過程中迫使我們直面內在生命的黑暗核心，對應於現代性象徵秩序的創傷性虛空。

This essay examines Edward Yang’s filmic poetics in light of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The purpose is to observe how the protagonists in Yang’s films, as subject, are subject to the authoritative Others, but who demonstrate only their failure to function as the symbolic (social or ethical) law. The big Other of the law, which is supposed to determine the symbolic order of the society or family, often degenerates into the Other of jouissance, as an obscene figure. Yang also focuses his critique of the social, educational and political institutions by revealing their violence and absurdity. His films always display a small object of desire that, in my view, appears as a grimace of the dark Lacanian real, causing the breakdown of the supposedly intact symbolic construct. Even though modernity is a perennial theme of Yang’s films, he strives to show the traumatic predicament in which social and cultural modernity seems destined to be trapped. Yang also attempts to probe the relationship between the Chinese Confucian tradition and the western social paradigm of modernity, both of which, as the cultural symbolic, face serious crisis in contemporary Taiwan. The destitute subject of the characters in Yang’s films is thus often enacted through the ＂traversing of fantasy＂ as a critical moment that prompts us to face the dark kernel of inner life, corresponding to the traumatic void of the symbolic order of modernity.