Love, Denial, and Death Drive: A Psychoanalytic Study of Violence in Pakistani Dramas and the Case of TikToker Sana’s Murder through Freud and Lacan’s Lens

The history of Pakistani television themes changed with empowered women playing the forefront characters in the 1970s. Among South Asian countries, Pakistan has an extremely innovative drama industry, and there are many brilliant serials that have succeeded internationally. Within these discourses, male protagonists often translate rebuff into disgrace, thus validating violence to be a heightened form of longing. Drawing on Freud’s notion of repression, the death drive, and Eros–Thanatos duality, as well as Lacan’s theories of desire, lack, and the symbolic order, this study is a psychoanalytic reading of the recent Pakistani teleplays and the actual killing of a TikToker, Sana Yousaf. Building on qualitative textual analysis of Dawn articles deconstructing abusive representations of love (Images Staff, 2025; Shabbir, 2025), this article explores how the narrative of male obsessive desire paves the way for cultural approval of violent reactions to female autonomy expression. The analysis is deepened by a consideration of the confession of the man who killed Sana, Umar Hayat, who confessed to snapping after repeated refusal, reflecting patterns dramatized on screen. Results show that these media portrayals not only contribute to naturalizing the male gaze and violent ownership of women, but they also echo unconscious drives of possession and destruction as proposed by Freud and Lacan. The research reminds us of the necessity of responsible storytelling in Pakistani media to interrupt cycles of deadly desire and gendered violence.