The intrinsic content of the work the Golden Pavilion is analyzed from a psychoanalytical perspective. The correspondences between the novelist Mishima and the young hero Mizoguchi are only alluded to ; the author concentrates more on explaining why the young adolescent, received as a novice in the monastery of the « Golden Pavilion », comes to make the criminal decision to burn the famous temple. The vagaries of the construction of the ego in the pre-Oedipal and Oedipal phases, and the hero’s difficulty in finding a place as a desiring subject are examined. The central question has to do with the peculiar status of the Golden Pavilion within the hero’s psychical economy : reality, fantasy, hallucination, or endo-psychical object ?