Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis 3031399692, 9783031399695

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Praise for Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Contents
1: Introduction: Life and Celestial Jerusalem
2: The Clinical Experience and the Birth of the Symbolic Order: Lacan’s Theoretical Leap in 1953
2.1 “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”
2.2 “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”
3: “Family Complexes” (1938): An Early Model of the Return to Freud and the Conceptualization of the Father
3.1 The Splits of the Father in Freud’s Theory: Between the Biological-Concrete and the Biological-Conceptual
3.2 Lacan’s Criticism: The Family as a Sociocultural Institute
3.3 Splitting—and Saving—the-Father
3.4 The Father’s Fall from Grace: The Invention of Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism
3.5 Extracting the Jewish and Paternal in Bergson
3.6 Judaism and the Good Father
4: Return to the Logos: Between Dualism and Extimacy
4.1 The Logos: From Heraclitus to John
4.2 Logos in Christianity, Heidegger and Lacan
4.3 The Subject’s Extimacy and the Other
4.4 In the Beginning Was the Word
4.5 The Body-Signifier Dualism
4.6 The Logos and… Collective Dualism
4.7 Demythologization and the Logos
5: Lacan and Jung (1): The Threatening Affinity
5.1 The Slippery Slope to Occultism
5.2 Jung and Freud
5.3 Weltanschauung and Anti-ideology
5.4 The Non-libidinal Libido
5.5 The Imagined Similarity Between Lacan and Jung
5.6 Abstraction and Obscurity
5.6.1 Lacan and Jung’s common denominator
5.6.2 Freud’s Rejection of Jung’s Style
6: Lacan and Jung (2): The Difference Between them and the Judeo-Christian Tradition
6.1 Lacan’s Struggle Against Jungianism and the Difference Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic
6.2 Jung’s Psychotic Imagination and Freud’s Materialism
6.3 Anti-Jungianism and Anti-Gnosticism: Split in the Face of Harmony
7: Lévi-Strauss and Lacan following ‘Totem and Taboo’: What Is a Collective Unconscious?
7.1 The Anxiety of Metaphysics
7.2 The Jealous Father of ‘Totem and Taboo’
7.3 The Processing of the Theory of Lévi-Strauss in the Lacanian Discourse
7.4 Lacan Following Lévi-Strauss: The Mechanism of Language and the Metaphysical Danger
7.5 Lévi-Strauss and Lacan Rereading ‘Totem and Taboo’
7.6 Jung, Freud, Lamarckism
7.7 Lacan’s Processing of Freud’s Lamarckism
8: “I am who I am” (“Eheye asher Eheye”): The Name-of-the-Father, the Other, and the Biblical Position
8.1 The Name-of-the-Father and Psychosis
8.2 Science and Psychoanalysis following the Cogito
8.3 Lacan’s Seminar III: The God of Schreber
8.4 Seminar III: The Constitution of Modern Science and the Judeo-Christian Tradition
8.5 ‘I am who I am’
8.6 ‘I am who I am’ in Seminar III
8.7 Following Racine and Jansenism
8.8 God of Speech and Desire
8.9 The Anti-Metaphysical Traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Lacanianism
9: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Judaism, and Christianity: Reading Seminar VII
9.1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Biology
9.2 The Real, Jouissance, and the Thing
9.3 The Theological Origins of Lacanian Ethics
9.4 The Law and the Thing in the Bible and in Paul
9.5 “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself” and Freud’s Theory of Narcissism
9.6 The Law of Love and the Death of the God-Father in Paul and Lacan
9.7 The Two Faces of Freud’s Moses
10: The Pleasures of Baroque: An Epilogue on Late Lacan
Works Cited
Lacan
Freud
Additional Literature
Author Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

THE PALGRAVE LACAN SERIES SERIES EDITORS: CALUM NEILL · DEREK HOOK

Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis Itzhak Benyamini

The Palgrave Lacan Series

Series Editors Calum Neill Edinburgh Napier University Edinburgh, UK Derek Hook Duquesne University Pittsburgh, USA

Jacques Lacan is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the 20th century. The reach of this influence continues to grow as we settle into the 21st century, the resonance of Lacan’s thought arguably only beginning now to be properly felt, both in terms of its application to clinical matters and in its application to a range of human activities and interests. The Palgrave Lacan Series is a book series for the best new writing in the Lacanian field, giving voice to the leading writers of a new generation of Lacanian thought. The series will comprise original monographs and thematic, multi-authored collections. The books in the series will explore aspects of Lacan’s theory from new perspectives and with original insights. There will be books focused on particular areas of or issues in clinical work. There will be books focused on applying Lacanian theory to areas and issues beyond the clinic, to matters of society, politics, the arts and culture. Each book, whatever its particular concern, will work to expand our understanding of Lacan’s theory and its value in the 21st century.

Itzhak Benyamini

Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis

Itzhak Benyamini Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Jerusalem, Israel

ISSN 2946-4196     ISSN 2946-420X (electronic) The Palgrave Lacan Series ISBN 978-3-031-39968-8    ISBN 978-3-031-39969-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: P.Spiro / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Acknowledgments

The book, in its current version, is a cumulative result of years of work that started when writing my Ph.D. thesis, at the Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Since then, with the help of many readers, friends, and supporters, it has been revised, extended, and edited to reflect my ongoing studies of Lacan’s writings. I am, therefore, much indebted to all who took part in this endeavor: I am grateful to Dr. Michael F. Mach and Prof. Rivka Feldhay for their comments on my writing. The manuscript underwent several revisions until Resling, an academic publisher in Tel Aviv, published it in 2007. Many thanks to Professor Edward L. Greenstein, former head of the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, for providing financial support in translating the book to English. I extend thanks and appreciation to the translator, Dr. Liat Savin Ben Shoshan, and the editor of translation, Dr. Dana Tor, for their dedicated work in preparing the manuscript for review. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague, Dr. Shirli Sela-Levavi, who did the academic editing of the manuscript and prepared it for publishing, for her friendship, generous help, and professionality in bringing the manuscript to its final publishable version in English. I would like to thank Mr. Colum Neil and Mr. Derek Hook, editors of the Lacan series at Palgrave, for finding interest in my manuscript, v

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Mr. Philip Getz, senior editor, Mrs. Sujatha Mani and Ms. Shenbagavalli Saravanan who took care of all elements of production and bringing this book to print. Finally, I would like to thank my love, my friend, and my companion in my voyage through Lacan’s work, Dr. Orit Yushinsky, whose study and teaching of Lacan and Labor Process Theory paves a new, fascinating way of understanding Lacan for me and for all his readers.

Praise for Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis “Benyamini’s new book is an in-depth, fascinating and innovative study of Lacan’s theory, and the many schools of thought in the history of Western philosophy that contributed to the discourse of Lacan’s life and time. This book, therefore, is not only for those interested in a new, rich understanding of Lacan, and of the origins of psychoanalysis. From Heraclitus to Freud, through Judaism and Christianity, this strikingly erudite author offers a masterful weaving together of Western philosophy and theology. Using the study of Lacan as a focal point of structuralism, psychoanalysis, Judeo-Christian theology and even mysticism, Benyamini offers his readers fresh perspectives and new, exciting integration of classical Ideas. A real treat for lovers of interdisciplinary thought and cultural studies.” —Alice Bar Nes, Author of Psychoanalysis, Mysticism and the Problem of Epistemology: Defining the Indefinable “Attending to both Lacan’s Catholic Christian and Freud’s Jewish perspective on the Father, Benyamini brilliantly opens up a new understanding of Lacan. His interpretation raises the stakes of how we inherit the legacy of monotheism in religious, psychoanalytic, and cultural terms. Anyone invested in psychoanalysis should read this book!” —Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas

Contents

1 Introduction: Life and Celestial Jerusalem  1 2 The  Clinical Experience and the Birth of the Symbolic Order: Lacan’s Theoretical Leap in 1953 13 2.1 “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”  14 2.2 “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” 29 3 “Family  Complexes” (1938): An Early Model of the Return to Freud and the Conceptualization of the Father 41 3.1 The Splits of the Father in Freud’s Theory: Between the Biological-Concrete and the Biological-Conceptual  44 3.2 Lacan’s Criticism: The Family as a Sociocultural Institute  54 3.3 Splitting—and Saving—the-Father  57 3.4 The Father’s Fall from Grace: The Invention of Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism  61 3.5 Extracting the Jewish and Paternal in Bergson  65 3.6 Judaism and the Good Father  68 4 Return  to the Logos: Between Dualism and Extimacy 75 4.1 The Logos: From Heraclitus to John  76 4.2 Logos in Christianity, Heidegger and Lacan  79 ix

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4.3 The Subject’s Extimacy and the Other  81 4.4 In the Beginning Was the Word  87 4.5 The Body-Signifier Dualism  92 4.6 The Logos and… Collective Dualism  94 4.7 Demythologization and the Logos  99 5 Lacan  and Jung (1): The Threatening Affinity101 5.1 The Slippery Slope to Occultism 102 5.2 Jung and Freud 105 5.3 Weltanschauung and Anti-ideology 106 5.4 The Non-libidinal Libido 116 5.5 The Imagined Similarity Between Lacan and Jung 120 5.6 Abstraction and Obscurity 124 5.6.1 Lacan and Jung’s common denominator 124 5.6.2 Freud’s Rejection of Jung’s Style 127 6 Lacan  and Jung (2): The Difference Between them and the Judeo-­Christian Tradition131 6.1 Lacan’s Struggle Against Jungianism and the Difference Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic 131 6.2 Jung’s Psychotic Imagination and Freud’s Materialism 139 6.3 Anti-Jungianism and Anti-Gnosticism: Split in the Face of Harmony 150 7 Lévi-Strauss  and Lacan following ‘Totem and Taboo’: What Is a Collective Unconscious?161 7.1 The Anxiety of Metaphysics 164 7.2 The Jealous Father of ‘Totem and Taboo’ 166 7.3 The Processing of the Theory of Lévi-­Strauss in the Lacanian Discourse 169 7.4 Lacan Following Lévi-Strauss: The Mechanism of Language and the Metaphysical Danger 172 7.5 Lévi-Strauss and Lacan Rereading ‘Totem and Taboo’ 177 7.6 Jung, Freud, Lamarckism 179 7.7 Lacan’s Processing of Freud’s Lamarckism 181

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8 “I  am who I am” (“Eheye asher Eheye”): The Name-of-the-­Father, the Other, and the Biblical Position185 8.1 The Name-of-the-Father and Psychosis 187 8.2 Science and Psychoanalysis following the Cogito192 8.3 Lacan’s Seminar III: The God of Schreber 197 8.4 Seminar III: The Constitution of Modern Science and the Judeo-Christian Tradition 200 8.5 ‘I am who I am’ 204 8.6 ‘I am who I am’ in Seminar III208 8.7 Following Racine and Jansenism 212 8.8 God of Speech and Desire 218 8.9 The Anti-Metaphysical Traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Lacanianism 221 9 The  Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Judaism, and Christianity: Reading Seminar VII227 9.1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Biology 228 9.2 The Real, Jouissance, and the Thing 231 9.3 The Theological Origins of Lacanian Ethics 237 9.4 The Law and the Thing in the Bible and in Paul 241 9.5 “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself ” and Freud’s Theory of Narcissism 245 9.6 The Law of Love and the Death of the God-Father in Paul and Lacan 248 9.7 The Two Faces of Freud’s Moses 251 10 The Pleasures of Baroque: An Epilogue on Late Lacan259 W  orks Cited269 A  uthor Index283 S  ubject Index289

1 Introduction: Life and Celestial Jerusalem

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) dedicated his doctoral thesis (1932) to his brother: “To my brother, the Reverend Marc-François Lacan, Benedictine monk of the French order, my brother in religion”. However, in the inscription appearing in the reprinted edition of this study, dated 1975 (edited by Jacques-Alain Miller)1 the last words, “my brother in religion” are omitted. David Macey, who studies the development of Lacanian thought, notes in his preface to his book Lacan in Contexts, that Lacan, like Freud, sought to avoid scrutiny and exposure of his earlier biography, concerned that it would reveal the foundations of his thought. The reason was the unfolding myth that Lacan was a pioneer in the field of psychoanalysis and that his discourse had by and large developed independently, ex nihilo.2 Macey presents in his book various contexts of Lacan’s early development, in particular those concerning his ties with the surrealist movement in Paris and with French psychiatry at the turn of the  Lacan (1932b). For more on his relationship with his brother, see Roazen (1996) (who mentions the omission from the inscription in page 336), and also Barzilai (1999: 151–155). 2  Macey (1988: 1–4). 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_1

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twentieth century. He takes this opportunity to suggest that there are additional aspects worthy of scrutiny, e.g., the theological one.3 This can be elaborated, if not exaggerated further by citing Slavoj Žižek, who claims that “everyone who aims at really understanding Lacan’s Écrits should read the entire text of Romans and Corinthians in detail”4. In a similar vein, French-Jesuit theoretician and philosopher Michel de Certeau, who was close to Lacan in the 1950s, refers to the concept of the Other (l’Autre), claiming that Lacan’s use of formulae that refer to the Other as “the dark God” (Dieu obscur) denotes that “such formulations, and a thousand others similar to them, […] gradually bring the strange impression that the house is haunted by monotheism”,5 as manifested in key, capitalized, Lacanian terms such as la Loi, le Père, l’Autre, akin to the way God and his titles appear in Western religious discourse. Accordingly, the omission of “my brother in religion” may be seen— even more so than the actual original inscription (which could be interpreted as merely a fraternal courtesy)—as a telltale hint to the attempt to conceal one of the dominating elements in the development of Lacanian discourse—the religious one. The foundations of this substratum may date back to Lacan’s Catholic family background and his close relationship with his brother.6 However, even when this background is considered, one should be careful not to present Lacan as having been completely immersed in Catholicism. It seems that his position is much more complicated and ambivalent. The following citations seem to provide hints to this ambivalence. In them, Lacan refers to a possible reaction of the audience in his seminars (an audience, which was mainly atheist and even Marxist), to the theological elements in his seminars that are intellectually out of vogue. The two different citations are taken from Lacan’s seventh seminar,  Macey (1988: xi).  Žižek (1999: 149). 5  de Certeau (1986: 47–66). 6  Benedictine monk Marc-François Lacan, Jacques Lacan’s brother, is known as one of the editors of the Catholic Lexicon of the Biblia (as part of the emphasis of contemporary Catholicism on the Biblia: Vocabulaire de théologie biblique 1970), and as the author of a book of sermons (Lacan, M-F, 1975). At times, he also wrote texts, which aside from their theological nature were related to Lacanian psychoanalysis (see Lacan, M-F, 1987). 3 4

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The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), and unfold the complexity of Lacan’s relation to theology and religion, mainly to the Catholic-Christian tradition. The first citation is pronounced right after Lacan uses Saint Paul’s speech about the sin and the law to demonstrate his notion of the dialectics between the law and desire: Whatever some may think in certain milieux, you would be wrong to think that the religious authors aren’t a good read. I have always been rewarded whenever I have immersed myself in their works, and Saint Paul’s Epistle is a work I recommend to you for your vacation reading; you will find it a very good company.7

At another lesson of the same seminar, Lacan refers to his visit in the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, with a somewhat apologetic tone towards his “suspicious” audience, along with criticism towards the religious discourse.8 I thus find myself in front of an audience that was very large and of which I had a very good impression, summoned there by the Catholic University… As you might expect from me, I didn’t mince my words or censor my language. I didn’t attempt to attenuate Freud’s position on religion. More-­ over, you know what my position is concerning the so-called religious truths.9

* * * Lacan’s main theme, particularly since the 1950s, was the call for “a return to Freud”, by rethinking the Freudian text. The question is, how did this return to Freud coincide with Lacan’s unique cultural and religious background? According to Žižek, the “return to Freud” may be interpreted  S7: 83.  A lengthy discussion of these citations appears in Chap. 9. 9  S7: 170. 7 8

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as Lacan’s breakthrough vis-à-vis the particular and narrow Freudian discourse, by transferring its original denotation to a different context— just as Paul did in relation to Jesus’ Jewish-particular discourse and Lenin concerning Marx’ discourse.10 With regard to Žižek’s assertion, one may wonder whether there is a contradiction and tension not merely between the universal and the particular but also between two kinds of particularity. Could it be that en route to that corrective “universalization”—in order to augment Freudian particularity—Lacan transformed Freud through the particular French-catholic scepter? According to Žižek, universalization was to be carried out initially by C. G. Jung, but having disappointed Freud (by having his own insights), it was Lacan himself who realized this. How are we to understand Lacan, then? Did he too have his own cohesive set of insights prior to his encounter with Freud’s writings? Was Lacan Hegelian even prior to attending Alexandre Kojève’s course on Hegel?11 Was he as Catholic as his biography suggests, or is it that he was influenced by surrealism? Furthermore, could it be that Lacan’s “return” to Freud meant “pouring” Freud into this context? This particularity of Freud vis-à-vis that of Lacan can also be posited in the theoretical context of the intergenerational Oedipus complex between the particularity of the father (Freud) and the particularity of the son (Lacan) (similar to the way Freud and Jung grasped their own identification-­ rivalry relations as oedipal).12 Lacan, who sought to rephrase psychoanalysis, coined the phrase “The Return to Freud”, but in order for the return not to be presented as naïve or as orthodox, but rather as revolutionary, he had to revisit the concepts of the “Father” and “Oedipus” in the Freudian sense. The issue of Freud’s position as the “father” of the psychoanalytic movement (in the sense of cult or church) was therefore relevant for Lacan. And indeed, the Lacanian “revolution” can be portrayed as a return to the “Father” and as a rephrasing thereof.  Žižek (2001: 2–3).  Alexandre Kojève (1968–1902) was a Russian immigrant who lived in Paris, taught in the 1930s a course at the École des Hautes Études on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, focusing in particular on the dialectics of master and slave. Many of his listeners would later come to form the French intellectual elite: Sartre, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty and Lacan. See Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Kojève 1947). 12  See the letters of Freud and Jung (Freud and Jung 1974) on the theoretical and personal relations between them. Also compare to Harold Bloom’s approach in The Anxiety of Influence (1997). 10 11

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Lacan defined himself as “Freudian”, albeit differently from the way this assertion is perceived at first glance. It ought to be examined whether Lacan managed during his life to reconstitute the “Freudian” to equal the “Lacanian”. When he said he was “Freudian”, was it as though he said that he—like his audience—was “Lacanian”?13 This begs the question whether Lacanian discourse has resituated the discourse of Freud, Jewish and anti-religious, deeply within the vastly different intellectual world of French-Catholic psychoanalysis, whilst preserving its original foundation. Following Freud’s death in 1939, the question of his status arose in the psychoanalytic movement in terms of the father figure: would it remain a menacing character (in line with Freud’s biographical image), demanding its disciples to adhere to it under the threat of “excommunication” (Jung, Tausk, Adler)? Alternatively, would it be better to steer clear of his menacing figure and establish a new Psychoanalysis, as the proponents of ego psychology sought to do by renouncing Freud’s commitment to the concept of the unconscious and the centrality of sexuality? Ironically, the same psychoanalysts who strayed, according to Lacan, from Freud the father, were the ones who would lead the IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association), which Freud had founded in order to preserve his legacy. My premise is that, as early as the 1930s, Lacan sought, in the framework of this revision, to stay away from the image of Freud as a menacing, evil, father—as a superego who commands, “Do not follow me!” (Do not place yourself as a father in your own right, as an autonomous instigator of a discourse)—and instead, places himself as the proponent of the positive identity of “Follow my lead!” (Develop your psychoanalysis using your own tools, but through a commitment to my way, pursuing my teaching). Lacan’s alternative was the return to Freud, albeit to a very particular Freud, to Freud as signifier, as text, as an oeuvre, as a symbolic function: a return to Freud’s texts, to his German, to his language. It is my assumption that Lacan knew that Freud as a text was less of a threat, allowing for a greater degree of creativity, unlike what he was as the

 According to Lacan’s words in a conference in Caracas, 1980, one year prior to his death; Lacan (1981). 13

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threatening imago, forcing any subject encountering it to remain silent or to be utterly rejected. * * * My premise is that within Lacanian discourse, lies a central dualist tension between the body and the signifier/language. For example, in a late lecture in 1972 in Leuven University, Lacan declared, “We live!” (“Nous Vivons!”); for him, life is the sound rock, on which psychoanalysis relies, rather than on “celestial Jerusalem”.14 Here, Lacan voices one aspect of a dilemma that unfolds throughout his clinical and theoretical work, which ranges between the structure, the theory, the formula and the philosophy (as metaphysical aspects of discourse), and life, body and jouissance (as allegedly extra-metaphysical existential aspects). This dilemma is tied to another one, not less complex, regarding the portrayal of the father figure following the Freudian discussion of Oedipus: Is the father a conceptual/internal representation, or is it a concrete person encountered by the subject? Indeed, in Freud’s writings, there often appears an argument concerning the existence of the superego, which is an internalization of the father figure, but it is an internalization that refers to an encounter with an actual person. The conceptualization of Freudian motifs could have led Lacanian psychoanalysis to undesirable places, especially in the spiritual sense, and clash with Lacan’s additional goal: to maintain a connection with life, with the clinical experience in the encounter with the speaking and

 A recorded lecture in a documentary film about Lacan (Wolff 1982). Lacan says in the lecture: “Life—it is the stable thing from which we are nourished. We live! There is no doubt in that, we are aware of it every second, but now we must start relating to life as a concept.” This is the tension that exists between speech, language and life—‘the speaking man thinks he exists (être)’.” Later on, following the words of a revolutionary student who bursts into his speech, Lacan blames—being anti-progressive (as he refers to himself at the time)—the revolutionary tendency, as calling for the master and for harmony, i.e., for the love of “celestial Jerusalem”. Compare also to similar comments from the lesson of December 3, 1973, known as, “Impromptu in Vincent”; this lesson was attached as an addendum to the published book of seminar XVII (S17: 240) (a seminar given during the student protests of 1969–1970). 14

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jouissance15–deriving subject, as well as with that which cannot be articulated. Generally speaking, Lacan faced two pitfalls. The first and more obvious one had to do with the risk that his psychoanalytic theory would slide towards a conceptual discussion in which the unconscious, the father and the Other, would be defined or perceived as conceptual entities, rather than singular entities related to the jouissance of the finite body, or to the encounter with other people in our lives: the father, mother, any other, etc. The second and more latent danger was being perceived as closer to the teaching of Jung (who was considered romantic and spiritualistic). The perceived affinity stems from the quasi-superficial similarity between the concept of the collective unconscious in Jung and that of the Symbolic order in Lacan. In various periods Lacan needed both Jungianism and Structuralism to exceed the concreteness of the Freudian discussion of the father and to theorize it: in his early work on the Imaginary order, Lacan used motifs, which are highly similar to Jungian ones, and as of the 1950s, he started focusing on the Symbolic order, guided by the theories of Roman Jacobson, Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Having processed terms and motifs out of these discourses, Lacan faced a dilemma: how to theorize the Freudian discussion more abstractly, without giving up the relation between the physical and the linguistic-­symbolic-­cultural? This raises the question, in what way motifs of the religious discourse, which he used and processed, in fact served him in solving this theoretical dilemma. The encounter between Lacan’s analytic theory and JudeoChristian religious discourse shall be examined in this sense. Although Lacan refers in his writings to other religious traditions, his relation to Judaism and Christianity stands out: these religions constitute the basis of the cultural world in which he lived, as well as the basis for the religious discussions in Freud, to which Lacan often referred. These religious frameworks (like any religious framework) hold a distinct ethical stand

 Jouissance is a Lacanian term that is often translated as enjoyment, which does not quite capture the term. I will use the original term jouissance throughout the book. 15

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(that will be pointed out later on), since they do not only constitute religion, but also culture, in the wide sense of the word.16 * * * In this current book, I shall therefore seek to learn about the way Lacan shaped a new psychoanalytic discourse out of his unique cultural background. For this purpose, I shall examine how conceptual and religious themes played a part in shaping Lacan’s psychoanalytic discourse, as this discourse encountered theoretical dilemmas related to his primary project: the return to Freud. There is no claim here of reducing Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and defining it as purporting a religious stance, but rather of examining the function of the religious themes in this discourse. Indeed, Lacan clearly appropriated and developed many concepts and themes from various discourses in philosophy, anthropology, science, etc., which were significant for establishing his own discourse. Nevertheless, I shall concentrate here on the discursive components that enable Lacan to establish his return to Freud (theoretical discourses) and place at the center of this return the ethical aspect (cultural-religious discourses). Lacan operated in the psychoanalytic field, wherein he tried to establish his independent standing and discourse. To accomplish this, he used elements of theoretical discourses of the cultural framework in which he operated—such as the teachings of Freud, Jung, Hegel, Heidegger, Levi-­ Strauss and other modern thinkers, as well as the Judeo-Christian cannon—to establish himself as the only true interpreter of Freud. He created a theoretical encounter with those theoretical ingredients, while  The connection made here between Judaism and Christianity under the concept of “Judeo-­ Christianity” allegedly requires critical examination, but it evolves from the way Lacan himself writes it. Also relevant in this context is Gerard Haddad’s suggestion that we conceive Lacan as identifying with a Jewish stand. Haddad (1994: 305–333) positions Lacan as identifying with the position of French-Jewish Rabbi Eli Benamozegh (1822–1900), who emphasized the need of finding the common denominator between the Jewish and Christian culture. Conversely, Tort (2000) identifies the Lacanian emphasis on fatherhood with Catholicism. Similarly, the anti-­Lacanian psychoanalyst André Green (1996) argues in an interview about Lacan that the latter is a Catholic psychoanalyst and that his emphasis on language was designed to flatter the French intellectual class, as opposed to the Freudian-Jewish position. 16

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ignoring some of their aspects, i.e., he removed several ingredients from the appropriated discourse and processed those with which he worked until they became synonymous with aspects integral to his discourse; then, Lacan introduced them into his own discourse or presented them as confirming and supporting it. Therefore, the methodological model I shall present here refers to the tension between the Lacanian discourse and those influencing discourses he appropriated that are presented above, which I shall refer to as ‘Processing discourses’.17 * * * Another question remains as to the validity of a certain claim concerning the development of Lacanian discourse and how it has changed between the beginning of the 1930s and the end of the 1970s. This claim is that the changes in Lacanian discourse are presented as shifting the emphasis between the three Lacanian orders (the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real), which constitute the heart of his innovation. In his early days, Lacan focused on the mirror stage and on the imaginary order. Since the early 1950s, his priority shifted towards the Symbolic order of language and the unconscious, whilst positing a new concept: the “Other”. Finally, since the early 1960s, he emphasized that which transcends the Imaginary and the Symbolic: the real, excess-feminine jouissance and the real object, the cause of desire—objet petit a.

 The term “discourse” means in this context statements that are united by rules that regulate the same statements, delineate, and distribute them. This definition follows the theory of Pierre Bourdieu (1977), and particularly of Michel Foucault (1969). According to Foucault, the discourse is an intersubjective phenomenon that constitutes the subject. A discourse is not constituted by a subject-author, but by archives—pools of texts—and the rules of using them that create meaning. This signification process is subject to power struggles inside the discourse, and between the discourse and others. In this sense, a discourse is the creation and conservation of meaning within a certain sociocultural context. Foucault posits the meta-author as creating a discursive practice, and particularly refers to the examples of Freud and Marx and to their function with relation to the Freudian and Marxist fields. He discusses the return to these founders of the practices of discourse, and even hints at Lacan’s return to Freud as reconstituting the practice of discourse of the founder. In that, he presents Lacan as one who independently establishes a practice of discourse (Foucault 1969). The model with which I will work here contains tension between the author and the discourse. The intention is to distinguish the “author’s function” (Foucault 1969) within the discourse, as well as the constraints in which he works. 17

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In Lacanian studies, there are three positions regarding the development of his theory: the first is that his theory consists of three separate phases: the Imaginary in the 1930s and 40s; the Symbolic in the 1950s; and the Real in the 1960s and 70s.18 The second position claims that there are no leaps from one phase to another, but rather a continuous and successive development. Finally, the third one is that there is a single, never-changing “Lacan”. Here, I shall accept the claim that Lacan has changed, but not in a continuous and clear way. That is, I shall present an intermediate position, which distinguishes between three phases, but nonetheless also seeks to trace the transition from one phase to another. Therefore, I shall look into several key Lacanian concepts: the Name-ofthe-Father, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Real, and the Other—in order to examine “the moment” at which the concept first saw light, what theoretical dilemma it sought to resolve, as well as what new dilemmas it created. I shall focus mainly on the theoretical leap of the early 1950s, when in a matter of a few years, Lacan suggests the return to Freud, introduces the distinction between the three orders and the concept of the “Other”, and the relation between language and the unconscious. This book seeks to explain this leap as a leap into a structuralist position (even before a structuralist “school” had even existed as such in the 1960s and 70s). I shall describe this development, or these leaps, against the background of the clinical and institutional developments in Lacanian discourse. The various stages of Lacan’s life and the institutional crises he went through are considered according to the view that the clinical, institutional-­sociological and biographical aspects of Lacan’s teaching are all intertwined. The premise I shall seek to examine here, is that these theoretical leaps are strongly connected to the way in which Lacan seeks to situate his discourse within the Judeo-Christian cultural realm, and particularly, in the framework of the common anti-metaphysical ethics, which he believes is situated within the same realm. In other words, a certain JudeoChristian position, which Lacan perceives as anti-abstract, took part in  This division is based on a study and examination of several divisions made by Ettinger (2006); Clark (1988, I: xxxiv–lxi); Marini (1992: 95–138); and Miller (1979). Miller describes those developments in Lacan’s teachings as “Paradigms of jouissance”: Miller (2000). 18

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charting his theoretical transitions, which stemmed from theoretical crises and dilemmas, no less than from observations of psychoanalytical experiences in his own clinic. *** The structure of this book is as follows. Chapter 2 presents a preliminary examination of the concepts pertaining to the distinction between the Symbolic and Imaginary orders, as introduced by Lacan in 1953, and raises the theoretical and ethical dilemmas arising from this conceptualization. Chapter 3 presents Lacan’s 1938 text on “Family Complexes”, which encapsulates most of the theoretical and cultural dilemmas Lacan pursues following his attempt to revise psychoanalytic theory and practice at this early stage. Next, Chap. 4 presents the way Lacan of the 1950s demanded the return to Freud and examines how this demand coincides with the theological theme of the incarnation of the logos in the flesh. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 present Lacan’s way of dealing with the ramifications of the return to Freud, by appropriating and processing other theoretical discourses. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss Lacan’s handling of Jungian discourse, and Chap. 7 his grappling with the structuralist discourse. These three chapters describe the implications of these ‘processing discourses’ on the description of the father figure within the psychoanalytic discourse and present the relation of this description to the Judeo-­ Christian stance on the status of the father. The last two chapters bring up Lacan’s direct approach to theological themes. Chapter 8 discusses the way Lacan examines in Seminar III: The Psychoses, the biblical expression “I am who I am” and links the concept of the Other to the concept of God in Western civilization. Chapter 9 discusses the way Lacan examines, in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the relation between what he defines as “The ethics of psychoanalysis” and the Judeo-Christian ethics, mainly through a detailed discussion of the biblical expression “love thy neighbor”. In these two chapters, I show how Lacanian discourse crystallizes around a religious, anti-metaphysical position. The book ends with an Epilogue on the ramifications of this discussion on Lacan’s later teaching and his perception of femininity.

2 The Clinical Experience and the Birth of the Symbolic Order: Lacan’s Theoretical Leap in 1953

Although Lacan was active back in the early 1930s, developing fascinating theoretical work on the mirror stage and family complexes, 1953 was Lacan’s annus mirabilis. In that year, he presented the doctrine with which he will be identified ever since; the distinction between the Symbolic order, the Imaginary, and the Real, and the emphasis on the concepts “The Name-of-the-Father” (Nom-du-Père) and “the Other” (l’Autre). Two representative texts from that miraculous year elucidate these key concepts. First, “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”—a lecture delivered at the Philosophical college of Paris, in which Lacan first distinguished between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and consequently between the symbolic father and the imaginary father. In this lecture, the term “The Name-­ of-the-Father” appears almost incidentally. Second, the most important lecture in this period—“The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, given in Rome in September 1953, in which Lacan expresses the principles of his theory in a well-developed and crystallized manner. This lecture may be seen as a manifest about the singularity of Lacan’s clinical approach compared to other psychoanalytic approaches.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_2

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2.1 “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth” Le mythe individuel du névrosé was not published in Écrits, as could be expected, but only in 1979, by Jacques-Alain Miller.1 Delivered to a university audience, the lecture is designed to justify Lacan’s rebellion against the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). Consequently, he attempts to present his clinical and theoretical position as clearly as possible. Thus, the text is relatively clear, and its dilemmas are rather transparent. In addition, it is easy to identify the birth of Lacan’s early articulation at this stage of “The Name-of-the-Father” and the distinction he makes between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. In the lecture, Lacan clearly distinguishes between his and the other approaches in psychoanalysis, relating an act of immersion with the Imaginary order to the other prominent analysts in his time (particularly from the Anglo-American current of ego psychology) and the emphasis on the Symbolic order to himself. He argues that these analysts have an imaginary relationship with their patients, while he is interested in a completely different level of analytic discourse—the symbolic level. The Imaginary is related to the narcissist relations between the therapist and patient, as the patient projects his narcissist fantasies as well as his aggressions on the therapist. Lacan relates the Imaginary to an aspect he calls the “individual myth” of the patient. He borrows this concept from a 1949 text by Claude Lévi-­ Strauss titled “The Efficiency of the Symbol”.2 According to Lévi-Strauss, the myth contains a narrative dimension but at the same time, it is characterized by internal structural relations. The purpose of the myth is to resolve a conflictual crisis or a misunderstanding of reality under  The first publication of the text in French followed an earlier publication in English by The Psychoanalytic Quarterly (Lacan, 1979). Translated with an introduction by M. N. Evans, this version, as well as the French subsequent version, also includes a foreword by editor Jacques-Alain Miller. Miller’s words offer a kind of warning, which contribute to clarifying the importance of this text on the one hand, and yet attempt to narrow its scope on the other. According to Miller, this lecture represents the birth of Lacan the structuralist and constitutes the “rudiments of later development in the thought of Dr. Lacan” (Miller 1979: 405). Miller also elaborates on the history of the neglect of this text, as well as the fact that Lacan himself refers to that neglect in a footnote in Écrits (E: 57, n. 6). 2  Lévi-Strauss (1963: 186–205). 1

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previous mythical contrasts. Lévi-Strauss presents the shaman as giving his patient the symbolic meaning of the local myth, and from the description of the shaman’s work, he proceeds to compare it with the psychoanalyst’s work. The psychoanalyst, like the shaman, works with the patient’s myth, yet this is an individual myth, which the subject creates, and therefore it contains his own private components. From here, Lévi-­Strauss continues to argue that the unconscious is indeed structural and universal. This is because the unconscious, like the myth, contains narrative stories organized by unconscious rules, just as the basic units of the language are organized by the universal laws of linguistic form. This position regarding the structure of the unconscious will have great influence that will constitute Lacan’s entire linguistic discourse in the 1950s and afterwards. Curiously, despite the great influence of Lévi-­Strauss’ article on “The Neurotic’s Individual Myth”, Lacan neglects to give credit to its author. In opening his lecture, Lacan notes that he would like to clarify a particular subject that relates to clinical experience that he has discovered recently and which he would like to conceptualize. He is aware that he does not yet have the perfect tools for it. It is not a completely different subject, but an attempt by Lacan to redefine the relationships between persons under the Symbolic order, which until then was conceived as “narcissism”. For Lacan at that period, as presented in the paper on the mirror stage,3 narcissism is not only a phase in childhood, but also the very basis for the psychology of the human. Moreover, it is expressed not only in self love, in the sense of the love of one’s own image, but also in a projection of that love (or hatred) on the figures that surround him. And vice versa: the image of the ego, which is the image of the body, is the result of an imitation of an external model. Lacan seeks, from now on, to deviate from this type of discussion to reveal the true, basic essence of the analytic experience. In this text, Lacan increasingly speaks of the clinical practice and experience that is the source of his position. He wishes to articulate this experience in words and theory, which is a difficult endeavour.4 His difficulty also derives from the need to revise the theory according to his analytic  E: 75–82.  NIM: 405.

3 4

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experience. It seems that this dilemma, of the relation between theory and the clinic, will lead Lacan from now on throughout his teaching over the years. This begs the question: What is the clinic? To what extent is it the origin of theory? In order to clarify the singular clinical experience to the audience, Lacan does what appears to be a contradiction in terms: he seeks to detach himself from the singularity and find the fundamental aspect behind it. He does not do it through examples from his clinic (except for several brief, sporadic comments), but by examination and research of paradigmatic cases presented by Freud. This rhetoric, it should be noted, will characterize him all along. In other words, Lacan conceptualizes the clinical experience, condensing it to its essentials. In fact, his dilemma is how to transform the experience, the origin, into a theoretical articulation. Lacan emphasizes that the difficulty lies in conveying the conceptualization to the audience, as it is not an audience of psychoanalysts but an academic audience of philosophers that are used to conceptual discussions. Therefore, he opens with an apology for his very attempt to organize this experience and articulate it to his particular audience: “To abstract this new element from that teaching and that experience so that you can appreciate its implications involves quite special difficulties in a lecture”.5 It must be noted that Lacan gave this lecture in Le Collège de Philosophie in Paris, to Jean Wahl’s request. We may thus ask: How does he deal with this Other, that is, the university discourse? How does he define himself vis-à-vis this discourse that aspires, as he says, to find the single meaning of reality, a one and only worldview? How should he present to this audience the unfamiliar clinical experience in a conceptualized manner without betraying it? After these opening words, Lacan confronts the argument that psychoanalysis is not a science, but an “art”. He argues that it is indeed an “art” in the medieval sense of the word when the humanities were considered part of the liberal arts. Why does Lacan wish to tackle this argument? Perhaps this is a part of his attempt to position psychoanalysis squarely between modern science and models that are less rigid, which examine the human closely without forcing him into the clutches of a final  Ibid.

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mathematical formula as in scientific university psychology. This is related to his own attempt to understand the subject of the clinic and articulate this experience in thetheoretical framework. In turn, it may resonate the internal dilemma during the constitution of Lacanian discourse in which Lacan deals with the sensitivity that he has to develop to the relation between the clinic and the scientific formula, and as will be soon made clear—between the clinic and the structure, or the concept of the structure. What makes the humanities unique? Lacan says that at their foreground is the “fundamental relation to human proportion”.6 In this sense, psychoanalysis is the closest discipline to the liberal arts, if only for its usage of speech (parole). Since the analytical experience essentially revolves around speech, “it always implies within itself the emergence of a truth that cannot be said, since what constitutes truth is speech…”.7 Therefore, the analytic experience (as well as the human being as a speaking being) cannot be treated as an object of a scientific formula that reduces speech into a singular dimension of the formula; speech should be examined as something that embodies a “deeper” dimension, a structural aspect, one that should be articulated. At this point, we may again trace Lévi-Strauss’s influence in his discussion of the myth. Lacan suggests that “there exists at the heart of the analytic experience something that is properly called myth”.8 According to Lacan, the myth is something that enables a form of discourse for something that is non-transferrable through the definition of truth, since only through speech, which is developmental, can truth exist. That is, the myth attempts to convey this dimension of truth. In what form? In the form of a story. Therein Lacan adds that Oedipality is in itself a myth, as it is the story that attempts to convey the analytic experience, which cannot be told, as a truth.9 It seems that Lacan, when pointing at the fact that the Oedipal complex is only a myth, wishes to transcend this myth, to work with it to find the way out of it in an act that may be called “demythologization”. In the  NIM: 406.  NIM: 407. 8  Ibid. 9  Ibid. 6 7

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face of the myth, Lacan places the fact of the analytic experience, and as aforementioned, he does not provide examples from his own clinic. He makes a comment that is almost paradoxical: “I bring you a series of experiential facts”.10 We have here a series that is essentially something structural that conveys facts from experience, which is singular and unique (as Lacan testifies himself ). However, Lacan illustrates not by using specific examples, but through structural articulations. That is, it is not merely a presentation of the Oedipal myth, but its reconstitution from myth to structure: “These formations require us to make certain structural modifications in the oedipal myth, inasmuch as it is at the heart of the analytic experience.”11 Here Lacan goes on to speak about the father, since the concept of the father is at the heart of Freud’s Oedipal myth. If this myth also contains a structural aspect, then the status of the father, which is bound to analytic experience, contains this structural aspect as well. This Father is related to his cultural location as a figure under certain social circumstances, but also to being a cultural function: These changes permit us, on a second level, to grasp the fact that underlying all analytic theory is the fundamental conflict which, through the mediation of rivalry with the father, bind the subject to an essential, symbolic value. But this binding always occurs, as you will see, in conjunction with an actual debasement, perhaps as a result of particular social circumstances, of the father figure. [Analytic] experience itself extends between this consistently debased image of the father and an image our practice enables us more and more to take into account and to judge when it occurs in the analyst himself….12

Lacan describes a complex and ambivalent relationship between the patient and the father. On the one hand, the father is a concrete figure in the discourse of the patient, which Lacan conceives as the imaginary father. This figure gives expression to the patient’s individual experience. At the same time, Lacan notes that there is a devaluation of the father, as demonstrated in  Ibid.  Ibid. 12  NIM: 407. 10 11

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the clinic at his time. This devaluation is expressed by a presentation of the father figure as weak and degenerate. However, the father in the analytical discourse, also has the role of connecting the subject to a set of social norms, to the Symbolic order. In this sense, the father is not a function that should be understood through a specific father, but as a cultural function. The crisis occurs, according to Lacan, when this function is reduced to a concrete father figure. Hence it is important for Lacan to distinguish between the imaginary father (the concrete father figure or the substitute of the concrete one) and the symbolic father (the structural function of the father in the life of the patient and in the analytical experience), according to the distinction he makes between the Imaginary (in the sense of the patient’s momentary fantasies) and the Symbolic (in the sense of the structuralism that the Imaginary covers). Lacan seeks the structural relation out of the Oedipal complex in Freud, although he presents it as an imaginary myth. That is, there is no devaluation of the myth, but an acknowledgment by Lacan that if he would delve into the Oedipal myth, and if he would skillfully use the analysis of the function of the myth according to Lévi-Strauss, it would enable him to say something interesting about the symbolic function of the father. During the discussion of the father and the myth of the father, Lacan adds another layer of discussion, following the philosophical discourse. As he argues, in the framework of the relationship of the therapist-analyst with the subject-patient, The therapist gains the status of the master, the moral master, who throughout history has pulled the subject out of his ignorance and introduced him into the network of social relations. The master is presented here under the influence of Hegelian philosophy (both that of Hegel himself, who introduced the dialectics of the master and slave and under the influence of Kojève), and his status is atrophied, similar to the depreciated Oedipal father.13 According to Lacan, the myth is a representation of a period of time, a chronological description in an “imaginary way”,14 of a special relation to a human form of existence under certain social circumstances. He adds 13 14

 Ibid.  Ibid.

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that this is why the specific social function of the myth can also be found in the analytical experience of the neurotic. Lacan chooses to examine this through the case of the Rat Man.15 He argues against psychoanalysts who claim that Freud’s cases are incomplete, and scorn their articulation, as evident in what one of them said to Lacan: “Their technique [of the cases], he said, is as clumsy as it is antiquated”.16 Lacan replies that although these case studies appear to be incomplete, Freud must be reexamined, and it should be asked why he chose these particular cases, out of confidence in him: “And one must have confidence in him”.17 Beyond that, Lacan adds a comment that is pivotal to our present purposes regarding his approach towards the clinical experience and its description. As he says, there is a gap between Freud’s clinic and those of all other analysts. Freud’s clinic is paradigmatic of all the rest—the primary articulation that one should address.18 There is a certain clinic, and there is another one, the clinic, Freud’s, which has a different status altogether. This clinic is actually the anchor against the metaphysics of overconceptualization. Is this anchor enough? Will the conceptualization of this experience suffice rhetorically to explain its uniqueness? Maybe a new anchor is required—of a point of view, an ethics, an ideology? Can such an anchor be explained by the fact that such a clinic is rooted within history, inside culture? How is explaining the importance of the symbolic background of the clinical –to prevent the clinical from being based upon metaphysical assumptions –liable to slide into an opposite standpoint, in which the clinical is the last word in face of “they” (the non-analysts) who do not understand? Is the clinic turning into the total metaphysical anchor? Lacan stresses the distinction between the everyday clinical experience, characterized by its private arbitrariness, and the fundamental clinical experience, by stretching the difference between the deceptive Imaginary and the fundamental Symbolic. Through this, he attempts to avoid sliding into an imaginary scenario of the patient. However, if the alternative is a  Freud (1918).  NIM: 408. 17  Ibid. 18  Ibid. 15 16

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discussion of Freud’s cases, this raises the question—What about Freud’s own imaginary script? How does Lacan wish to avoid it? We can only wonder whether Lacan’s attempt to explain the clinical experience to an external audience, the mere (excruciating) attempt to give sense to the singularity of the clinical experience, is what led him to create the division between the petty Imaginary, as revealed to him daily at the clinic, and the Symbolic, which represents the structural principle behind every individual story narrated in the clinic. Lacan begins by presenting and analyzing the Rat Man and defending this choice. He addresses the structural characters of the compulsive neurosis that hide behind the patient’s aggressive fantasies. All this is set against a call stopped at the Imaginary, which is a failure of encounter with a text that is as important and fascinating as Freud’s. Lacan wishes to point to the aspect of the neurotic myth within this pathology—with its imaginary aspects—to reach what is beyond it—the structural Symbolic. At the center, there is the aggressive fantasy of attack by rats. This fantasy stresses the subject upon hearing the story. Against the backdrop of this distress, Lacan’s inquiry examines the structural aspect behind the fantasy. Lacan wonders if this is merely a fantasy and suggests that what designates this text is its structural particularity, which exceeds the imaginary-­aggressive fantasy. That is, he wishes to point at the singular contribution of the case, but at the same time to say that there is something beyond its imaginary/ mythical aspect. This structural particularity is important for Lacan, following Freud, who aims at studying each case anew in its own particularity, as if we were ignorant of the theory.19 Lacan adds that there is simplicity here akin to that of a geometrical model or a constellation. In the geometrical sense, this is the structural situation of the subject within his world of myth. This structurality is connected to what exceeds it, what lies beyond it, its prehistory, particularly the structural relations within the family. And the location of the subject is articulated here in the Symbolic order.20 With relation to the Rat Man, Lacan notes that behind the myth that the patient narrates lies an earlier one: an imaginary scenario that predetermines the subject’s life. This is 19 20

 NIM: 410.  Ibid.

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evident in the stories of the conflicts of the Rat Man’s father with a poor woman and with a rich one, and his entanglement in gambling. The conflict of the father left its marks in the life of the patient. I.e., there is a clear and visible connection between the fantasy surrounding the father and the neurosis and phantasm of the son. Here there are two stories— that of the father and that of the son—and the structure is expressed in the mere relation between the two stories, which are related in turn to the structural relation between the son and the father (in the sense of a symbolic father). This structurality translates the first imaginary story into a second imaginary story of the patient, and we learn of the Symbolic only through an investigation of the imaginary mythical. In this sense, the Imaginary cannot be clearly separated from the Symbolic. This ambiguity is manifest in Lacan’s own discussion: sometimes it is not clear whether he speaks of the symbolic or imaginary value of his objects of discussion. It is also perhaps the reason for his profound difficulty in preparing the lecture, as Lacan comments at the beginning. The distinction is not easy, because the imaginary-mythical is almost the only context in the analytic experience in which the Symbolic can dwell, and only by passing through this Imaginary can the therapist extract the Symbolic. However, according to Lacan, the danger lies in the mere dallying on this Imaginary, which has seductive power. Is it an “iconoclastic” tendency that guides Lacan against the Imaginary, the pictorial, the mythical, even if he is aware of its value? The relation between the stories of the father and the son reverts Lacan to the question of the father function and its atrophying. In this case, the Rat Man’s father is no longer alive, all that remains of this father is the imaginary father, the father as an image that structurally duplicates the scenario in the son’s life.21 Thus, the neurotic son creates a relationship that duplicates the complication of his father’s relationships with the people in his life. Lacan describes this as the myth of the subject regarding his life, which includes something that can only be articulated by way of imagination, something behind which hides the structural aspect: “This phantasmatic scenario resembles a little play, a chronical, which is precisely  NIM: 412–413.

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the manifestation of what I call the neurotic’s individual myth.”22 The figures in the father’s life are realized in the flesh of the figures in the son’s life. In this case, Lacan’s ultimate goal is to examine, as said, the status of the father as Father, even more than to learn about neurosis in itself. In the background stands the castration of the father. The demise of the father figure is connected, according to Lacan, to the analytic experience, when the aggressive fantasies are turned toward the therapist. Lacan’s criticism of other analysts (and sometimes Freud himself ) is that they linger too long on this aggressiveness, which is part of transference, and thus get caught in the network of the patient and his own phantasmatic story, instead of researching the actual duplication of the myth, the actual structurality of the duplication of the myth from generation to generation, as well as the symbolic father’s role as a guiding principle in the therapy. Actually, this is an intermediate phase in Lacan’s theoretical development. On the one hand, he discusses the narcissistic identifications according to the model of the mirror stage, which dominated his theory in the 1930s and 40s: the ego is structured through an imitation of an external image, an identification that fires back aggressively towards the ego. On the other hand, he attempts to diverge from this discussion to the structural aspects (inspired by Lévi-Strauss) of the myth in itself, and the relations between the subject and the world that surrounds him. This tension is embodied in the theory itself already in this stage, when Lacan splits the father figure to the imaginary father and the symbolic father. Lacan fixes the myth of the individual at the heart of the analytical experience. This myth incorporates the aggressive relation to the father and the therapist. He argues that lingering on it is a sinking into the mythical Imaginary without proceeding towards the structural aspect behind the mythical. However, since Lacan still does not emphasize the role of language in the structure of the unconscious (as we read in later texts of Lacan), he notes that this narcissistic aspect is that which leads the subject in his relation with the therapist and with his past that is translated to present. Lacan adds that he could present some further examples of his

22

 NIM: 414.

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own, shedding light on the state of the neurotic much better than the traditional triangular thematization of the Oedipal complex.23 From here Lacan moves on to another example which is not a clinical case, but a literary one. He reads in Goethe’s autobiography, mentioned in the Rat Man case study: Dichtung und Wahrheit.24 Lacan stresses, following the title of Goethe’s book, the extent to which the truth (Wahrheit) regarding reality is also connected to poetry (Dichtung), and is not only a matter of dry facts. In fact, he speaks against the Goethe specialists, who search the objective, “real” truth behind Goethe’s life story. As he argues, these specialists do not understand that the autobiography is titled as such because of the connection that the writer sees between truth and poetry. That is, behind the author’s stories, which are imaginary, there is a structure that contains a truth that can only be expressed through human speech, which turns this structural truth into a story or a myth (either collective or personal, like the patient’s). It appears that there is a need for the imaginary fantasy in order to recognize the structural-symbolic which lies behind it. The Symbolic is not detached, but always lives inside the narrative-imaginary. I will not give a full description of Lacan’s analysis of Goethe, but I will however linger on a detail that appears to be insignificant at first reading. While describing a scene in which the young Goethe is involved in a romantic relationship with two girls, Lacan lingers on a marginal detail. The young Goethe dresses up as a church boy and presents himself to the priest of a village where he stays, as if coming to hand out baptism bread (carrying the bread is a task usually entrusted to the father after the baptism of his son). The specialists argue that six months before that episode with the girls and six months after it, no baptismal ceremony was held in the area where the young Goethe stayed. What is relevant for our purposes is that Lacan argues that the father function is involved here, in the sense that the young Goethe is a replacement of the Father; he is the one who actually passes on the communion bread although he has only an external relation

 NIM: 418.  Literally in English: “Poetry and Truth”, from the English title of the translation of Goethe’s Autobiography: From My Own Life: Poetry and Truth, Goethe (1897) 2016. 23 24

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to the ceremony.25 That is, in this text the awareness that Lacan attributes to Goethe is that the paternal function is not a biological matter, but relates to the cultural-symbolic function: Now, the Goethesforscher have demonstrated that for six months before and six months after the Frederica episode, there was no baptisms in that locality. The christening cake, traditional gift to the pastor, can only be Goethe’s fantasy and, as such, thus assumes in our eyes its entire significance. It implies the paternal function, but precisely inasmuch as Goethe specifies that he is not the father, but only the one who delivers something and who has only an external relation to the ceremony—he makes himself the petty officer, not the principal hero.26

My emphasis on this apparently marginal comment by Lacan will be clarified forthwith, as two pages later, he mentions the term nom-du-père for the first time in its Lacanian sense, relating it to the paternal function. Curiously, the paternal function in that comment is related directly to the baptismal rite. Thus, Lacan’s text highlights the Christian origin of the term, as in the New Testament: “All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father [εἰς τὸ ὄνομα τοῦ πατρὸς], and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28: 18–20, KJV; my italics). It may be said that this sense is close to the way Lacan uses the term “Name-of-the-Father”: the paternal function as acting in the name of the Symbolic order. If so, to what extent does this term, borrowed from Christianity, also brings with it a religious connotation and is more than just empty rhetoric? To what an extent did this connotation penetrate Lacan’s own insight of the paternal function, as he himself suggests that this function is a representation of the name of the father, and not the father himself (as a concrete character in a story or in the patient’s fantasy). Accordingly, we will later ask to what extent Lacan’s discussion of the 25 26

 Ibid.: 425–436.  NIM: 421.

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Symbolic order, of the paternal function, and the stress he places on them, are related to a Jewish or Christian perspective or ethics of one kind or another. Here, Lacan also presents for the first time the relation between the imaginary and symbolic fathers, while first using the term “Name-of-the-­ Father”, as mentioned. However, upon first encountering the “Name-of-­ the-Father”, we are still not quite aware of the extent to which it carries with it the somewhat later meanings of the paternal function. For example, does Lacan indicate that the Real in this text should be understood in the sense of objective reality, and less as the Real in Lacan’s later teaching, which may be articulated as the traumatic aspect of life? Lacan emphasizes that the function of the symbolic father does not overlap with his position as a real, biological father, the father of conjugal “reality” in modern society. Given that, is the Name-of-the-Father here precisely the actual father in reality?27 If we acknowledge the religious aspect and relate the term the “Name-­ of-­the-Father” to Lacan’s analysis of Goethe’s story of the baptismal bread, we can assume that the meaning is indeed that the “Name-of-the-Father” carries the paternal function here. Lacan further argues that the reason for the degeneration of the paternal function is that the Imaginary gets in the way, taking over the real father and embodying it under the patient’s mythological fantasy. That fantasy, however, may be analyzed only by recognizing the structural relationship between the son and the father as a cultural-symbolic function. To further describe the paternal function, Lacan relies on another religious contexts, referring to the views of French Catholic poet Paul Claudel, whose plays scrutinized the image of the humiliated father in Catholic culture. In formulating his discourse at this point, Lacan conceives the Oedipal complex as a myth representative of the attempt to seal this crack, heal that wound, using the story of the father and his murder as in Freud’s Totem and Taboo. How far does Lacan diverge from this myth? To what an extent does he produce a new myth about the father as humiliated, a myth that is perhaps less of a narrative, but gives new meaning to the same crisis?  NIM: 421–422.

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It appears that for Lacan, the symbolic father is enwrapped by the imaginary father and presented as humiliated, turning him into an object of aggression and a representative of death. All in the sense that the father (as well as the therapist who re-embodies him) threatens with castration and death, and as such concretely embodies the abstract principle of death. Lacan argues thus under the influence of Heidegger and Hegel, as he himself states. Thus, Lacan connects two terms: “Death” and “Master”. This is the master of Hegel’s master-and-slave dialectics, who represents the cultural values. He is what the father could have embodied, whether as a symbolic or as an imaginary father. It is the therapist who is embodied for the subject as this master, who for Lacan is also death, or rather the patient’s encounter with death. Facing this master, the patient expresses love and the desire to receive support and wisdom, but at the same time aggresses against him. For Lacan, the split between the symbolic and imaginary fathers is in fact the internal split experienced by the subject as he distinguishes between the father as function and the father as metaphor. Therefore, Lacan claims that this distinction is not only structural, but also related to the chronology of the subject’s life. This shifting between the historical-developmental and the structural in Lacan occurs in an interim stage in the development of his discourse. On the one hand, we have the influence of Lévi-Strauss’s structural theory, which begins to demonstrate its impact by emphasizing the Symbolic and the distinction between it and the Imaginary. On the other hand, there are still the previous sediments of the theory on the mirror stage and narcissism, which are more developmental in character, being imaginary, that is, nonabstract essences in the subject’s life, metaphors of his phantasmatic life (and phantasm is always a story, a myth). Lacan expands the Oedipal triangle of son, mother and father by adding a fourth element, in order to present Oedipality as a myth behind which lies a fundamental structure of the relationship between the son and the father (and father substitutes) and between both and the mother-­ object, as well as another factor structuring their relationship—the mediation of death.28 In other words, the father-son relations are not only concrete, but there is a fundamental dimension that always cuts across 28

 NIM: 423.

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them: death. Lacan, however, cannot stop at this pessimistic point, at least not in front of his audience, all the more so because he equates death and the Imaginary, of which he is critical. From now on, the Imaginary with its aggressions becomes the enemy of the therapeutic setting, the place from which one needs to diverge. Therefore, Lacan seeks to free himself of the patient’s fixation on his encounter with death towards the plane of the light, not necessarily in the religious sense of faith, but in the sense of openness towards faith. This faith, Lacan says has been expressed by Goethe on his deathbed: “Mehr Licht! More light!”29 * * * It seems that Lacan seeks to address the representation crisis of the clinic: how to convey the authentic experience in theory and in language. This constant shift between the experiential and theoretical will be discussed in the following chapter. It appears that by this stage of Lacan’s development, when he is all enthused by Lévi-Strauss’s theory, he turns the entire experience into a metaphysical anchor and reduces it to structural questions. Moreover, he does not truly convey the clinical experience to his audience, since he immediately clings to the Freudian cases as part of his attempt to return to Freud. Arguably, this return impedes any talk about the contemporary clinic, which lacks any value for Lacan and even grows distant from Freud himself; the close reading of Freudian cases turns them into sacrosanct objects whose light all other clinical cases and experience must bathe. What is the status of this experience as an absolute objective datum in the heart of the theory? This is an anchor that need not be proven other than by using the rhetoric of “we know this from our clinical experience”, without using clinical cases, but only Freud’s texts about the clinical experience and classical literary references. Against a claim of this type, Lacan could have argued that he refreshes and enlivens the Freudian text by turning the Freudian clinic into something vivid and dynamic that awakens us to rethink the very essence of the psychoanalytic experience. In fact, Lacan is not truly interested in a naïve return to the Freudian myths  NIM: 307.

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as he perceives them, and therefore seeks to demythologize those myths by searching for their structural logic. This again carries the danger of growing distant from the Freudian clinic as well.

2.2 “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”30 In 1953, Lacan had to contend with the IPA’s opposition to the Paris Psychoanalytical Society (in French: “SPP”), particularly due to his own presence there. The IPA thus requested to remove Lacan from the ranks of the SPP as a condition for including it in the IPA. The pretext for the request to remove Lacan was the brief therapeutic session he had introduced: in that approach, the session would not end after a predetermined time, but following an unconscious occurrence during the meeting itself. Another was the training procedures for his analysts. In June that year, following a dispute over the establishment of a clinical training institute, Lacan and a group of other analysts abandoned the SPP and established the French Psychoanalytical Society (in French: “SFP”), which would later break off from the IPA. In a lecture held in a conference of the Psychology Department of the University of Rome in September 26–27, 1953, Lacan presented a text which since then has become an iconic manifest, where he placed himself explicitly in opposition to other psychoanalytic approaches not committed, in his view, to Freud and to his innovativeness. To do so, Lacan proposed in that famous lecture to view language as the main foundation of psychoanalytic research and treatment, a proposal essential to his project of returning to Freud: “Whether it wishes to be an agent of healing, training, or sounding the depths, psychoanalysis has but one medium: the patient’s speech.”31 Lacan sought to include humanistic studies in psychoanalytic training in order to provide broad understanding of the symbolic context of the  “Rome Discourse”, as recently published in AE: 133–165, is an early version of the lecture that appeared in the Écrits and translated into English, E: 197–268. 31  E: 206. 30

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unconscious: the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religions, and literary history and criticism.32 Particularly important for him was delving into the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, from which he borrowed the distinction between signifier and signified, as well as into Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropology, through which he understood the relation between the Symbolic and mythological-­ imaginary (as presented in his lecture on the individual myth), as well as the construction of the subject as a sociolinguistic creature. Thus, Lacan combined his theoretical return to Freud with insights borrowed from other discourses, such as anthropology, sociology, linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics. This was necessary in order to expand Freud’s original context and develop a more profound understanding of his writing transcending the routine, banal regurgitation of his conceptualizations. Here are Lacan’s words in this matter, from the introduction to the lecture “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” written for the Écrits in 1966: In a discipline that owes its scientific value solely to the theoretical concepts Freud hammered out as his experience progressed…. It would seem to me to be premature to break with the traditional terminology. But it seems that these terms can only be made clearer if we establish their equivalence to the current language of anthropology, or even to the latest problems in philosophy, fields where psychoanalysis often need but take back its own property.33

Here we can notice Lacan’s attempt to extract Freud from his concrete, “original” context in order to replant him in a more contemporary one. In other words, Lacan considers it an urgent task to free the Freudian terms from their routine, worn-out usage, which is no longer aware of their radical potential and true contribution to the psychoanalytic discourse. This naturally begs the question of the relation between the “intentions” of Freud the author and Lacan’s simultaneously loyal and subversive reading thereof.  E: 238.  E: 239–240.

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In the lecture, Lacan conceives the popular approach to the Freudian terminology, to Freud’s unique language, through the Freudian insight regarding ritualistic compulsiveness as presented in Freud’s article “Obsessive Actions and Religious Exercises” (1907) and equates between them.34 Lacan demonstrates his antagonism toward the compulsiveness that has come to dominate the routine use of Freudian terminology by relying on the Freudian analysis of religion as “universal obsessional neurosis”.35 According to Lacan, religion and “mendacious” psychoanalysis (such as ego psychology) compulsively rehearse routine rituals, completely unaware of the psychological ramifications of that rehearsal. Thus, just as Freud sought to liberate humanity from religion, so does Lacan seek to free psychoanalysts of their “mendacious” positions with regard to psychoanalytic therapy and theory. In that context, note also Lacan’s approach with regard to what he sees as the “Freudian orthodoxy”: Orthodoxy fights to conserve tradition, whereas Lacan views himself as a fundamentalist who seeks to return to the very source, abandoning the hermeneutic culture that has come to dominate and falsify the original corpus. Thus, in returning to the Freudian text, Lacan refuses the image of another post-Freudian interpreter who returns to certain writings. In emphasizing the function of speech—Lacan positions himself as one who extracts the “real” Freud from those texts.36 Lacan also justifies his return to Freud in terms of the scientification of psychoanalysis: “If psychoanalysis can become a science (for it is not yet one) and if it is not to degenerate in its technique (and perhaps this has already happened), we must rediscover the meaning of its experience. To this end, we can do no better than return to Freud’s work”.37 This is not a return to Freud’s figure as a castrating and threatening father whose word is the IPA analyst’s command, but as a text that must be carefully read. Later in the lecture, Lacan foregrounds three early books by Freud as essential to the return to Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), The

 E: 203.  Sigmund Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) SE: IX: 127. 36  E: 203. 37  E: 221. 34 35

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Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), wherein he identifies the author’s uniqueness as the linguist of the unconscious. Lacan searches for some inner logic in Freud, which for him may be found in its purest form precisely in his early texts. In that, he is opposed to the rival school of ego psychology, which found greater interest in the late Freud, which it interpreted as highlighting the importance of the ego and its defenses. According to Lacan, in the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud suggests that “What is important is the version of the text, and that Freud tells, is given in the telling of the dreamthat is, in its rhetoric”.38 What Freud refers to as the telling of the dream in fact represents the logical rules of the preliminary processing of the dream raw materials by the unconscious, which Lacan equates with the syntactic rules of human language: “We must thus take up Freud’s work again starting with the Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams], to remind ourselves that a dream has the structure of a sentence […]”.39 Thus, in this early text, Lacan finds the true and original Freudian core: the conceptualization of the unconscious as structured like language. He goes on to claim, however, that Freud did not manage to offer a full-­ fledged linguistic theory of the unconscious as he was yet unfamiliar with Saussure. Accordingly, as the first step of positioning his discourse as unique compared to other versions of psychanalysis, Lacan sorts out Freud’s writings and selects those addressing the relationship between language and the unconscious, pointing them out as encapsulating the true core of Freudian psychoanalysis. The next step in the lecture would be to develop his own version out of Freud, his own alternative as to how the psychoanalytic treatment method should be conceived and managed, which would in turn inform his method of teaching and training analysts. To do so, Lacan places the unconscious within the otherness of the “big Other”, as he calls it, which for the subject, represents the Symbolic order, language and the system of social rules surrounding kinship. Into the linguistic context of the unconscious, Lacan integrates his discussion of kinship relations and the Oedipal complex, while conceptualizing and channeling the complex to less physical, linguistic contexts, as  E: ibid.  E: ibid.

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articulated in the centrality of the “Name-of-the-Father”—which is, as mentioned, the symbolic father, the paternal function, as a master-signifier responsible for the subject’s normal functioning within language/ culture. Lacan finds the characterization of the unconscious as a radical Other, for example, in Freud’s discussion of telepathy.40 In doing so, he may be taunting the audience, since these discussions and Freud’s general interest in the occult are the types of things that have probably always embarrassed fellow psychoanalysts. Lacan, however, adopts this esotericism: The fact that the subject’s unconscious is the other’s discourse appears more clearly than anywhere else in the studies Freud devoted to what he called telepathy, as it is manifested in the context of an analytic experience. This is the coincidence between the subject’s remarks and facts he cannot have known about, but which are still at work in the connections to another analysis in which the analyst is an interlocutor—a coincidence which is, moreover, most often constituted by an entirely verbal, even homonymic, convergence […].41

Here, Lacan raises, for the first time, one of the key motifs in his discourse: the unconscious is the discourse, the expression of the Other, of the radical otherness of language. Note that whereas the later Lacan would connect the Other to different aspects of human experience, here the otherness is primarily expressed in the presence of language vis-à-vis the individual. For Lacan, this aspect does not lie only, and explicitly, in Freud’s early works on the relations between the unconscious and language, but also, as mentioned, in “repressed” works such as those on telepathy. But for Lacan it is important to focus this discussion on Freud not on the nature of telepathy as such, but on its relation to analytical experience. It is precisely here, in the esoteric, that Lacan finds the clear formulation of the otherness of language and its mediatory role. Like analysis, telepathy confronts man

 See Freud’s reflections on the relation between dream and telepathy in “Dream and Telepathy” (Freud 1922) and in “Dreams and Occultism” (Freud 1933c). 41  E: 220. 40

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with the Other, that is, both analysis and telepathy confront man with a treasure of signifiers and their combinations. These in turn convey the “other” and strange message of the unconscious. Into his discussion of telepathy, Lacan also lets slip Freud’s great interest in numerology—in the non-scientific inquiry into the influence of numbers on human fate. This influence is derived—argues Lacan (as does Freud)—from unconscious processes. Signifiers such as numbers are the Other’s tools of reorganizing in the unconscious and managing the subject’s life without the latter being aware of that.42 Lacan goes on to relate this to the analytic experience, claiming that the patient’s unconscious encounters the therapist’s, since both are under the influence of the Other, of language. Each is a medium of the Other, of language, which expressed itself through them. This is Lacan’s way of sidelining the non-scientific implications of Freud’s discourse on numerology and telepathy. The question is, however, to what extent does Lacan produce here, albeit indirectly, a type of discourse, which may be interpreted as semi-mystic, of man’s encounter with language and the indirect encounter of man’s unconscious with that of the other? In other words, does Lacan choose certain, arguably marginal aspects of Freud and highlight them as the core of psychoanalytic doctrine? And if that is so, what cultural background enables such a move? To return to Lacan’s polemic aspect, here we see the theoretical expression of his opposition to the other approaches in psychoanalysis that for him, tend to oversimplify the me-you, patient-therapist encounter as dyadic or even harmonious. Lacan introduces the Other as a “third element”, a transcendental, external (and simultaneously internal) element controlling both the therapist’s and the patient’s both conscious and unconscious conduct. This third element is introduced, according to Lacan, also in Freud’s discussion of the joke43 in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Like the word (in French, mot d’esprit—literally, “word of the spirit”—means “joke”, and particularly witticism or gibe), the joke confronts us with the Other, awakening the vigor of the Other, of language, shuffling and reorganizing it comically. This jocular move is akin to that of the  E: 223.  In German: Witz.

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unconscious, that picks out certain signifiers of the Other, manipulates them, recombines, and reactivates them. This also expresses Lacan’s ability to diverge from a discourse sanctifying the otherness of language and presenting it as something static that controls the unconscious. On the contrary, the Other is robust, but stupid, unaware of itself, and it is precisely the unconscious that controls the signifiers and the subject, just as the joke manipulates both language and the subject.44 For Lacan, Freud’s discovery lies not only in the importance of the unconscious as such, but in its role as the medium of language. However, the unconscious is also a manipulative element that sets language against itself. In this Lacanian view, we can see how careful he is not to turn the tension between the unconscious and language into a unidirectional relationship of control but perceives this tension as an elaborate system of relations between man, others, the unconscious (of each) and language. In other words, he takes care not to overemphasize a single transcendental dimension, whether of the unconscious or of language. Subsequently in the lecture, Lacan states that Freud’s discovery is the very locus of the individual within the Symbolic order. Note the phrasing, which avoids reference to the unconscious but rather emphasizes the Symbolic order. It may therefore be argued that whereas Freud coined the term “unconscious”, Lacan sees himself as having pointed out— through his move of returning to Freud—the importance of the Symbolic order. In those years, Lacan would position himself within that discovery of his—which he retroactively attributes, as mentioned, to Freud, as the anchor that supports him as he proceeds—as opposed to the other interpretations of Freud. Out of this tension between him and the other currents in contemporary psychology, also arises a somewhat apocalyptic note of warning: ignoring the symbolic aspect would not only represent a discursive repression of the Freudian discovery, but also bring about the destruction of the analytic experience as a whole, and in Lacan’s own words: “To ignore the Symbolic order is to condemn Freud’s discovery to forgetting and analytic experience to ruin.”45 * * * 44 45

 E: 224.  E: 227.

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Having presented the relationship between the unconscious and language, Lacan connects them both to kinship, alluding to Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (1925) and particularly to Lévi-Strauss’s writings—primarily The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949)—which had a huge impact on him during the 1950s.46 It is the symbol that makes the person a person—a talking person—and it is the symbol that distinguishes him from the animal. What is the symbol? Here Lacan relies on the theory of numbers as well as on Lévi-­ Strauss’s anthropological thought. The laws of kinship and marriage, as Lévi-Strauss revealed, are organized under the combinatorial laws of the basic units of mathematics. This is similar to the way Lacan, following Lévi-Strauss, highlighted the laws of language as the basis for the organization of signifiers in the unconscious. Namely, the rules of kinship, as the rules of language, are unconscious rules that organize the subjective life. They are the basic law that manages human life—the symbol, in the sense of combinatorial organization of basic linguistic units, is what gives them subjective meaning. Lacan emphasizes that this subjective meaning is in fact an illusion regarding the subject’s freedom. Again, we find Lacan’s radical stance: the human subject is subordinate to transcendental linguistic rules. Who remains free here? Is it the law, the law that organizes the basic units of language? This law is not a substance, but merely technical rules of joining and regulating basic signifiers. In this sense, the Other and language are not substance with content, but an empty human dimension organized under rigid rules. These rigid rules, however, arbitrarily connect basic units, producing various subjective possibilities of meaning. This is perhaps what leads to the illusion of subjective freedom. The law of marriage, which organizes, according to Lévi-Strauss, the exchange of gifts and women, (akin to the rotation of signifiers in the language system) is, therefore, unconscious and operates under the logical combinatorial laws. Here we find how Lacan merges his view of the laws of marriage, syntax and language, numerology, and telepathy into a single entity of man’s subordination to the Law. In this context, it is also important for Lacan to highlight the Oedipal dimension of psychoanalysis. And again—as emphasized above—he  E: 220–230.

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simplifies and demythologizes what he perceives as an imaginary myth. For Lacan, this myth is nothing but the narrative-phantasmatic embodiment of the structural aspect of man’s location within the Symbolic order, within this law of logic and combinatorics, the law of the symbolic Father (who lies beyond the Oedipal-imaginary father). In this sense, all that remains of the Freudian-mythical father is a combinatorial rule. And all these rules, both the combinatorial and those of kinship, operate under a single center of gravity: a single hole, which is the fundamental, primary rule that governs all others: the prohibition of the object, the prohibition of incest with the mother and sister.47 Thus, in “The Function and Field” Lacan expresses the need to anchor the knowledge regarding man’s locus within the Symbolic order. This order enables the subject’s life and his illusory freedom, his self-expression, and even delineates the subject’s life under the rules of the mathematical or logical law of adding, subtracting and cross-referencing signifiers. Lacan’s defense of this knowledge he shares with Lévi-Strauss about the linguistic unconscious and the location of the subject within the Symbolic order leads him to locate his own insight within the Judeo-Christian religious discourse when the Law—in Lacan’s terminology—becomes identical with the religious law, which is the prohibition of incest. And again, an apocalyptic note is evident in Lacan’s words; it seems that those who transgress the law of kinship in the Bible are identical to those who reject Lacan and do not recognize the importance of language in learning about the unconscious. The latter denigrate the sacred word, the logos, and this is what would actually spell their downfall. Thereafter, Lacan advances towards a relatively new term, first mentioned in the “Subject’s Individual Myth”. If this term was not completely clear at first, here it takes on a clearer meaning, one that would accompany Lacan over the next years. This meaning is influenced by Lévi-Strauss’s thinking about “zero symbol” or the “floating signifier”—that empty place or black hole within the system of social laws which enables all signifiers to revolve around the same symbol, which is fundamental to the law itself. The term is of course The Name-of-the-Father: “It is in the name of the 47

 E: 230.

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father that we must recognize the basis of the symbolic function which, since the dawn of historical time, has identified his person with the figure of the law […]”.48 Here, Lacan identifies the Name-of-the-Father with symbolic identification. In addition, he distinguishes—more clearly and sharply than in the text on the individual myth—between the Symbolic and imaginary-narcissistic orders. It appears that Lacan asks its audience to remove the mythical-­imaginary remains in relation to the father, which he perceives as narcissistic, in the sense that they give personal meaning to an external symbol. His admonishing tone seeks to suggest that the very involvement of the Imaginary in the relation to the Name of the Father in fact causes the pathology itself. Thus, Lacan seeks to remove what he sees as the mythical remains of Oedipality and reorganize the relation to the basic law of language and the unconscious. He proposes to conceptualize, to see behind the father (as an imaginary figure), the (symbolic) law of the father, which is organized as a zero symbol, which in itself is empty and meaningless. This is why man cannot remain with the void and tends to seal the hole with his own phantasmatic story: he denotes it his narcissist meaning, the imaginarymythical meaning. No doubt, Lacan wants us to be heroic under his iconoclastic demand to avoid any identification with image and representation, to be present in the void of representations, in a zero law that lies behind language and in the movement of the signifiers in the unconscious. This is our debt, says Lacan, to the word, to the sacred logos, whose presence as truth can only be articulated in our recognition of its meaninglessness. * * * At this point, it appears that Lacan uses a rhetoric of admonition and persuasion, with huge enthusiasm with the structuralist theory. This relates to what I have presented with regard to the text on the individual myth, where Lacan—seeking to come closer to the authentic clinical experience— finds himself distancing himself even more towards the theoretical model and the iconic cultural assets of the Freudian case studies.  E: 230.

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The following chapters will refine the question of how Lacan regulates the degree of transcendence inherent in these concepts. As already suggested in the two lectures presented above, Lacan usually integrates the religious context in the theoretical dilemma. One example has been suggested here through the metaphorical use of the terms logos (or “word”, verbe) and “incarnation”, which offer the ethical possibility to challenge the language-body and the Other-subject dualisms. Another example is the use of the term the Name-of-the-Father, which is originally Christian-­ religious and which expresses the paternal function as a cultural function of transmission from the generation of the father to the generation of sons.

3 “Family Complexes” (1938): An Early Model of the Return to Freud and the Conceptualization of the Father

Lacan received his psychiatric training in the 1920s and 30s, which familiarized him with psychoanalysis and informed his early writing and teaching in the field. By the end of that period, he will leave the IPA following his manifest-like lecture “The Function and Field” (1953). The early Lacan examines what he would later define as the order of the Imaginary (imaginaire) in the context of the patient’s narcissistic identification with a particular other (autre, which will be presented from the 1950s onwards by way of contradiction to the Other, l’Autre) and the resulting syndromes, particularly in paranoid psychosis. Some of the important works of this period discuss cases of female violence: the case of Aimée, the focus of his 1932 dissertation,1 and the case of the Papin sisters.2 For the paradigmatic understanding of the Imaginary, Lacan presented the mirror stage of the infant (ages 6–18 months), following experiments conducted by French psychiatrist Henri Wallon. In this pre-Oedipal stage, the child’s ego (moi) is constituted—rather than the subject in the subsequent Lacanian sense, in its unconscious  Lacan (1932a, 1932b).  Lacan (1933).

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_3

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context—through imaginary-narcissistic identification with his own mirror image (or with that of the mother or another child). Lacan emphasized the illusory nature of the ego constituted in a process of alienation vis-à-vis the imitated image before him. He also emphasizes the child’s aggression against that image, following the narcissistic threat the integral image poses to the emerging ego. Into this psychoanalytical theory, Lacan adapted the master-and-slave dialectics from Hegel’s philosophy, mediated by Alexandre Kojève’s teaching, hence the emphasis on alienation and illusion. Lacan rallied against the ego psychology that was then gaining influence in the US and in the IPA, which highlighted the ego’s ability to live as an autonomous and whole creature. He also rallied against humanist existentialism, which highlighted the ego’s consciousness and autonomy. Lacan sought to present the individual as having a fundamentally paranoid mind, characterized by non-recognition and alienation, i.e., misguided and misguiding consciousness that confuses the (body of the) ego with (the body of ) the other. Despite Lacan’s desire to investigate the imaginary-narcissistic in those years, his position was primarily negative and critical. Against narcissism and body image, related to motherhood, Lacan preferred delving into the function of fatherhood. In that sense, “Family Complexes” is the only early text where Lacan transcends his discussion of the Imaginary towards what he views as the positive horizon of fatherhood—that saves the subject from motherhood. Moreover, we can say that during that time, Lacan devotes little attention to fatherhood, as he is yet unfamiliar with the structural-linguistic position to which he would be exposed only in the early 1950s. We will therefore return to the “prehistory” of Lacanian discourse: the 1938 “Family Complexes”, wherein young Lacan sought to revise the psychoanalytical theory. The text is a double article written for The French Encyclopedia. Its first section addresses what Lacan called “family

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complexes”, and the second addresses “family pathology”.3 As we shall see below, in discussing family complexes, the young Lacan sought to revise psychoanalytical theory, as early as in this stage, by highlighting the importance of (particularly patriarchal) culture in constituting the human subject, including in the very early complexes of the first few years (the weaning complex, the intrusion complex, which parallels the mirror stage, and the Oedipus complex). Consequently, he sought to reaffirm the importance of the father in constituting the human subject and highlight the relation between the pathology of the modern man and what he viewed as the loss of the father’s status in modern Western society. As the author of an encyclopedic article, Lacan was supposed to summarize as objectively as possible the most recent psychoanalytical insights on the family. However, he chose to include his own insights in his summaries, although he was not yet known as an independent theoretician in psychoanalytical circles. In the following part, reading this seminal text, which reveals some of the roots of the future thinking of this daring and innovative theoretician, will enable us to learn about the development of his discourse.

 According to Lacan’s biographer Élisabeth Roudinesco, the encyclopedia was edited by Lucien Febvre following the suggestion of French Minister of Education, Anatole de Monzie, in 1932. Psychologist Henri Wallon, who was Febvre’s close friend, was entrusted with editing the eighth volume, which he titled “The Mental Life”. Wallon wrote most of the articles himself, but also commissioned others, including two that were supposed to represent the new voices in French psychiatry: psychoanalyst Daniel Lagache (1903–1972) and Lacan. Based on Febvre’s memoirs, Roudinesco writes that Wallon recommended to his friends in the encyclopedia’s editorial board to allow Lacan to write the article, despite his cumbersome and difficult writing (that was already notorious at that time). Lacan submitted the first section fairly quickly, but the second was delayed. The first manuscript, submitted in 1936, shocked the editorial board due to the textual and theoretical difficulties it presented, particularly the part on the Oedipal complex, which turned out to be completely illegible. The text underwent multiple edits by two language editors, and Lacan himself introduced multiple revisions to the text, to make it more legible. Nevertheless, Febvre wrote in his memoirs that Lacan’s style was not bad, but unique, and that little could be changed in it: it can either be accepted as such, or rewritten completely (Roudinesco 1997: 140–142; for the original article, see Lacan 1938a). This text was published under the same title in the collection of Lacanian writings titled Autre écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001, 23–84), edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, with no references and only one major division into chapters. The quotes and references in the present study are taken from this version, which is currently the most authoritative. 3

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3.1 The Splits of the Father in Freud’s Theory: Between the Biological-Concrete and the Biological-Conceptual As shown in the previous chapter, Lacan of the 1950s sought to reexamine Freud’s presentation of the father, which could be interpreted as too concrete or too biologically oriented, and thus detached from the symbolic aspect of the father. As will be shown, already in the 1930s, Lacan reexamines the father figure. In order to better understand his reading of this figure as a by-product of his desire to revise the Freudian psychoanalytical theory, I will first present Freud’s description of the father in a general outline, and examine whether the dilemma of presenting the father, which Lacan sought to resolve, had already arisen in his formulation. The Ego and the Id (1923) sharpens the tension between Freud’s case studies, which expose the reader directly to the clinical world, and his meta-psychological theoretical writings. In these writings, Freud seeks to extract meta-psychology from the clinical cases; a theory that lies “beyond” the psychology of the individual cases. At this point, Lacan further accentuates this tension, and tries to resolve it by searching for the fundamental aspects that cut across the clinic: the symbolic-linguistic aspect that lies beyond the mythical-imaginary. He does that by using the following concepts: “concrete”, “conceptual” and “biological”. “Concrete” refers to the father, described in theory as the actual father in the nuclear family, the one identified by the child as such in the heterosexual family cell. “Conceptualization” is the attempt to raise this father beyond his concrete existence, without denying it, but rather in an attempt to understand him as representing a higher principle, cultural or structural. Finally, “biological” refers to presenting the concrete father as the by-product of the biological discourse: either as the family’s biological father (as the source of sperm), what I call here “biological concretization”, or under what I conceive of as “biological conceptualization”, which is (as will be discussed), the conceptualization of the father figure through the biological-Lamarckian discourse.

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When Lacan analyses the Oedipus complex in “Family Complexes”, he follows Freud: the child (enfant, around the age of four) distinguishes between the parents; his drives are related to the genital organs, and constitute his desire for the most proximal object, that is, the parent of the opposite sex. This attraction, however, is constantly frustrated, as the desire cannot be consummated. Although this frustration is part of the nature of the drives, of the child’s condition as a human creature, Lacan reads it as related to the object, also seen as an obstacle preventing the satisfaction of that desire, i.e., the same-sex parent. The frustration is also accompanied by the repressive education system that seeks to deny the child’s jouissance, particularly by way of masturbation. Nevertheless, the child understands that the same-sex parent is ambivalent in his regard (recalling that we are supposed to assume as self-evident, according to Lacan’s view, the fact that the child is male and that the same-sex parent is the father):4 on the one hand, the father is seen by the child as the agent of sexual prohibition, and on the other hand, as the model for its violation: “[…] le parent de même sexe apparaît à l’enfant à la fois comme l’agent de l’interdiction sexuelle et l’exemple de sa transgression”.5 There is something deceptive about that double father, as he is unstable or unreliable from the child’s point of view: he demands distancing from the mother, but at the same time attaches himself to her in a kind of perverse act. This duality of the father figure is presented in The Ego and  Although Lacan does not mention explicitly who the father is and who the mother is, we may assume that the child is the son (according to the Freudian presupposition, with all its problematics), that the parent of the other sex is the mother, and that the same-sex parent is the father. This is because Lacan defines the parent of the other sex as the closest object for that child (AE: 46). Conversely, the father embodies simultaneously the Law and its transgression with regard to the object of his own and the son’s attraction. Indeed, as Lacan suggests later on under the title “The Family According to Freud”, Freud’s theory of human sexuality with reference to the individual’s position in the family assumes the asymmetric nature of the relations between the sexes and the assumption that the subject here is the male child (AE: 47). This statement on the centrality of the male child in Freud’s conception of the complex, and in fact in Lacan’s as well, raises the question of the degree to which such an approach affected Lacan’s concept of the father with reference to masculinity versus femininity, as well as the prioritizing of father-son relations over father-daughter relations. In fact, as the text indicates, Lacan remains faithful to Freud’s gendered approach. For criticism on this position in “Family Complexes”, see Barzilai (1999, Ch. 2). Considerable feminist criticism has been written against Lacan; see, e.g. Irigaray (1977), who sharply attacks what she views as the phallocentrism of Lacanian discourse; see Grosz (1990) for a comprehensive analysis. 5  AE: 46. 4

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the Id, argues Lacan, under the terms “superego” (Über-Ich) and “ego ideal” (Ichideal). In fact, Lacan persists here in following a key Freudian position that presents the duality of the father’s demand from the child, as understood by the latter. Based on his discussion of the Oedipus complex, the late Freud built his theory of the triple mental division of the ego, the id and the superego (see the final chapter of The Ego and the Id). The superego, as the internalization of the Oedipal father figure, contains simultaneously the elements of love and positive identification next to elements of hatred, aggression, competition and negative identification.6 As mentioned, in The Ego and the Id, Freud proposes two terms: the superego (first appearing in this text) and the ego ideal. He does not clearly distinguish between them but refers to both as names for the cultural-conscientious authority formed in the child’s psyche after the resolution of the Oedipus complex. The superego as an internal father contains the same ambivalence directed at the child himself. As a moral authority, the superego is supposedly positive with regard to the child, but precisely out of the compulsive demand to follow the moral commandment, it contains the negative-aggressive charge inherent in the id, against which it rallies in retrospect.7 Why did the late Freud seek to make these distinctions and offer a representation of an internal paternal element? It appears that the source for this lies in some of his previous theoretical dilemmas. Freud’s position with regard to the father belonged at first to what was called “the theory of temptation” (as in his Studies on Hysteria (1895), coauthored with Joseph Breuer). As part of this early conception of the hysterical trauma, the father was seen in the most concrete sense as abusing the child, thereby producing a traumatic and subsequently repressed memory. That repressed memory is articulated in the neurotic symptom. As also presented in a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud broke away from this conception of the seductive father and shifted towards the understanding of childhood phantasy and sexuality (particularly in his Three Essays on the

 Freud (1923: 34–35).  Freud (1923: 53).

6 7

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Theory of Sexuality, 1905).8 From this point on, he examined the relationship between the father and the emerging subject, and between them and the mother in light of the insight regarding the Oedipus complex. Thus, Freud moved from presenting the father as a real, concrete evil entity that caused suffering, to relegating him to an ambivalent and phantasmatic status in the eyes of the child. An example that highlights the ambivalence of the father figure is the case study of the “Wolfman” (1918), where Freud explains how the belief in God the Father was imposed on the man at a young age. According to Freud, this belief led the Wolfman to identify strongly with the crucified Son.9 Although the mediation was carried out with the help of a maternal figure (in the sense of the maternal-archaic superego), religious belief was associated in his psyche with the father’s figure and values—a particular father, a cruel one (such as described in Totem and Taboo), the father that orders the prohibition rather than the father with whom the child identifies; this is a father who acts as the conscientious authority that acts sadistically, that is, deriving pleasure from punishing. And indeed, the Wolfman, as described in Freud’s case study, sought to break free of the Evil Father (God, conscience, the maternal superego) in favor of the close, Good Father. Freud’s mythological development of this duality is presented in Totem and Taboo, where he assumes the father figure has two incarnations: the Totem (positive identification), as opposed to the Taboo (negative identification). In the introduction to his book, Freud argues that the Totem has been banished from modern society, leaving few remains behind, whereas the Taboo, the prohibitive-negative identification, remains among us, acting compulsively against the modern, miserable subject. That modern man remains facing the Kantian categorical imperative—in the sense of the moral commandment that seeks to free the subject of his excess pleasure in favor of an equality of pleasures within a moral-social framework.10

 Freud to Fliess, September 21, 1897 (Freud 1985: 264–267).  Freud (1918: 86). 10  Freud (1923). 8 9

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Though expressed in a negative form and directed towards another subject matter, the taboo does not differ in its psychological nature from Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, which operates in a compulsive fashion and rejects any conscious motives.11 Thus, we can argue that the purpose of this attempt by Freud to split the father figure, already in early stages of the development of his theory, was to discover a paternal principle that transcended the concrete father. In other words, Freud’s attempt to grapple with the father figure led him to distinguish between the image of the father as body (unique, concrete) and the conceptual principle of fatherhood, as expressed in Totem and Taboo: the unique, primeval father as opposed to the principle of paternity.12 In fact, Freud used a “historical” narrative to describe fatherhood as something that transcended the concrete father of the Oedipal family. Apparently, he sought to do so since clinging to the concrete father, the real father the patient talks about in the clinic, did not enable him to formulate a theory beyond the praxis from which the Oedipal structure arose—simultaneously narrativemythic (as described in Totem and Taboo) and structural, and therefore also scientific-universal in lying beyond the concrete cases. In Freud’s attempt to present the Oedipal structure as a universal essence that transcends the specific cases he had studied, he thus sought narrative-mythical or scientific support. Scientific support came in the form of Lamarckian theory. This was the second, more abstract aspect of Freud’s biological presentation of the father. The first biological aspect linked the father to his biological-­ personal side, as one who sires children, or to his unique and historical existence—the ancient father that walked the Earth in Totem and Taboo. In theorizing that aspect, Freud was influenced by neo-Lamarckism, an approach named after French Zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

 Freud (1913: xiii–xiv).  Ibid.

11 12

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(1744–1829).13 Originating from biological research, Freud found no fault in Lamarckism—which was considered of dubious scientific value even at that time14—and was apparently exposed to it while reading Darwin. Accordingly, Freud kept believing—despite the fact that most biologists in his time had already rejected that doctrine—that traits, in the psychological sense, may be hereditary, including in the case of the memory of trauma, such as seduction in childhood or the threat of castration. This thought permeated Totem and Taboo in particular, enabling Freud to present fatherhood as a principle that transcends the concrete father. This was a continuation of Freud’s attempt, as presented above, to expose the early phantasy with regard to the father within the traumatic subject, already at the time of Studies on Hysteria. A hint to the Lamarckian influence may be found in the first chapter of Totem and Taboo, “The Savage’s Dread of Incest”, where Freud asks how the taboo (the prohibitive law) passed on from generation to generation, whether by the force of social coercion, that is, education, or by force of mental heredity: These prohibitions must have concerned activities towards which there was a strong inclination. They must then have persisted from generation to generation, perhaps merely as a result of tradition transmitted through parental and social authority. Possibly, however, in later generations they may have become ‘organized’ as an inherited psychical endowment. Who 13  Lamarck formulated his views in Philosophie zoologique (1908). This book also propounded the principle of the inheritance of acquired traits. However, Freud was less influenced by the thoughts of Lamarck himself, and more by what is called Lamarckism, or neo-Lamarckism, which emphasized the genetic mechanism and the inheritance of acquired traits. Freud was particularly influenced by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), through the work of his friend Fliess. Haeckel was a Darwinist, but also highly influenced by Lamarck; he developed the biogenetic law governing the development of the individual embryo (ontogenesis) as mirroring the evolution of the species (phylogenesis). For Haeckel’s influence on Fliess and Freud, see Sulloway (1979: 199–204). 14  Like other orthodox Freudians, Freud’s biographer Peter Gay denied that influence, for example, in a note in which he comments on the issue very briefly and dismisses it offhand (Gay 1998: 298). For the biological aspects in Freud’s doctrine, see especially Frank Sulloway’s groundbreaking biography Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (Sulloway 1979), throughout which he argues that Freud was actually inspired by psychobiology, particularly following Darwin and Lamarck (p. 391). For the Lamarckian influence on Freud, see especially pp. 274–275. Finally, see Freud’s Phylogenetic Fantasy (1987), a text from his estate discovered in 1983, which clearly articulates the author’s interest in phylogenesis.

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can decide whether such things as ‘innate ideas’ exist, or whether in the present instance they have operated, either alone or in conjunction with education, to bring about the permanent fixing of taboos?15

As mentioned, this intellectual spark first lit up in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, early on, when he was searching for the actual, primitive event that could explain the neurotic symptom. Lamarckian theory provided him with the theoretical solution. The primal phantasies (Urphantasien) of child seduction, castration anxiety and the trauma of the primal scenes (Urszenen) could not be explained, according to Freud, merely by the individual’s reality: they had a collective basis. The collective solution was the sum of historical sources of ancient memories passed on across the generations. Thus, in a passage from Lecture XXIII of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916–1917), “The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms”, Freud proposes his daring hypothesis that certain fantasies that recur among different neurotics are “phylogenetic endowment”.16 According to Freud: It seems to me quite possible that all the things that are told to us to-day in analysis as phantasy—the seduction of children, the inflaming of sexual excitement by observing parental intercourse, the threat of castration (or rather castration itself )—were once real occurrences in the primaeval times of the human family, and that children in their phantasies are simply filling in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.17

This idea reincarnated in the late Freudian attempt to organize the mind in a tripartite division, to the ego, superego and id. As described above, Freud first presents the “superego” in The Ego and the Id, in the famous chapter “The Ego and Superego (Ego Ideal)”, where the parenthetic term carries the same meaning. Whereas at first, it seemed that the term “superego” does not refer to the conceptualizatoin of the figure of the father himself, but only to the attempt to present the relation to the father, it now appears that in fact, Freud does not seek to only  Freud (1913: 31).  Freud (1917b: 371). 17  Ibid. 15 16

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present the superego as part of the subject’s mental organization, but also as an abstract entity that lies beyond the subject. In doing so, Freud confesses his Lamarckian source of inspiration: Owing to the way in which the ego ideal is formed, it has the most abundant links with the phylogenetic acquisition of each individual—his archaic heritage. What has belonged to the lowest part of the mental life of each of us is changed, through the formation of the ideal, into what is highest in the human mind by our scale ofvalues.18

Freud uses that theory to protect psychoanalysis against the claim that it does not value the spiritual and sublime aspects of the human being. He goes on to explain that the individual superego is a reincarnation of the archaic superego born after the patricide described in Totem and Taboo.19 Thus, in Totem and Taboo Freud takes care not to expose the Lamarckian background of his thoughts, whereas here it is expressed quite frankly. Apparently, as the years passed, Freud became more confident of this aspect in his doctrine, confidence that is revealed also in Moses and Monotheism, where he discusses the memory of the traumatic murder of Moses, a memory that is passed on unconsciously from one generation of Jews to the next.20 Similarly, in Freud’s series of New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, he also expresses his support of phylogenetic theory. He rallies against the materialistic theories (the various currents of Marxism) that presented ideology as the product of economic relations and argued that the materialistic views on human history undervalued the cross-­ generational transfer of traditions through the figure of the superego.21 This argument suggests several positions held by Freud—some distinctly materialist22 and others sliding towards some kind of  Freud (1923: 36).  Freud (1923: 37). 20  Freud (1939). 21  Freud (1930). 22  For example, Freud’s acceptance of the materialist (Marxist) principle that complements the psychoanalytic insight into the human being’s physical needs. See, e.g., “The Sexual Life of Human Beings”, Lecture XX of the New Introductory Lectures (Freud 1917a: 312). Note, however, that Freud was far from accepting the communist solution. 18 19

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pseudo-­scientific spiritualism of the Lamarckian kind (as Freud did not let this influence encompass all aspects of his theory). Whereas in Totem and Taboo and other works (such as Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 1921), Freud sought to present human sexuality as part of the interaction between the individual’s drives and the social order that imposes itself on the subject, it is still impossible to describe the Oedipal myth of Totem and Taboo without the Lamarckian influence: the desire to murder the father and consume him as a kind of memory the generations keep passing on hereditarily. Since this, in my opinion, is Freud’s main attempt to conceptualize the father figure, it would be interesting to also present his reaction to another attempt to conceptualize the father figure—using the concept of Imago, much used by Jung. This point is critical for our purposes, since as will be discussed below, Lacan uses the same term for the same purpose. The term Imago is familiar in Jung’s writings, particularly since The Transformation of the Libido (1911–1912), where he describes internal paternal, maternal and fraternal images.23 In this book, Jung railed explicitly against Freud, and methodically detailed their personal and doctrinarian disagreements. The Imago is an “unconscious representation”; it is not the image of another, but the stereotypical reflection of the other in the individual’s eyes. For Jung—as for Lacan later on—the Imago is an image, in the Latin sense of the word, i.e., an emotional and also visual representation of patterns of images close to the child in his development, representations that will later determine his relation to others. The Imago is not just the product of an individual experience, but also a collective prototype that is actualized by the individual. Another key Jungian term—also used by Lacan later on—is “complex”. The concept forms the basis for Jung’s collective unconscious as it describes

 Jung (1955).

23

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the child’s network of imagos and their interrelations.24 Freud and his followers also used the terms Imago and “complex” early on,25 however, beyond the specific usage of “Oedipus complex” and “castration complex”, Freud was publicly opposed to the use of “complex” and described it deprecatingly in a 1914 letter to Ferenczi as Jung’s “complex mythology”. This response to the Jungian usage of “complex” can clarify the problematics of using Jungian terms in 1938, when Freud is still alive, and Lacan seeks to present himself as the quintessential Freudian. Already then, Freud saw the danger of abstraction using the Jungian “complex”, as he sharpened his criticism of the conceptualization of Oedipus by the Jungians, who used Jung’s Imago and “complex” in a spiritual, desexualized sense: All the changes which Jung has perpetrated upon psychoanalysis originated in the intention of setting aside all that is objectionable in the family complexes, in order that these objectionable features may not be found again in religion and ethics. The sexual libido was replaced by an abstract idea, of which it may be said that it remained equally mysterious and incomprehensible alike to fools and to the wise. The Oedipus-complex, we are told, has only a “symbolical” sense, the mother therein representing the unattainable which must be renounced in the interests of cultural development. The father who is killed in the Oedipus myth represents the “inner” father from whose influence we must free ourselves in order to become independent…26

Again, it is not my intention to argue here that the concept of parenthood or the parental image in Lacan and Jung are identical, and that for Lacan the real-life parent is meaningless (as suggested by Freud’s criticism  The early Jung borrowed the term “complex” from famous French psychologist Pierre Janet and developed his conception of complexes using word association tests conducted at the Berghölzli Psychiatric Clinic in Zurich. In these tests, the participants’ reaction time to words presented to them was measured. Jung found that sometimes, groups of words were interrelated around a common theme, and called such groupings “complexes”. The experiment demonstrated the influence of unconscious processes. However, Jung referred to the complexes as independent “personalities” that appeared in anthropomorphized forms in dreams, as well as in delusional “voices” in schizophrenia, attesting to the splits in the human mind. For more on the early Jung’s doctrinarian development around these terms, see Storr (1973: 27–41); Storr (1989). Jung presented his theory of the complexes in The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907); Studies in Word Association (1910), and more succinctly in “On the Doctrine of Complexes” (1911). 25  For an example of Freud’s use of Imago, see Freud (1912). 26  Freud (1916: 450–451). 24

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of Jung). However, Freud’s words serve as a kind of warning sign against following the Jungian direction of turning the internal parental image into one that overshadows the parental reality. Still, it is worth inquiring if it is possible to apply Freud’s criticism of the Jungian terms Imago and “complex” to Lacan’s approach in those years, and even later.

3.2 Lacan’s Criticism: The Family as a Sociocultural Institute Lacan’s first step towards de-biologization and abstraction of the father concept is articulated in his total conceptualization of the family institute, presented under the title “L’Institution familiale” in the introduction to “Family Complexes”.27 Lacan argues that the human family is an institute constituted by culture, not only nature or biology. This is because the relations between family members are not governed by biology alone and because the human race is characterized by social relations governed by a paradoxical economy of drives. For the rest of the animals, drives are natural, whereas among humans, they are characterized by conversion and inversion.28 Therefore, Lacan began searching for an alternative to “drive”, which would become the “complex”, originating, as mentioned, in the Jungian discourse and designed to refer to the child or adult’s entire system of identification (imagos). This characterization of the human family cell as culturally constructed is a key motif in “Family Complexes”. Our discussion of it will always be accompanied by the paradoxical-perverse aspect of instinctual human behavior characteristic of family relationships. Lacan will conceive in the same way also of the father’s status in the cultural context, that is, with relation to paradoxical and conversional-perverse drives. Indeed, in his introduction, Lacan moves immediately on to the preliminary presentation of the father status. For him, the first (pre-Oedipal) stages of the maternal functioning carry a biological overtone in their organization of the drives; i.e., the instinctual behavior there is similar to that of the  AE: 23–27.  In the early twentieth century, “instinct” was the common French and English rendering of the Freudian Trieb. AE: 23–24. 27 28

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biological family, whereas with relation to “paternalism”, we need to examine the extent to which it is influenced by spiritual conceptions that have marked its development in the cultural context. Therefore, to better understand the family cell and the role of paternalism within it, Lacan proposes that we must exceed a purely psychological discussion (that is, one that addresses the individual as though he or she is autonomous), and must also include information from comparative studies in ethnography, history, law and social statistics.29 Here, we already find what would develop further in the later Lacan: the demand to study the structure of the unconscious, the family relationships and fatherhood in contexts that are not exclusively individual-psychological, but also sociocultural. To that end, psychology would have to abandon its customary biological reductionism, and rely mainly on social studies.30 Indeed, Lacan integrates the psychoanalytical discussion (that already in its Freudian origin has been informed by readings in anthropological and sociological research literature, as manifested particularly in Totem and Taboo) with sociological discussions. Thus, in the 1950s, when Lacan will blaze his trail through his discussion of the Symbolic order, he would do so particularly in light of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s anthropological-structuralist work on family relations in tribal societies. To highlight the importance of the cultural context for the understanding of the family institute, Lacan offers two examples, which, as he comments, have continued to be considered controversial among researchers in his time. The first is related to psychological heredity. Perhaps this is an indirect response by Lacan to Freud’s attraction to arguments concerning phylogenetic heredity. Lacan claims that the family is responsible for inculcating culture by repressing the drives and passing the “mother tongue” on to descendants. In that respect, the family is also responsible for the individual’s psychological development, in other words, it bequeaths behavioral structures and mental representations that are beyond the boundaries of consciousness but does so not biologically but culturally. Subsequently, Lacan would clarify that he includes it in his understanding of the concept of the Imago. According 29 30

 AE: 24.  AE: 24–25.

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to Lacan, there is mental-cultural continuity across the generations. We can understand this continuity through the terms, “totem” and nom patronymique,31 that also bequeath, within the framework of culture, the group members’ psychological traits. The second example offered by Lacan has to do with biological kinship relations. Lacan suggests that the modern Western norm is that of a father-mother-child family cell, supposedly identical to the biological family cell. He further adds that there are research based attempts to view this similarity in terms of a shared structure founded on the drives and that may be evident already among the family structures of primitives.32 This too appears to be an indirect response to Freud’s approach (in his discussion of the Oedipus complex), which mostly tended to conceive the father in his bourgeois-marital context as a real life-concrete father. Lacan moves on to deal with the primitive family. He immediately states that the theories that seek to characterize the family in biological terms in comparison with the animals are not grounded on facts. He argues that in primitive societies as well, marriage is always accompanied by prohibitions and rules, i.e., a cultural order. He also states that the primitive forms of family are always organized around a central, mostly patriarchal authority, and that models of kinship, inheritance, etc. operate along either patriarchal or matriarchal lines. In addition, the primitives’ family structures are aligned with biological relations even less than their modern counterparts—despite the stereotypical expectations of the primitives to be closer to animals, and their relationships to be more strongly grounded in biology. This view, that countered the expectation of the primitive to be “primitive”, that is, closer to the natural world, may already be found in Totem and Taboo,33 whose author, like Lacan, was informed by contemporary anthropological research, particularly that of Émile Durkheim. Broader anthropological foundation for the structural complication of primitive kinship relations will be offered subsequently by Lévi-Strauss.34  AE: 25.  AE: 25–26. 33  See, e.g., Freud (1913: 12). 34  Lévi-Strauss (1949). 31 32

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However, as mentioned, before Lacan came across his writings, he had already internalized the assumption regarding the primitive’s “progress” compared to the modern, hence the text’s subsequent highlighting of the more “accurate” conception of fatherhood among the primitives compared to modern society. The Lacanian emphasis on the advantages of civilization compared to naturalness will be therefore accompanied by an evaluation of the archaic-primitive world, where the patriarchal hierarchy is more strongly established. Following Durkheim’s study, Lacan suggests that the primitive family does not respect biological kinship relations. This lack of respect for biological relations often involves what he defines as “systematic non-­ recognition”.35 Moreover, kinship relations in primitive societies are familiar only through rituals that legitimize blood relations, and if need be, also construct artificial ones. Lacan mentions in that context, as an example, the totem and adoption, which constitute father-son relations that are not necessarily biological.36 Lacan concludes at the end of his introduction that in order to better understand the psychology of the individual, who is primarily a family member, as well as the psychology of the modern family, we must first study the primitive family.37

3.3 Splitting—and Saving—the-Father In order to clarify the conceptualization of the father figure, we must first understand the conceptual foundation that enabled it for Lacan: the attempt to split the Oedipal father into two main figures with whom the child identifies. Through this division into two types of identification, Lacan presented his preference for the concept of the father as an abstract postulate (and thereby his preference of a certain side within that split). In “Family Pathology” Lacan’s point of departure is that there are two basic identifications of the child with the parent, particularly the father,  AE: 26.  AE: 27. 37  AE: 27. 35 36

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that is both the superego and a catalysator of sexuality.38 In the section on “The Oedipus Complex”, Lacan clarifies that this is the most significant complex since, in it, the imago of the father is present in the infant’s life, as opposed to the two previous complexes—the weaning complex that is with reference to the mother’s imago or her breast, and the intrusion complex that is with reference to the imago of the sibling or fellow neighbor. Lacan seeks to understand the split inherent to the father’s imago, with the source of this split concept being in Freudian theory. As Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues in Lacan: The Absolute Master, Lacan was Hegelian in his thought already at an early stage, even before being exposed to Kojève’s reading thereof, and thus also read Freud dialectically, particularly with regard to the Oedipus complex and the identifications with the father. According to Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan also realized that there was a flaw in the Oedipal identification since it did not free man of competitive aggression (as articulated in the myth of Totem and Taboo), due to the ambivalence of the aspect of identification with the father. Nevertheless, Lacan sought not to break free of the “Oedipus” and tried to save “him”. His solution was to separate the dialectics of ambivalent identification with the father into two contradictory identifications—the positive (ego ideal) on the one hand, and the negative-aggressive (superego) on the other.39 Borch-Jacobsen suggests that Lacan would cling to that distinction later on, when presenting the difference between imaginary identification and symbolic identification, and between the imaginary and symbolic father.40 In this sense, his argument supports my assumption that when Lacan presents the father imago, the ego ideal and later on also the symbolic identification, the concept of the Name-of-the-Father and symbolic father, he in fact raises the father figure to an abstract-ideal level that is far removed from Freud’s concept of the father (which was mostly concrete, despite attempts at biological conceptualization). The distinction between the ego ideal and superego would subsequently enable Lacan to differentiate between imaginary identification that has the visual dimension and symbolic identification that has the  AE: 79.  Borch-Jacobsen (1991: 37). 40  Borch-Jacobsen (1994a: 278–281). 38 39

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linguistic dimension. This is based on Freud, who describes the superego (following his study of psychosis) as a threatening internal image,41 as opposed to the ego ideal, which represents the realization of the spiritual principles that the ego internalizes by way of sublimation. Such a clear distinction according to image/word cannot be found in Freud, but it is important for Lacan to make it and thereby produce the abstraction of the father figure into a verbal principle and a visual principle. The former will in the future become the Name-of-the-Father, the father as signifier. Although Lacan criticizes Freud’s biologism, he emphasizes early on the importance of the Oedipus complex for Freud and the weight he intends to give to that complex in his own writing, his intention being to re-conceptualize the complex.42 Lacan clarifies that his objective is to stand behind Freud’s emphasis on the Oedipus complex and the father’s role in man’s life and at the same time revise it, in order to understand the development of neurosis in the past, but particularly in his own time. Lacan persists in continuing from the same point in which Freud stopped in The Ego and the Id by presenting the duality of the father figure, this time making a clear distinction between Freud’s two main concepts of the ego ideal and superego, one that is completely absent from Freud (or at least not present in a well-defined and explicit manner in the latter book). For Lacan, the suppressing instance is the “superego”, while the sublimating instance is the “ego ideal”.43 Namely, the superego is the agent of negative identification whereas the ego ideal is the agent of positive identification, with the process of introjection differing between the two cases: one is based on violent repression, and the other on sublimation, which is preferable. This is why, argues Lacan, Freud emphasized the role played by castration anxiety with regard to the negative identification with the father figure. The child fears the paternal prohibition against intimacy with the mother, i.e., incest.

41  See for example Freud in The Uncanny on the internal conscientious authority, whose parallel in paranoia is an external figure observing and supervising the patient (Freud 1919b: 235–236). 42  AE: 45–46. 43  AE: 46.

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Lacan makes it clear that the main question of the relation to the father (through the twin agents, the ego ideal and superego), particularly prior to the resolution of the Oedipal crisis, is the question of identification. The child identifies with the father’s imago, as opposed to the mother’s or the siblings’ imagos in the earlier complexes. Already at this early stage, Lacan seeks to analyze “structurally” (the term structurale appears here before Lacan establishes the “structuralist” trend in France, beginning in the 1960s) the identification with the father’s imago. This structural analysis thus represents already at this stage part of Lacan’s trend of abstractly conceptualizing the father figure and disconnecting it from the concrete context towards a structural one. The structural split in the father’s imago and that split’s association with Totem and Taboo may be found ten years later in Lacan’s “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948).44 This is a lecture given right before his structuralist turn. In this text, Lacan associates the splitting of the identification with the father with the Freudian terms of primary and secondary identification. Primary identification is negative-aggressive as it is narcissistic, whereas the subsequent secondary identification has the values of culture and sublimation. In that sense, Lacan also connects secondary identification with the Freudian ego ideal. Under this distinction, he suggests that even though he considers Totem and Taboo to be a myth imagined by Freud, this myth was psychoanalytically “correct” or “real”, and we can learn from it on identification with the father figure. What is salient here is that in this 1948 article on aggressivity, as in “Family Complexes”, Lacan insists on de-mythologizing the Freudian Oedipality: the father Imago is primarily an image, and less of a real-life aspect of the father, as Freud sought to emphasize in imagining the myth of Totem and Taboo. Nevertheless, it may be said that Lacan precisely refines a position that is originally Freudian, although not stated so explicitly: the possibility of viewing the two types of identification with the father figure in Totem and Taboo, as well as the distinction between positive and negative identification, which is little more than the distinction between the Totem and the Taboo.  E: 82.

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3.4 The Father’s Fall from Grace: The Invention of Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism Towards the end of the subsection on the Oedipus complex, Lacan addresses the cultural and historical contexts of the father question, particularly the rise of psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth century and of the totalitarian regimes in the early twentieth: two phenomena related to the loss of the father’s status. As emphasized in the article on “Family Pathology”, the falling status of the father is the main cause of the pathologies of the modern individual. Lacan ends this section of “Family Complexes” by considering the family complexes the nucleus of all modern neuroses and adding that everything derives from the personality of the disgraced father.45 This conception of the pathology of modern society is particularly related to Lacan’s view of the mother versus father figure. It may be argued that in fact, he manifests a paternalist approach as opposed to identification with the mother. His primary dualistic distinction is not between a good and a bad father, but between a bad mother and a father, who splits into a bad versus good father. The bad father (the superego) in fact conceals the mother, based on the Kleinian view of the archaic maternal superego figure, which influenced Lacan. In a subsection titled “The maternal origin of the archaic superego”,46 Lacan addresses the maternal sources of the Oedipal-paternal superego, following Melanie Klein. These (bad) narcissistic sources will be overcome by the (good) paternal Oedipal complex.47 The mother, with all her importance in delivering and nurturing the child, is an imago, dangerous to his subsequent development. Based on  The figure of the disgraced father will be further developed in Lacan’s work, particularly in Seminar VIII, Transference (1960–61), following the plays by Catholic playwright and poet Paul Claudel (S8: 265–325). 46  Some of the subsections do not appear in the edited copy of the text by Miller in AE. The name of the subsections in English are therefore taken from the unofficial translation by Cormac Gallagher, Lacan (1938b). 47  AE: 53. 45

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the Freudian view of the Oedipal process, the good father must liberate the child from the mother. Despite Klein’s influence on him (with regard to the imaginary-­ aggressive pre-Oedipal stages)48—and to a certain extent Otto Rank’s (with regard to the “birth trauma”)49—Lacan highlights in this text the importance of the father’s role. Note, however, that as part of his attempt to revise the Oedipus complex, he primarily treats that role of the father in the context of the cultural characteristics in constituting the psyche and the unconscious (hence the use of the term “complex” in the cultural sense, as opposed to “instinct” in the biological sense). Moreover, Lacan perceives the maternal Imago in cultural contexts—unlike the simple rule that that father equals culture whereas mother equals nature. Lacan even associates the return to the maternal imago with the sense of nostalgia to a lost totality, to the dark and forgotten paradise. Moreover, the contemporary political context intrudes into the discussion: the article in the French Encyclopedia was published in 1938, a year before the start of WWII, when Europe was swept by totalitarian regimes: Stalinism in the Soviet Union, Fascism in Italy, and of course Nazism in Germany (as well as several other regimes, particularly in eastern Europe). Therefore, Lacan associates the human hope to return to the mother with the totalitarian ideology, as a sort of “social utopia” and “nostalgia” that hide the “obscure aspiration of death”.50 Thus, at the heart of the dark times, Lacan finds redemption precisely in the return to the paternal fold—in diametric opposition to the popular, intuitive image of paternalism as oppressive (as opposed to the mother-­woman seen as representative of freedom). Lacan’s anti-utopist criticism therefore prefers the Law of the Father, with all its limitations, over the mother’s total control of the infant. Although he distinguishes between the good and bad father, as we have seen, the bad father is the superego, and on the same superego, Lacan says it originates precisely with maternal archaism. Thus, we find that already at this early stage  On Melanie Klein’s influence on the early Lacan and his ambivalence towards her, see Koehler (1996). 49  Rank (1923). 50  AE: 36. 48

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where Lacan speaks against “the metaphysical vision of world harmony” presentiments of his future criticism against abstract worldviews, as well as worldviews of harmony and perfection with regard to the individual and the Other. Lacan accepts the assumption regarding the existence of matriarchal cultures, but he views them primarily as dictatorships. For him, what is perceived as a father allows the subject—with all the oppression this involves—to somehow construct a separate subject. It is no coincidence that Lacan mentions Hegel in these contexts, as the latter understands the individual only as located within the Weltgeist, or “world spirit”, that is, the system of human culture in its universalism, where the individual wins his privacy only out of coping with the generality.51 The individual needs family/fatherhood so that in the course of his dialectic struggle with that fatherhood, he would be able to find his position as an individual. For Lacan, this is also the reason why only within the paternal generality the subject—and even the subversive ideologue—would be able to find his place. However, in what way does adhering to Hegel’s philosophy allow Lacan to treat the subject as not completely bound by some perfect and harmonious Otherness? Will the Otherness posed by Lacan later on be a split and anti-harmonious one? Lacan takes the ambivalence of the paternal Imago and within it distinguishes between positive and negative. The negative is associated with the mother, and the positive is left for the father. This subject faces the imagos of the father and mother; in fact, it faces the central element of the paternal imago, which is, as mentioned, positive, whereas the maternal imago is simultaneously the best and worst, as it draws the subject to self-destruction, to death. Therefore, the enlightenment movement, which raised the flag of progress and liberation from tyranny, could only do so out of reference to the paternal imago.52

 AE: 36. It is well known that Hegel had a huge influence on Lacan already in the early stage of his development. On the relation between Lacan’s theory and Hegel’s philosophy, see in particular Borch-Jacobsen (1991). See also Slavoj Žižek’s extensive work, which is the rereading of Lacan through Hegelian philosophy—particularly in his first book, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Žižek 1989). 52  AE: 60. 51

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Obviously, Lacan is sensitive to his formulations and to potential reactions to his argument regarding the father. He tries to fend off critics who would present him as a conservative seeking to preserve only patriarchal values. Importantly, we must not confuse here between a conservative political position and a radical-fascist rightwing position, which is totalitarian, and adamantly opposed by Lacan. This totalitarianism he identifies, as mentioned, with the maternal Imago. Apparently, the nostalgia for this Imago of the mother derives from the misunderstanding of the paternal role in the modern age, as expressed in the bourgeois ideology that glorifies coupling in the biological sense and therefore confuses between the paternal function and the concrete-biological father in the intimate relationship. The result is a decline in the paternal function, and the quick solutions of returning to an authority that is in fact totalitarian.53 In that context, Lacan adds his position with regard to the development of Freudian theory. He seeks to locate the birth of psychoanalysis in a certain historical-cultural context, thereby also allowing its revision, with reference to the degeneration of the paternal status.54,55 Out of Lacan’s revision of Freud’s Oedipus complex, he presents the claim that Freud’s theory is the outcome of the historical context in which he lived, and therefore the meaning of the “totem” became confused with the broad meaning of the Oedipus complex. Lacan demands precision and the construction of a clear relationship between the totem and the positive ego ideal: Les sociétés primitives, qui apportent une régulation plus positive à la sexualité de l’individu, manifestent le sens de cette intégration irrationnelle dans la fonction initiatique du totem, pour autant que l’individu y identifie son essence vitale et se l’assimile rituellement: le sens du totem, réduit par Freud à celui de l’Œdipe, nous parait plutôt équivaloir à l’une de ses fonctions: celles de l’idéal du moi.56  AE: 60–61.  Žižek (1999: 392, n. 3) argues that in the 1930s and 40s, Lacan analyzes the Oedipal complex in its concrete-historical sense, in the 1950s, in the structural, trans-historical sense, and in the 1970s he returns to the historical analysis. 55  AE: 61. 56  AE: 73. 53 54

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As mentioned, when Lacan analyzes Freud, he cannot ignore the Jewish aspect of the discussion. Freud is defined as the “son of a patriarchal Jew”, who has indeed identified the Oedipal complex, but did so in its already disrupted condition, i.e., when the totem and taboo are intermingled and there is no clear differentiation between the good and bad father, between the lost ego ideal (a reincarnation of the totem) and the tyrannical superego.

3.5 Extracting the Jewish and Paternal in Bergson Borsch-Jacobsen argues that Lacan could not have found his justification for the argument about the duality of the father figure in Freud, but only in the latest studies on “primitive” societies.57 Indeed, Lacan dedicates an extensive subsection within the chapter on the Oedipus complex to the sociological context of his thought about the father. As Lacan learns from the renowned anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942), in matriarchal society, authority is not embodied by the father, but by the mother’s uncle, who is a tough and demanding figure who monitors the family supervisions and rituals—in other words, functions in fact as a superego, as a negative identification. Conversely, the father in that society represents the positive identification (functions as the ego ideal) by playing a supportive role in teaching his son survival skills.58,59 In other words, the mother figure stands behind the superego. As mentioned, Lacan seeks to liberate the archaic maternal shadow from the father’s Imago in favor of the “real” father, the good one. Lacan adds that this situation, where the good father’s image is clear, as is the differentiation between the father’s two roles, prevents neurosis in tribal society (as  Borch-Jacobsen (1991: 39).  AE: 56. 59  See in particular Sex and Repression in Savage Society (Malinowski 1927), where he criticizes Freud’s narrow view of the Oedipal complex, attributed to the psychoanalyst’s Eurocentrism. 57 58

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opposed to the modern era where the father contains, both roles as articulated in Freud’s Oedipus complex). *** Lacan integrates sociological materials and adapts them to strengthen his theory as well as solve resulting problems by adopting different sociological theories, among them that of Henri Bergson. The latter was not a sociologist, granted, but his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932), to which Lacan refers, had sociological pretensions. Lacan worked in a cultural-religious contexts and used concurrent ideas to solve dilemmas arising from his theoretical developments. In the subsection titled “The Openness of Social Bonds”,60 Lacan makes use of Bergson’s approach. Bergson distinguishes between “morality of obligation” and “morality of inspiration” as part of his attempt to offer a philosophical criticism of anthropology in his days. For Bergson, when society tries to maintain static closure from the external world and remain cohesive, this expresses the “morality of obligation”. Conversely, when society universalizes itself and its contents through exemplary models such as saints, heroes and mainly mystics, this expresses its “morality of inspiration”. Lacan seeks to use this Bergsonian insight as part of his discussion of patriarchal versus matriarchal supervision in tribal society (which he presents following Malinowski): Nous rapprocherons de ce fait le moment critique que Bergson a défini dans les fondements de la morale; on sait qu’il ramène à sa fonction de défense vitale ce “tout de l’obligation” par quoi il désigne le lien qui clôt le groupe humain sur sa cohérence, et qu’il reconnaît à l’opposé un élan transcendant de la vie dans tout mouvement qui ouvre ce groupe en universalisant ce lien […].61

Further on, Lacan relates the authority of the biological-maternal figure and the “morality of obligation” and social closedness, as well as the authority of the father figure and the “morality of inspiration”, which  Lacan (1938b: 41).  AE: 57.

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means social openness and a tendency of obligation to the son. The concept of paternal “obligation” in the quote above is related in Lacan directly to the divine/paternal promise to the son, as is known in Judeo-­ Christian theology: the divine-Abrahamic promise to Isaac the son with relation to the story of the binding. However, in this myth as well we find the ambivalence of the father figure—it includes also the cruelty, which we may assume belongs, in Lacan’s viewpoint, to the archaic-Kleinian maternal figure. Something of Abraham also includes Sarah; Abraham also includes the obligation, the positive identification, but at the same time, the remains of what may be seen as Sarah’s maternal demanding. Lacan describes how human societies become increasingly “human”, i.e., patriarchal, and less maternal or “animal”, while preserving in their rituals the memory of the cruelty of the primary relationship with the mother. In this way, Lacan connects the two constitutive myths of father-son relations—the Greek (Oedipus) and Jewish (Isaac)—as such that the aggression inherent in them is not the father figure’s fault, but rather that of the mother figure, which remains imprinted in the father in the figure of the archaic superego.62 According to Bergson, religion and its prophets have a key role to play in the transition to an open society with universal aspirations, and he offers examples from Greek philosophers, Israelite prophets and Buddhist monks. For him, the religion that has played this role most prominently was Christianity.63 However, Lacan’s formulation in “Family Complexes” with regard to Bergson, may mislead the readers to think that Bergson focuses in his book on the Israelite prophets, viewing them as the perfect model of universalism of social principles. Clearly, this is not so, as Bergson adopts the Christian position that views Judaism and the Israelite prophets no more than a stage in the development leading to the rise of Christianity and Christian mysticism, whose generator and chief representative is Jesus. Only once (and in a few sentences, at that) does

 AE: 57–58.  Bergson himself was born to a Jewish family, but gradually showed greater interest in Catholic Christianity, and at some point, even considered converting to Catholicism. In 1937, he wrote a will where he stated that had it not been for antisemitism and his desire to identify with the Jews oppressed under Nazism, he would have done so. He died in 1941 in occupied Paris (see Kolakowski 1985, particularly Chap. 6). 62 63

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Bergson refer to the biblical prophets, and even then, not in the patriarchal context, but as the forerunners of Jesus.64 Particularly edifying is the fact that when adapting Bergson, Lacan does not highlight Christianity nor the Catholic feminine mystique that Bergson found fascinating (St. Theresa and Madame Guyon), but rather associates the (open) “morality of inspiration” primarily with the Israelite prophets.65 Moreover, he associates this morality with the father rather than the mother figure, i.e., the feminine authority presumably better able to “connect” to mysticism. What is fascinating in the transition from Bergson to Lacan is that the latter repositions the “universalist”-Christian position in a particular Jewish context. Will Lacan continue to do so later on, when seeking to universalize the Freudian myth of the Oedipus complex?

3.6 Judaism and the Good Father It appears that Freud (followed by Lacan) would have identified with the Jewish position that concentrates on the moral-abstract essence of divinity (positive identification) but forbids its simulation in the sense of physicalnarcissistic similarity (negative identification), which is none other than the prohibition against graven image. Indeed, in his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939), published a year after Lacan’s “Family Complexes”, Freud seeks to describe Judaism as religiously progressive relative to the idolatrous world—a progress which is the byproduct of the triumph of the paternal over the maternal image, that of a father whose image cannot  Bergson (1932: 254).  Note that Bergson was seen in his time as part of a fashionable anti-rational and anti-intellectual trend, as well as the philosophical preacher par excellence of Catholic modernism, emphasizing intuition as opposed to rational-scientific thought as part of his pretense of establishing a semi-­ mystical philosophy (particularly in his Creative Evolution, 1907). As part of the criticism against it, Bergson was also presented as representing the rise of femininity and maternal sensitivity at the expense of the father’s role in society, as for example in Julien Benda’s criticism, following what was seen as Bergson’s disrespect for language and logic and emphasis on emotions. Some Catholic critics also viewed Bergson’s thought as a pagan threat to Catholicism and particularly Thomism with its irrationality. In 1914, the Church even prohibited reading Bergson’s works. On the other hand, many viewed his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion as a text primarily inspired by Christianity. 64 65

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be painted, but only his name spoken.66 This progress is parallel to a different development of language, which is also related to the triumph of the father as signifier (in the Lacanian sense). As mentioned, in “Family Complexes”, Lacan conceived of the superego as the negative form of identification with the father (the forbidding father), and the ego ideal as the positive form. Lacan viewed his failure, as well as Freud’s triumph, in that the rise of psychoanalysis occurred precisely when the father figure was weakened in Western culture, and when the ancient differentiation between positive and negative identification with the father became irrelevant, and consequently the “real” father was perceived as containing both types of identification. Therefore, Lacan seeks to re-differentiate between the two paternal functions in order to understand modern pathology—all of which is the result of the nuclearbourgeois family structure and the fall in the father’s status. As we have argued above, Lacan does that in order to conceptualize certain motifs in Freud’s theory and rescue the lost fatherhood from its grip. In his discussion of the father figure in human history, Lacan highlights its importance among the Jews. This is indicative of the perception of Judaism in Christian culture as the paternal religion par excellence, as the religion of the Law of the Father, as opposed to the other, pagan religions seen as matriarchal. Already here, Lacan presents the fact that only the Law of the Father, with its limitations, can liberate from the death in the bosom of the maternal Imago. He describes, as mentioned, the degeneration of the father’s role in modern Western society, through identification with traditional Jewish society, which he believes knew how to safeguard that role. Based on the former analysys, Do Freud and Lacan, particularly the latter, locate psychoanalysis within an ideological/ethical position we will call “splitting-fatherhood”? Such a position privileges the renunciation of the impulse and of the desire to merge with the maternal totality, as well as fatherhood as an abstract concept (against fatherhood as a threatening image of the superego type). It is this principle that enables the subject to realize his uniqueness within the general cultural-symbolic order. For Lacan and Freud, Judaism more than any other religion realizes this position, which is opposed to the pole of the maternal-total position unable of any compromise or renunciation. 66

 Freud (1939: 18).

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Therefore, it appears that in the 1930s–40s, Lacan emphasized (1) The rupture of the father figure in modern society; and (2) the visual (narcissistic-imaginary) aspect of ego reflections in a competitive-identical ego. The “summary” of these two motifs is embodied by the visual figure of a threatening and cruel father, which is primarily a visual rather than a linguistic representation: the imaginary father, the superego versus the father as signifier (symbolic father, ego ideal). The imaginary father is the image of the punitive father who threatens both the child and the adult, as articulated in the early article “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (1948)—such that the parent’s Imago establishes the punisher’s image (and hence the image of the punitive God) for the future: This aggressiveness is, of course, exercised within real constraints. But we know from experience that it is no less effective when conveyed by one’s mien [expressivité]: a harsh parent intimidates by his mere presence, and the image of the Punisher scarcely needs to be brandished for the child to form such an image. Its effects are more far-reaching than any physical punishment.67

This 1948 position with relation to the father is parallel to the discussion of the same time (as presented regarding “Family Complexes”) of the superego versus the ego ideal: Positive identification: The ego ideal, the good father, the symbolic father Negative identification: Superego, the bad father, the imaginary father This distinction between the good and bad father will become Lacan’s main source for development of the father figure in the early 1950s. As expressed in the lectures and seminars of that decade, particularly Seminar III, The Psychoses (1956–57), the father figure and the reception/rejection of the paternal function are the two most relevant points for studying and treating psychoses, particularly following Freud’s discussion of The Schreber Case (1911). Lacan understands the bad father figure as a visual  E: 85.

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medium that attacks the psychotic during hallucination since the symbolic father, the Name-of-the-Father (the good father) has been foreclosed (see Chap. 7 for more on this subject). * * * To conclude, as we have seen, already in the early text of “Family Complexes” we can find an ambivalent approach to Freud’s image, which mixes tremendous appreciation with caution and criticism. Lacan reaffirmed Freud’s request to highlight the father figure at the expense of the mother figure and considered the Oedipus complex the most important psychological stage for the constitution of man (of all childhood complexes), against certain post-Freudian trends highlighting the mother figure and the pre-Oedipal stages. At the same time, Lacan also railed against what he saw as Freudian biologism as expressed, for example, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), and particularly against the projection of this biologism on the perception of the family and the father as biological realities. He also railed against Freud’s Lamarckian-­ biological position in Totem and Taboo. These two aspects merge already at this stage into a conception of the family and fatherhood as cultural institutes, rather than biological orders, and subsequently into the Lacanian insight of the Name-of-the-Father: the importance of the father as signifier, as a cultural function that constitutes the speaking human subject. Although Lacan sought to have the father returned to the center of psychoanalytical discussion, clearly evident is the influence of Melanie Klein’s theory on the importance of the mother figure in the pre-Oedipal stages (particularly with regard to the first complex of weaning), and this influence also permeates in the form of his structural conception of the father’s Imago. Just as Klein produces a dualistic conception of a “good mother” and “bad mother” (parallel to “good breast” and “bad breast”), so does Lacan produce a dualistic distinction between “good father” and “bad father” (or more precisely, between a good and bad paternal figure). This differentiation is based on concepts found in Freud himself, particularly in the Ego and Id: the ego ideal and the superego.

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As I have shown, in “Family Complexes” Lacan views the superego as the negative form of identification with the father (the forbidding father), whereas he views the ego ideal as the positive form. This split enables him to rescue the Freudian father figure given its weakening in Western culture, as well as to construct the figure of the “good” father around the cultural (and subsequently linguistic) dimension rather than around his threatening figure (the superego). In that sense, the dualistic split of the father figure in fact constituted the beginning of the strategy of conceptualizing the Freudian Oedipus complex as a necessary step in constituting the Lacanian discourse. In Lacan’s early writings on the father we can find the basis of the conception of the Name-of-the-Father and the Father as a symbolic-­linguistic function in the 1950s, when he burst into the consciousness of the psychoanalytical movement as a Freudian psychoanalyst, albeit one who is independent and original. This basis is interesting also in its religious contexts, since the question of the father was charged already in Freud with these contexts, as well as the question of the figure of God (particularly in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism). In fact, as we shall see below, the question of the father is also salient for Lacan in its religious contexts already early on in his theoretical work, and in the subsequent discussion about the Name-of-the-Father. As I have argued, this text is prototypical of the internal dilemma evident in Lacan throughout his work between the return to Freud and the desire to innovate, as well as between the desire to preserve the physicality and anti-metaphysical dimension in the Freudian theory and the abstraction of Freudianism liable to slide into metaphysics. The revision revolves around the concept of the “father” in psychoanalysis, and already at this time, Lacan seeks to perceive the father figure in broader cultural contexts, i.e., as an Imago, as an image, and less as the biological father in the family (later on, from the 1950s onwards, the conceptualization will try to also move away from the dimension of the image towards the dimension of language). In my view, Lacan uses two processing discourses to generate his revision of psychoanalysis: (1) The Jungian discourse, using such terms as imago and complex, Lacan struggles against what he considers (as does Jung) as Freudian biologism; (2) The Judeo-Christian discourse: Lacan

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refers to Henri Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion (1932), out of which he extracts the paternal-Jewish position. My insight into this act by Lacan will lead me to ask later whether his religious background points already at a cultural position that can resolve the dilemma between abstract and concrete physicality. It appears that following the fall in the father’s status, Lacan deconstructs his image into three types: the Imaginary, the Real, and the Symbolic. Using that split, Lacan is able to focus on the third kind, the symbolic father, otherwise known as the Name-of-the-Father, and thereby rescue the father figure and present his positive identification with it and the necessity of the existence of the symbolic paternal function given the pathologies caused by the deterioration of its status in the West. It appears that in “Family Complexes”, we can find the beginning of this Lacanian path, as he separates two father functions: the supportive-positive and the tyrannical-negative, tying the father’s negative image with the figure of the archaic mother, as a remnant of that mother. In doing so, Lacan seeks to rescue the father figure by transforming him into a cultural principle, defining him as a function and detaching him from the real father. It appears that all that would remain of the Freudian biological/spousal father in the next stage will not even be an imaginary father, that Imago of the 1930s-40s, but only a theoretical principle, a vacuous principle: the Name-of-the-Father. It may be that already at this early stage, the motivation of revising Freudianism by conceptualizing it could have led to a theoretical failure that required a type of cultural support. I argue that already in this early text, the support was found in the form of the Jewish position on fatherhood, which is universal, but also enables the existence of the individual within it. Against this position, Lacan places the totalitarian regime and ideology prevalent at the time. Maybe this was his way of expressing his identification with the paternal ethical position of Judaism, which had suffered and was about to suffer much more at the hands of that totalitarianism—that which in fact originated from the fantasy about the lost mother.

4 Return to the Logos: Between Dualism and Extimacy

As suggested in Chap. 2, in Lacan’s discussion of “The Function and Field”, he makes rhetorical use of the word le Verbe in its religious context (which is a translation of the philosophical/theological term “logos”). Based on a reading of Lacan’s writings throughout the 1950s, it appears he makes frequent use of this metaphor to describe the relation between the signifier and the body, and man’s entry into the Symbolic order. In the present chapter, I examine this use and inquire its purpose, and whether it is designed to resolve a theoretical dilemma in constituting the Lacanian discourse. The term “logos” has a tortuous history: On the one hand it is the contradiction of the myth and on the other, it is act in the world. The second aspect is expressed particularly in the verses that open the Gospel of John about the logos/Christ that creates the world and is embodied in the world in the human flesh: In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_4

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made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. […] And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. […] No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared Him. (John 1: 1–4, 14, 17–18 NKJV)

4.1 The Logos: From Heraclitus to John The history of the “logos” runs parallel to the history of religion and philosophy in Western culture. Lacan was influenced by Heidegger’s view of the concept, but Lacan’s reference to it is made in the Christian context of incarnation in the flesh. In pre-Socratic philosophy, there was tension between “myth” (or “story” in Greek) and “logos”. The myth, particularly as articulated by Homer, Hesiod and the tragedians, was a narrative expounding abstract principles using concrete expressions. The logos, as expressed in philosophy, was presented as its antithesis, as the alternative myth, as the factor of abstract reason in the world. In the sixth to fifth centuries BC, “logos” had a wide set of meanings: story, lecture, article, speech (the noun λόγος is derived from the verb λέγω, which means to count, to enumerate, to say); the meaning of “explanation” and “reason” developed out of the sense of “statement” and “saying”. These two poles of meaning—statement on the one hand and reason on the other—remained valid despite the various reincarnations of the Greek concept in the Western history of religion and philosophy. Let us begin with Heraclitus, since he offers the first important discussion of logos, and since he is highly relevant to analyzing Lacan, as Lacan translated Heidegger’s article on the logos in Heraclitus. In Heraclitus, who speaks to us out of the ancient Greek world, the logos is the immanent principle in the world: it is the principle of unity that emerges out of the multiplicity of worldly phenomena that contradict each other, the manifestation of the order of things in the world. This order is eternal and in it, we

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can recognize the secret of being. Parallel views of the logos have been shared by other pre-Socratic philosophers, such as Parmenides. The Heraclitan source introduced a metaphysical (and even mystic) context when talking about the need to listen to that ubiquitous divine force of reason, listen to the inner voice of man. Stoicism and Christianity will develop this trend towards a particularly religious view—a divine force that is also there in man’s inner being as an internal otherness.1 After the term “logos” found its way into Aristotelian thought in Rhetoric, where it refers to both speech and the speech act (as a rhetorical action),2 the next milestone is that of the Stoicism, which came to view the logos as the law of divine reason that governs the world, the immanent law within the world. In stoic materialism, the logos is viewed as a threadlike substance that runs through the entire cosmos—as the divine reason— with various deities seen as the images and personifications of the universal logical principle. Together with middle Platonism, stoicism had a considerable influence on the works of Hellenic Jew Philo of Alexandria, who sought to bring together the Jewish tradition of his religion with the Greek tradition in which he lived. Philo understood logos in both the stoic sense and in the sense of the Greek word logos, which was in fact the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew word ‫דבר‬. In the biblical sense, that word has a double meaning: a commandment, a Torahic law commanded by the Lord, and on the other hand, a cosmic principle: “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made” (Psalms 33: 6, NKJV). This understanding of the term is particularly familiar from the way Philo analyzed the opening verses of Genesis, where God is described as creating the world with spoken words, with logos. In the Bible, the logos/‫ דבר‬is not an autonomous entity, whereas in Philo the logos receives the meaning of “divine logos” (ὁ θεῖος λόγος),3 which creates and governs the world. This is a principle relegated from the  Jones, W. T. (1980: 18).  Covino and Jollife (1995: 17). 3  For example, in De Opicisio Mundi, Part I, Section 20. 1 2

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transcendent (remote) Lord to the world. Hence, the concept of logos in the full sense provided by Philo had huge potential for Christian thought. Already with Philo, logos included two aspects: the supreme, abstract and remote being, and the Lord with its human aspect that is close to man at all times. These two aspects come together in the logos (and subsequently in the logos-Christ in Christianity): on the one hand it is the whole of divine thoughts (ideas in the Platonic sense), and on the other it is God’s firstborn. In this way, this Being intercedes between the abstract divinity and humanity.4 Influenced also by the Platonic theory of forms and theology (as expressed in Timaeus, in the dialogue on the demiurge—the artisan-like figure responsible for maintaining the physical universe—Philo’s theology did not abandon the Jewish concept of God the Creator.5 Thus, when Philo presents the creation of the world and the relationship between God the Father and his firstborn Logos in On Special Laws, he alludes to Platonic inspiration, but at the same time to the Jewish-Biblical view of the Creation.6 The next incarnation of the concept would be, obviously, in the opening verses of The Gospel of John. Directed at the Hellenic communities, these verses were informed by the Jewish-Hellenistic insight of the Creator Logos a Demigod Logos. This way, Jesus came to be identified with this principle, and turned from an eschatological figure to one of ontological status.

 Lewy (1945: 11). See Mach (1994) on Stoic and Neoplatonist influences on Philo; see also the entry on Philo in Mach (1996), which provides an extensive bibliography. 5  On whether Philo recognized the Creation as ex-nihilo creation, see Winston (1981). See also Philo’s allegory on the Creation as an architectural design in On the Creation, Part 1, Sections 17–20 (Philo 1937). 6  Philo, Allegorical Interpertation part I, Section 19. 4

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4.2 Logos in Christianity, Heidegger and Lacan When reviewing the way Lacan refers to the logos in his discourse, it appears he continues an ancient Christian tradition of talking about it as part of the Christological discussion of the nature of the Trinity and of Jesus the Son-Logos. In this context, we may recall the words by Jesuit priest and historian Michel de Certeau, who suggests, in his article “Lacan: An Ethics of Speech” that Lacan’s doctrine represents the permeation of the Christian logos spiritualism into Freudian psychoanalysis, which had a distinct physical emphasis (in the Jewish sense).7 We cannot present this tradition in full as the discussion in question is too elaborate and complex for the present scope. However, a certain line that crosses through the Christian tradition may be found in Augustine, who states that Christ is the eternal Logos that lives within the believer’s mind and indicates the truth to him.8 Augustine’s discussion was in fact the continuation of the Greek one on the logos as a divine power encountered internally by the soul. In later Christianity, this is expressed in the pietistic approach. It may also be found in Heidegger, as argued by George Steiner: The Heideggerian postulate of a language speaking “in and through” man is an immediate burrowing from the Johannine doctrine of the Logos and its long legacy in Western mystical-Pietist expression.9

This is seen particularly in Heidegger’s article “Logos”, written on Heraclitus’ Fragment B 50: Ούκ ἐμοῦ ἀλλὰ τοῦ Λόλος ἀκούσαντας ὁμολογεῖν σοφόν ἐστιν η Εν Πάντα.  de Certeau (1986: 60). Compare Foucault in the lecture series The Hermeneutics of the Subject, where he claims that Lacan’s discourse is in fact spiritual: Foucault (1981–1982: 29–30); see also Foucault (1981). 8  Augustine, book 10, Chaps. 5 and 8. 9  Steiner (1979). 7

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When you have listened not to me but to the Meaning, it is wise within the same Meaning to say: One is All.10

Published in 1951, Heidegger’s article argued that the Heraclitan Logos is in fact language, our exposure to which enables us to come into contact with the Being, with the Sein. In 1956, as part of his move to return to Freud by way of the logos, Lacan translated the article into French.11 Heidegger’s approach to the logos was part of his attempt to challenge Western metaphysics, and particularly its Aristotelian and Platonic sources, which added the logical context to the logos, so that the logic overshadowed Being. In Heidegger, on the other hand, the logos contains the duality, the mediation between Being and language, reminding us of Philo’s

 Quoted in Heidegger (1954: 59).  Lacan’s translation of Heidegger’s article on the logos appeared in Booklet 1 of La Psychanalyse (Heidegger 1956; compare also to earlier discussion by Heidegger in An Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger 1935: 122 et seq.). Lacan does not refer to Heidegger’s article directly in his writing, but he refers the reader to Heraclitus’ conception of the logos in his important article “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud”, published in Écrits, and to an expression included in Fragment B 50, “η Εν Πάντα” (“all in one”) (E: 420). See Muller and Richardson (1982: 186–187). On p. 339, Muller and Richardson also argue, with regard to the sentence that concludes Lacan’s “The Signification of the Phallus” (E: 575), that through his approach to the logos (together with the concept “Nous”), we can understand that for him it is in fact the ancient equivalent of the Other. On the relation between Heidegger’s and Lacan’s interpretation of the “logos” following the latter’s article, see, for example, Edler (2002). The question of the relation between Lacan’s theory and Heidegger’s philosophy is too complex to be addressed in the present book. It has been discussed extensively in several studies. For example: Borch-Jacobsen (1991), Wilden (1968: 179–183, 200–204). An in-depth examination of how certain Lacanian motifs (such as his conception of metaphysics and of the tension between the Jewish and Greek worlds) are byproducts of Heidegger’s discussion of metaphysics is also called for. On the Heideggerian sources of Lacan’s critique of metaphysics, see, for example, Alemán (1997). Note, in general, following Wilden (1968: 182) that the question of Heidegger’s influence on Lacan is complicated by the fact that Lacan tends to assimilate philosophical principles borrowed form other thinkers into his own doctrine such that they become integral thereto, making it difficult to reveal their “origins”. In my own view, this aspect in the Lacanian discourse has to do with the diffuse relation between Lacan’s discourse and the adaptation discourses with which he grappled in order to confirm his theory. 10 11

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and Christianity’s approach to the logos as mediating between the abstract deity and humanity.

4.3 The Subject’s Extimacy and the Other It appears that this structural relation between man and God receives its psychoanalytic meaning in Lacan’s discourse: the unconscious, the subject’s internal-intimate essence, is in fact in contact with an “extraneous” signifier, and therefore belongs at the level of the Other. This Lacanian view of otherness is interestingly parallel to the view of divinity in the monotheistic religions as a total otherness, with which we can communicate through the religious/mystical experience internal to man. Note that Jacques-Alain Miller points to the similarity between Augustine’s view of God, as expressed in his statement interior intime meo,12 and the meaning of the Lacanian term extimité—a neologism that expresses the externality of the unconscious intimacy and vice versa.13,14 The term extimacy hardly appears in Lacan, but Miller uses it to demonstrate a logical principle that channels Lacan’s theory. Lacan mentions the term when describing the metaphor on the relation between interior and exterior in architectural spaces, so that the central point is actually “[…] the central place, […] the intimate exteriority or “extimacy”, that is the Thing […]”.15 This discussion, which appears in Seminar VII, is an allegory of the relation between the Thing/Other and the subject. In this seminar, Lacan identifies the two concepts, Thing and Other, following Freud’s words on man’s encounter with the stranger-­neighbor (who for

 See Augustine Confessions 3. 6, based on Psalms, Chap. 119.  Miller (2008: 6–7). 14  See Boothby (1991: 209) who demonstrates from a Lacanian perspective the relation between Freud and Heidegger’s understanding of Unheimlich and Angst as being simultaneously internal and external. The Heideggerian understanding of the two concepts may have had some influence on Lacan’s reading of them in Freud. 15  S7: 139. 12 13

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him is the Thing) as an encounter also with his most intimate jouissance. He posits there das Ding as exteriority, as the prehistoric Other.16 Lacan’s position about extimacy as the exterior/interior relations of the unconscious is reminiscent of Freud’s position on the uncanny. For Freud, the uncanny (Unheimlich) is a metaphor for the nature of the unconscious itself: a sense of uncanny anxiety arises when one encounters something that is at the same time absolutely alien to him, but is in fact surprisingly close to him, belonging to his most intimate parts. At the same time, the unconscious, the repressed, is the part most distinctly mine, but at the same time I seek to alienate myself from it on the conscious level. In this respect, the German word Unheimlich captures this duality on the level of language, as Freud sought to do: un is the negation, but Heimlich includes both the meaning of “domestic-intimate” and the meaning of something hidden from my view, since the domestic is the most alien and vice versa.17 The Other, says Lacan, following Hegel, is related to my desire for his desire; in other words, my own intimate desire is “out there” in the otherness of language, and even if I lie and seek to position myself as an independent subject controlling my own speech, this lie contains the truth that awaits me in the Other. In “The Instance of the Letter in the Subconscious, or Reason since Freud” (hereafter, “The Instance”), we see that for Lacan, there is a strong relation between the concept of (unconscious) “truth” and that of the Other.18 The Other is merely a human creation. This third element of truth (between the two: the self and other) exists only for human creatures, as nicely demonstrated by mendacity. Although animal species do experience some rudimentary form of mendacity, as in the traps animals lay for others, a fully conscious dialectic between truth and falsehood exists only among humans: only the human being can say something and present it as a lie, although it is in fact true, and vice versa. Lacan suggests that this state of affairs is most clearly expressed in Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation

 S7: 71.  Freud (1919b: 222). 18  E: 436. 16 17

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to the Unconscious (1905). The Joke always requires a third element to guarantee this tension between truth and falsehood.19 Lacan argues that this principle of truth-falsehood relations is relevant also to negotiations. The relations between warring parties are reminiscent of the imagined relations between animals: laying traps for the other side. But in peace negotiations, a third party is necessary to enable the leap of faith: successful negotiations therefore depend on “the relationship to the Other who is the guarantor of Good Faith.”20 Note that before Lacan presents these arguments, he examines whether the tension between the subject and the Id (das Es) in Freud is a dualistic tension between the forces of good and evil.21 Lacan’s reply is the attempt to work with this dualism,22 but at the same time complicate it in a relationship that may be called “extimate”. He alludes to his own famous and controversial analysis of Freud’s statement: Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.23 In Lacan’s alternative translation (which is not presented explicitly in “The Instance”, but in several other texts), we can find the core of his ethical argument on the nature of analysis. The customary English translation of this German expression of Freud is: Where the id was, the ego shall be24 or in other words, the id/repressed must rise (become sublimated to) the level of the ego—the ego must push the id aside. In a certain sense, this common translation matches the context where this statement was made in Freud—at the end of Lecture 31, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality”—in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis—after Freud presented in that lecture the distinction between the ego, id and superego. “Naïve” reading of that text might suggest that Freud did indeed mean to say that the ego would overcome and vanquish the id, as the allegory on the drying of the Zuiderzee makes perfectly clear in last words of that lecture:  E: 436.  E: 437. 21  E: 434. 22  Dualism is used here in the broadest sense of the word, i.e. not only in the philosophical-­ metaphysical, but also in the religious sense of ontological, spiritual and moral tension between mind and matter. 23  The German expression may be found in GW 15: 86. 24  Quoted by Lacan in “The Freudian Thing” (1955), E: 347. 19 20

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Nevertheless, it may be admitted that the therapeutic efforts of psyco-­ analysis have chosen a similar line of approach. Its intention is, indeed, to strengthen the ego, to make it more independent of the super-ego, to widen its field of perception and enlarge its organization, so that it can appropriate fresh portions of the id. Where id was, there ego shall be. It is a work of culture—not unlike the draining of the Zuider Zee.25

Against the customary interpretation, Lacan presents the fissure, the impossibility of the dualist harmony. According to the harmonizing approach, if there is an absolute contradiction between the ego (here in the sense of a talking self ) and the id, then it is possible to make the id’s movement toward the ego and “erase” the supposedly “evil” id. On the other hand, Lacanian ethics favors the ego’s submission to the id, to language, to the signifier, to the logos, which is supposed to lead, by the end of the analysis, to the insight that man and his unconscious depend on the Symbolic. For Lacan, the id (Es) is the subject (S), the subject of analysis, of the unconscious. Lacan plays with the similar sounds of the German noun Es and the French letter S. It means that the Freudian id is not—for Lacan (and somewhat contradictorily of Freud)—a biological essence, but a linguistic essence, subject to the Symbolic order and to language. Only the understanding of this aspect can bring the analysis to an end, out of an ethical position that argues that it is impossible to expand the ego and to constantly encourage it in the direction of harmony. Rather, Lacan interprets the Freudian statement, Wo Es war, soll Ich warden, as indicating movement in the opposite direction: the opening up of the ego to its other, to the id, knowing that it is the internal other that is always there and that cannot just be moved away. Lacan emphasizes this to prevent any possible compromise with the radicalness of the Freudian discovery, one that has recently, so he argues, routed post-Freudian psychoanalysis (until Lacan arrived).26 In “The Instance” Lacan does not analyze his alternative translation for the statement, but only indicates that the customary reading—as much as  Freud (1933a: 57).  E: 434–436.

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it tries to remain faithful to the original—misses out on Freud’s inner truth. In other words, we see that Lacan posits some kind of fundamental truth that he extracts out of Freud—the relationship between the subject and the radicalness of the unconscious and language, etc.—and through it, he reads all of Freud, even if this runs counter to Freud’s own intentions in a given text. Thus, this “Talmudic” reading borrows a certain German sentence and leans some metaphysical truth on its context. Does this truth come from previous metaphysical assumptions by Lacan? What is the cultural-religious background of these assumptions? Is the assumption regarding the radicalness of the Other and the subordination of the subject to this otherness (against the liberal principles of ego psychology that speak of the liberation of the individual/ego and even against some expressions by Freud) in fact a psychoanalytical translation of structural relations between the subject and his God in the Judeo-Christian religious discourse? Is it also related to Lacan’s rhetorical use of the terms “logos” and “incarnation”? In other words, is it just superficial religious rhetoric, or are there religious claims here that also carry contents transferred into the psychoanalytical discourse? To better understand this relation between the subject and other, we can turn to Lacan’s Scheme L, as described in “Introduction of the big Other” (May 25, 1955), in Seminar II.27 Here, Lacan presents for the first time the concept of the Other, enabling him to theoretically develop the distinction between the Symbolic and Imaginary order. Scheme L highlights the difference, as well as the relationship, between the two orders of the Imaginary and Symbolic. The imaginary is the axis between a—the ego (moi) as the other constituted in the mirror phase—and its specular image a’. Conversely, S is the split subject (psychotic as well as neurotic) dependent on A, the Other.28 Lacan asks who the ego is (moi, located at the bottom left and marked as a, for autre)? He argues that the ego is constructed (as illustrated in the mirror phase) by mimicking the other, the specular-imaginary other in front of it. The ego is therefore primarily something superficial, simulated, all part of the Imaginary order. Against the ego, Lacan positions the S 27 28

 S2: 235–248.  S2: 243.

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(upper left), the subject; according to Lacan, the analytic experience should concentrate around the subject. What is the subject? For Lacan, it is none other than that which is expressed in the unconscious, as opposed to the ego (a), and as such, it is the result of intimate contact with an otherness that is inside it and alienated from it at the same time—the otherness of language. The imaginary axis is a kind of wall that prevents the subject from finding his answer, which lies within the language/Other and behind the imaginary masks of identifications with others.29 This otherness is what Lacan calls the Other, which is the Other for the specific subject, the Other that is the reservoir of signifiers, which as such contains for the subject his question. In analysis, the analyst must take his place on the other side of this Other that contains the subject’s question, that is, position itself at the symbolic/unconscious rather than the imaginary axis of the mirror images and narcissism. What is striking here is Lacan’s need to dichotomize the Imaginary and the Symbolic, despite claiming that they are constantly interfaced in a way that actually disrupts the analysis. This tension between the Imaginary and Symbolic, argues Lacan, is like the tension between the false and real. In the 1950s, the Other, for Lacan, belongs with the Real, with the place to which the subject is supposed to be directed. Only Lacan does not leave that Real as a merely transcendent-external essence vis-à-vis the subject, but as an empty place in fact, to which the subject may turn and find the answer to the question of his existence (with all the paradoxicality this involves). True or false, the patient is positioned facing an Other embodied by the analyst, and in this dialectic must find his desire. How much do these formulations regarding the relation between the subject and the Other owe to the Western religious discourse and to the parallel tension between the believer and his God? At this point, at least, in the development of his discourse, Lacan expresses his need to rely on an Other, and even if that Other is known to be empty, he needs to rely on it to discover the unconscious truth. To what extent is this Other a metaphysical and transcendent other, which, in belonging to the world “beyond”, subjects the subject to it? What freedom remains for the subject in such a discourse? In what way, if at all, does  S2: 247–248.

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Lacan seek to regulate this trend, liable as it is to slide into a rigid position that forces the patient to be subject to the truth of his encounter with language—a truth that may be philosophical and theoretical, but which at the same time may be detached from the patient’s true needs?

4.4 In the Beginning Was the Word30 Assuming that the aspect of extimacy in Lacan has a semi-theological character, how is it expressed in the multiple references to the logos and the word as they appear throughout Lacan’s oeuvre? To what extent does this rhetoric on the Other and the Symbolic order also contain a kind of religious understanding of the signifier, the body and their interrelations? In “Function and Field”, Lacan raises this aspect of the logos most sharply. Lacan emphasizes the logos out of dialogue with Freud’s view in the conclusion of Totem and Taboo. There, Freud quotes from Faust—where Goethe adapts the opening of the Gospel of John—and uses the Faustian statement as part of the creation of the patricidal myth as the foundation of human history: “In the beginning was the deed” (“Im Anfang war die Tat”).31 This saying is the underside of the New Testament verse, “In the beginning was the word” (“Im Anfang war das Wort”). The concept of the “deed” summarizes Totem and Taboo, with its myth of the creation of humanity out of patricide. Conversely, Lacan—who sought to demythologize and conceptualize the myth into a structural principle—reintroduced the term “logos” as speech that is also deed, as an abstract concept that psychoanalysis needs to grapple with, instead of a historical reality of patricide or the physical reality of the real father or his imaginary figure. The statement “In the beginning was the deed” is taken from Faust’s words in his moldy study. This statement has a distinct anti-Christian note, in the sense that the German Christian has already had enough of  The familiar opening of the Gospel of John, “Au commencement, était la verbe […]”, became identified with Lacan. It was used, for example, as a motto in an interview for L’Express (Lacan 1975: 310), under his cover photo. See also the photo in an album prepared by his daughter Judith Miller (1991: 79). 31  GW IX: 194. Freud (1913: 160). 30

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the acts of the mind and sought the real out of his frustration with the spiritual. The erudite doctor Faust cynically expresses his attitude towards the spiritual origins of his world, as the revelation of the real has turned in the New Testament into sterile language, and it seems that Faust seeks to redeem the glory of the real by translating the Holy Scriptures into the language of his nation (an ironic allusion to Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible).32 Lacan refers to this quote without mentioning Totem and Taboo. His emphasis on the Symbolic order of language leads him back to John 1, 1, rather than to Freud or Goethe.33 By that, he contends that the subject is born into a world where language is already a fact of life that creates the world itself, i.e, for Lacan, the word was indeed in the beginning, and it is our deeds in the world that gives it life.34 Note that this creation, as Lacan tries to argue, is not language’s moment of birth (Lacan is even opposed to seeking the origins of language).35 This is also not a question of an absolute opposition of the speech and the deed, as speech is the active function of language that brings about deeds.36 Do the preference of the logos and the emphasis on the signifier suggest a Jewish or a Christian position? It seems that Lacan has primarily a JudeoChristian position since he plays simultaneously on both. The two are  ‘It is written: “In the Beginning was the Word. “Here am I balked: who, now can help afford? The Word? impossible so high to rate it; And otherwise must I translate it. If by the Spirit I am truly taught. Then thus: “In the Beginning was the Thought” This first line let me weigh completely, Lest my impatient pen proceed too fleetly. Is it the Thought which works, creates, indeed? “In the Beginning was the Power,” I read. Yet, as I write, a warning is suggested, That I the sense may not have fairly tested. The Spirit aids me: now I see the light! “In the Beginning was the Act,” I write’ (Goethe 2005: III). 33  Translating “logos” as “word” is part of an ancient Christian translation tradition that begins with Hieronymus’ Latin translation of the Bible (the Vulgate): Hieronymus chooses to translate “logos” as verbum, or “word” (based on Justin Martyr who argued that every word of God is logos Christos). To this day, this is the standard translation in European languages, including Wort and verbe. Note that Erasmus was the first to oppose this translation, arguing that the Latin word sermo (meaning “speech”, parole, or “sermon”) is much more appropriate. 34  E: 225. 35  See in “The Symbolic, the Imaginary, the Real” (Lacan 1963: 17–18). 36  This dilemma is well presented in Seminar XV: The Psychoanalytic Act, where Lacan claims he has been misread in the “Function and Field”. According to Lacan, the speech and act are identical: following Genesis, Lacan suggests that without speech there is no act, hence the two expressions are equivalent (S15, January 10, 1967). Compare to Lacan’s subsequent discussion in “The Triumph of Religion”, where he refers to “In the beginning was the word” (Lacan 1960: 73). 32

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inseparable in this case, since they are the product of the historical and theological development of “logos”. Indeed, in The Future of an Illusion, Freud prefers “our god logos”,37 only this Freudian logos is the Greekrationalist one, whereas Lacan’s is the Judeo-Christian logos of John, which is an adaptation of the former: it is a linguistic logos, a logos of statement, of speech. The embodiment of language in the flesh is an important aspect of Lacanian “mythology” about the creation of the human subject: through the symbolic agent—the Father or paternal function—language kills the infantile/imaginary body in favor of a body located in the Symbolic, in the order of the social law and language. Lacan perceives the creation of the symbolic body as an act of castration, where circumcision obliterates jouissance, or as Paul says: “Who also hath made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (II Corinthians 3: 6 NKJV).38 This approach is articulated at that time in many of Lacan’s seminars and in Écrits. A particularly beautiful and concise statement may be found in “An address: Freud in the century”,39 a lecture marking the centennial of Freud’s birth on May 16, 1956. Towards the end of the lecture, Lacan sought to clarify how we should return to Freud. In his view, Freud’s view is not anti-rational in its attempt to understand the human unconscious. On the contrary, Freud seeks the rational in man’s quest to be subjected to the structure of language and the social law. What stands out here is Lacan’s desire to reduce Freud to one clear meaning. It appears that in fact, 37  In the concluding section of The Future of an Illusion (Freud 1927: 54)—written in the form of a conversation between the rational narrator and an interlocutor who finds reason in preserving religion—Freud suggests that he is one of those who would rather reject any form of religion in favor of science, following the finest rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment. He therefore states, rather paradoxically, that instead of the Gods of the various religions, he worships the God of Reason: “unser Gott λόγος“. The divinity of reason is integral to the same anti-Catholic revolutionary tradition that has existed in France since the Revolution, most radically in the form of Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being. When Freud mentions the logos, he views it as part of the twin Green deities of Logos/Ananke (inevitability), following Dutch Writer Multatuli (Eduard D. Dekker, 1820–1887). 38  Lacan refers directly to the statement “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” in “The Instance” (1957), E: 423. 39  S3: 231–244.

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Lacan projects onto Freud his own pessimistic position about man and his subjection to culture and the order of signifiers in language. For him, Freud’s was a fundamentally pessimistic and anti-humanist position.40 To describe his discourse as consistent with Freud’s, Lacan goes on to argue that Freud was interested in only one question on the nature of man throughout his oeuvre, which can be summarized as ‘How is language possible?’: From beginning to end, from the discovery of the Oedipus complex to Moses and Monotheism, via the extraordinary paradox from the scientific point of view of Totem and Taboo, Freud only ever asked himself, personally, one question—how can this system of signifiers without which no incarnation of either truth or justice is possible, how can this literal logos take hold of an animal who doesn’t need it and doesn’t care about it—since it doesn’t at all concern his needs? This is nevertheless the very thing that causes neurotic suffering.41

It seems at first that Lacan’s formulation follows Claude Lévi-Strauss, who talked about the paradox of Totem and Taboo in The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). Thus, what we have here is a structural reading of Freud, but also an allusion to the question of alpha and omega in the Christian sense (Christ as the alpha and the omega), as well as to the question of the beginning as creation: What is the beginning? Is it the product of a speech act as suggested by the Christian context, the product of the act of the logos? Lacan alludes here to the Christian context in the Gospel of John, particularly the verses opening Chap. 2 that talk about the incarnation of the logos in the flesh, in the body, in the figure of Christ the Son. He associates that incarnation with the relation between man’s animal flesh and the speech and language of man, and the subjection of the animal-man to the signifier. Lacan also alludes to a biologistic-­ Darwinist influence on Freud, but takes this motif precisely in the theological direction, as this direction enables him to present the abstract myth as opposed to the Freudian concretization. Thus, we have a combination of two positions: a theoretical one (Lévi-Strauss) and a theological one  S3: 243.  S3: 242; my italics.

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(the logos), and both enable Lacan to break free of Freud’s Lamarckian position in his concept of phylogenesis and the collective-­congenital unconscious. In this sense, Lacan returns to a Freud that he recalibrates in advance, as Lacan posits “Freud” as a discourse consistent with his, as containing his own discourse ab initio. This abstraction of Freud’s terms is consistent with the view of language/logos as the center of the human being, with emphasis on the subjection of man to this order of language.42 Lacan explains that Freud came up with the patricidal myth to support the importance of the law of language in psychoanalysis. In other words, he does not seek to justify this myth, but he can understand what needs it served for Freud. The demythologization of Totem and Taboo is a key to understanding Lacan’s abstraction of Freud’s theoretical notions. However, this abstraction risked slipping into a philosophical metaphysical discussion. Lacan is aware of this difficulty, and although he asks, what is Freud’s philosophy, in the sense of a Weltanschauung—ironically aware that both have been opposed to pigeon holing psychoanalysis within a certain worldview—Lacan defines Freud, as mentioned, as pessimistic with regard to man. Lacan ended the Freud centennial lecture demanding that psychoanalysis become a science, inspired by the humanities, particularly linguistics: Psychoanalysis should be the science of language inhabited by the subject. From the Freudian point of view man is the subject captured and tortured by language.43,44 This statement summarizes all of Lacan’s principles in his certain return to Freud: Presenting his own view as consistent with Freud’s; the need for linguistic-scientific analysis of the unconscious; and the pessimistic view with regard to man’s subjection to the order of the logos. Hitherto, we have seen the importance of language to Lacan’s return to Freud in the 1950s, as well as the semi-theological relation between the language/signifier and the body in Lacan’s work at the time, a relation articulated by the conceptualization of Freudian motifs. Note that for  Ibid.  This expression reflects a typically Heideggerian style. 44  S3: 276. 42 43

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Lacan, the body is the imaginary body which, like the imaginary phallus, takes shape during the mirror phase, and that Lacan seeks to present it as functioning within the Symbolic order. This is Lacan’s objective in demythologizing the imaginary father, the father with the imaginary body, in Totem and Taboo and in the myth of Oedipus.

4.5 The Body-Signifier Dualism Considering the above, does Lacan have a dualist position regarding body and language?. According to van Haute, Lacan endorses an ontological dualism between the body on the one hand and language and subjectivity on the other (meaning the Lacanian “subject” in the sense of the subject of the signifier and the unconscious; thus, we can consider Lacan a follower of the Cartesian tradition despite all the criticism he heaped on it) in such a way that language and the body are mutually alienated. This is the mythology Lacan created with regard to the way language detachesfrom the body during the process of castration. Van Haute adds thatearly on, Lacan points to the detachment between man and nature (particularly in his presentation of the mirror stage), and is, therefore, opposed to any human adaptation to environment. First of all, Lacan continues developing the Freudian insight that not only does the civilizational state hinders the entity of a speaking and jouissant body from living in full happiness and full jouissance (as Freud argues in Civilization and Its Discontents (193o)), but also, and mainly, it does not allow our existence as sexual beings in civilization: we cannot achieve fullness and harmony nor can we compensate for the lack of, or for the lost adaptation. Moreover, van Haute argues that Lacan’s entire oeuvre is meant to demonstrate this Freudian concept of the lack that is the result of split subjectivity.45 In fact, this is the truth, but it is not the whole truth: Lacan’s theory does contain a distinctly dualistic element, but at the same time in stresses the tendency to break free of this dualism and of this anti-material trend, so that there is a relationship between the anti-harmonial approach and  Van Haute (2002, esp. pp. xv, 285).

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clinging to the body. This trend will become clearer in the 1960s and 70s and even before, when Lacan will link his theory to an anti-metaphysical ethical position that is, according to him, located within Judeo-Christian tradition. Hence, the importance of the Lacanian concept of the logos as containing the relationship between the body and the signifier/language, a relationship that is fundamentally dualistic, but at the same time innately resolved.46 Theoretically, the dualist dilemma and Lacan’s desire to solve it derives from two contradictory motivations. The first is to continue stressing the role of the body undergoing symbolization, which, although describing the relation between the signifier and the body, is based on an early dualist assumption of a signifier facing an imaginary body. This dualist trend developed a key motif in Freud, who pointed to the powerful relation between the unconscious and the body. This relation is articulated since Freud’s early beginning, in his theory of the hysterical symptom (particularly in Studies in Hysteria, coauthored with Josef Breuer (1895)). Lacan’s second motivation is to demythologize Freud’s doctrine, particularly regarding the constitutive Freudian myths of the Oedipus complex and Totem and Taboo. This demythologization is consistent with Lacan’s objective—since early on—to abstract several Freudian motifs, particularly those related to the (imaginary) father and the unconscious processes, while contextualizing them culturally and linguistically. In doing so, Lacan sought to rescue psycholoanalysis and the father figure from their contemporary condition, while reformulating psychoanalysis in a historical and cultural context different from Freud’s. 46  Compare to Miller on the dualistic tension inherent in Lacan between jouissance and the body on the one hand, and the signifier and Symbolic order on the other. According to Miller, the leading paradigm in the 1950s was the signification of jouissance, when the phallus turned from an imaginary image into a symbolic signifier, in a kind of Aufhebung (in the Hegelian sense of the simultaneous “lifting up”, rejection and preservation of a concrete element towards high conceptualization) from the physical jouissance to the symbolic desire. This way, the body undergoes signification, and as such it is “dead” (Miller 2000: 15–18). See also in Lacanian Biology and the Event of the Body, where Miller argues that the transformation of the signifier’s “speech” through the body occurs particularly in the hysterical symptom, when language’s signifier is embodied, i.e., when it takes advantage of the body to become incarnated (Miller 2000: 97). Finally, see ibid., pp. 46–48, on Lacan’s conception of the body in the “Function and Field”: a body that is dead within the Symbolic order. For more on the tension between the body and the signifier and on the body’s inscription by the signifier and the resulting eradication of jouissance, see the entry “Body” in Libbrecht (2001).

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In this sense, Lacan continues the Christian logos tradition: the extimate relation between logos and body, between the Other (signifier) and subject, which simultaneously preserves and destroys the very dualism between the two poles. In other words, Lacan’s solution for the dualistic crisis is to use a religious rhetoric of complex interior-exterior relations. The ethical meaning of this extimacy for Lacan, of his conception of the relationship between the body and language, between the subject and the Other, is that only by encountering this internalexternal otherness can the patient arrive at his truth, which is unconscious. In other words, Lacan’s objective is to free analysis, as much as possible, of its fixation on the Imaginary, which is the order of the false phantasies around and narcissistic relations with the analyst and lead it towards a profound understanding of the relationship between the unconscious and language.

4.6 The Logos and… Collective Dualism It appears then, that Lacan presents himself as Freud’s true heir, seeking to place his students within the symbolic space, where truth is revealed. Conversely, he presents other psychoanalysts, such as Anna Freud and the proponents of ego psychology (not to mention Jung), as wallowing in an imaginary space of phantasmatic mendacity. In the “Function and Field”, which is primarily astatement by Lacan of his theoretical uniqueness compared to his psychoanalytic competitors, he opens chapter 2—“Symbol and Language as Structure and Limit of the Psychoanalytic Field” (where, as mentioned, he states the need to return to Freud) with a motto borrowed from Jesus’ words in Redemption, in the ancient Greek script: Τὴν ἀρχὴν ὅ τι καὶ λαλῶ ὑμῖν (“Just what I have been saying to you from the beginning” (John 25: 8, NKJV).47 The words of Christ, as presented by John, paraphrase those of Genesis about the Creation. The word arche in this verse, as in the opening verse of the Gospel, is a translation of ‫בראשית‬, referring to the act of the Father in creating the world, as described in the opening verses of Genesis:  E: 266.

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In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis 1: 1–5, NKJV)

The opening verses of the Gospel of John (quoted in the beginning of this chapter) highlight the aspect of the division of light from darkness and of using language to create the world, which are implicit in Genesis. In fact, the verses from Genesis undergo “Hellenization” in John: the Father creates the world using the Son-Logos. This is a statement regarding Christ’s entity as the Logos incarnate, that which has always existed in God as God, the one who fulfills the Father’s wish. Moreover, we find here a kind of dualism of light and darkness, Son and evil. We see how an ontological dualism also transforms into a collective dualism—as customary in religious sects such as the Judean Desert sects, early Christianity, and heretic medieval sects: light and darkness, spiritual and carnal, we who know the truth and they who live the lie. It appears that using this motto, to which Lacan refers also in the “Function and Field”, Lacan also alludes to himself as the “true” emissary of Father Freud. Lacan even says as much in “The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956”, stating that Freud had created the IPA to protect his theory from the falsifiers, until the someone will present it appropriately.48 That “someone” is obviously Lacan. We may even go as far as comparing this to the Pauline model of presenting the Torah/nomos/law as the custodian of the Israelites, a temporary

48

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solution until Jesus will arrive and, in his crucifixion, liberate the believers from the shackles of the paternal law).49 Thus, the broad context of the motto is indicative of Lacan’s pretense: at that stormy time, he could identify verbatim with the following verses, out of his wrath at the IPA-qua-Pharisees, who consider themselves loyal to Father Freud, assuming his own righteousness and the truth of his path regarding the “real” Father. It seems that Lacan considered himself the only true reader of Father Freud, as opposed to the “errant” ones, and believed in his ability of showing them the right path. The following are the words attributed to Christ in the gospel: Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, “I am the light of the world: He who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.” The Pharisees therefore said to Him, “You bear witness of Yourself; your witness is not true.” Jesus answered and said to them, “Even if I bear witness of Myself, My witness is true, for I know where I came from and where I am going; but you do not know where I come from and where I am going. You judge according to the flesh; I judge no one. And yet if I do judge, My judgment is true; for I am not alone, but I am with the Father who sent Me. It is also written in your law that the testimony of two men is true. I am One who bears witness of Myself, and the Father who sent Me bears witness of Me.” Then they said to Him, “Where is Your Father?” Jesus answered, “You know neither Me nor My Father. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also.” […] Then they said to Him, “Who are You?” And Jesus said to them, “Just what I have been saying to you from the beginning. I have many things to say and to judge concerning you, but He who sent Me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I heard from Him.” They did not understand that He spoke to them of the Father. Then Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me,  See also my Narcissist Universalism: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul’s Epistles, which presents a psychoanalysis of the status of the sons and Christ vis-à-vis the paternal law in Paul (Benyamini 2014). 49

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I speak these things. And He who sent Me is with Me. The Father has not left Me alone, for I always do those things that please Him.” As He spoke these words, many believed in Him. (John 8: 12–19, 25–30, NKJV; my italics)

Evident in this quote are dualistic tensions that have both spiritual and sociological significance through the division between “me” and “you”: truth vs. falsehood, spirit vs. flesh, light vs. darkness. This context of the motto implies a discursive practice where Lacan both presents and conceals his intentions, particularly in the religious context: the motto is quoted in Greek script, and only those fluent in this language or in the scriptures can learn of Lacan’s intent. Moreover, presenting the motto indicates a somewhat megalomaniac trend with reference to the figure of Father Freud: just as Jesus is not alone, but with God, so does Lacan feel in those years as merging with the true spirit of Father Freud. However, just as Christ the Son (in the Pauline sense) tried to universalize his particular father, so did Lacan seek to mend the Father by removing particularist remains (biologism and the preference of the “imaginary” act over language) and universalizing him. Lacan’s audacity emerges as part of his struggle against other competitors for the loyalty to Father Freud: despite his pessimistic stance regarding the human condition, he raises an optimistic suggestion for relieving human suffering through the special knowledge of the Lacanian psychoanalyst, aware of the power of language in analysis. We can therefore say that regarding logos and language, Lacan shifts between pessimism and optimism: on the one hand, man is submerged in logos, and on the other hand analysts can recognizethis submerging. For example, Lacan refers to that, in Seminar VIII, Transference (1960–1961), where he claims—supposedly contrary to the Gospel of John, according to which Logos-Christ came down from Heaven but nobody knew him, that psychoanalysts are capable of knowing the logos: For us, the word has become incarnate. It has come into the world and, as opposed to what the Gospels say, it is not true that we have not recognized

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it. We have recognized it and are experiencing the aftermath of this recognition. We are at one of the stages of the consequences of this recognition.50

We may contrast Lacan’s words (there are those who recognize the logos) and John’s in the beginning of his gospel (nobody recognizes the logos).51 However, if we juxtapose this quote with the analysis proposed here in continuation of the motto from John, it would be clear that in fact, Lacan’s words do not contradict John’s, since the latter did not claim that all of mankind did not recognize Christ-Logos—there was a selected group that did believe in or recognize him: That was the true Light which gives light to every man coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. He came to His own, and His own did not receive Him. But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, to those who believe in His name: who were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth […]. (John 1: 9–14, NKJV)

Similarly, the same is true of Lacan, who contrasts “they” (even in the depreciative Heideggerian sense of the term) who do not recognize the logos, and “us” (Lacanian psychoanalysts) who recognize the logos-­ language as the most important aspect of the unconscious. Thus, using the term “logos” enables Lacan to promote two interrelated trends. One is the theoretical strategy, whereby this concept enables Lacan to resolve the dualistic tension in the process of constituting his discourse within the framework of the return to Freud. The other is also related to that return to Freud: Lacan posed a collective tension between him and his students and all the other active psychoanalysts. He saw himself as Freud’s true heir, in being the representative of the logos. The other “heretics” are seen as failing to recognize the Freudian truth concerning the essential presence of the Symbolic order and the Other in the analytical process.  S8: 302.  As in Richardson (1996: 182).

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4.7 Demythologization and the Logos As we have seen in Chap. 3, the process of returning to Freud began as early as in the 1930s, when Lacan wrote the articles on “Family Complexes” for the French Encyclopedia. In these encyclopedic articles, the young Lacan proved courageous enough to grapple with the Freudian heritage and to understand the birth of psychoanalysis in its historical-­ geographical context. He criticized certain aspects in Freud’s theory (while Freud was still alive) but was still faithful to the Freudian approach. This would be the basis for Lacan’s statement in the 1950s regarding the need to “return to Freud”. The main revision proposed by Lacan is in Freud’s concept of the father. In discussing Totem and Taboo, Lacan shows that it is a myth in the sense of a story that conveys meaning, and that even though the myth is historically baseless, it is psychoanalytically correct. This is the basis for Lacan’s demythologization of the Oedipus myth in Totem and Taboo. This demythologization would have to wait, however, before it could mature when Lacan of the 1950s would encounter Lévi-Strauss’ structuralist studies and Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic studies (which had also informed Lévi-Strauss): in these authors’ works the father is not a figure flesh and blood, but a function, an abstract concept—the Name-of-the-Father. This, I believe, is the source of all the complications and dilemmas: Lacan seeks to break free of Freud’s fixation on an obsolete myth and tries to rescue it by means of a linguistic-structural Aufhebung, by detaching the father from reality, from the historical factuality as imagined by Freud. According to Lacan, Freud had imagined Totem and Taboo in the sense that the act he described belonged to the Imaginary, while failing to acknowledge the symbolic importance of the father figure. This rescuing of the father is also fraught with danger, as this figure might become a conceptual, abstract metaphysical principle lying beyond the subject of analytic experience. In a certain sense, it is interesting to compare Lacan’s approach to the Freudian myth of the father in Totem and Taboo with the demythologization project of Protestant theologian Rudolf Bultmann in his book Jesus Christ and Mythology (1958). It is also appropriate to ask, to what a degree

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Protestantism had already been fundamental to this anti-mythical approach. Assuming that in the modern age it is impossible to naïvely reproduce religious narratives presented in the Old and New Testament, Bultmann argued that it is essential to reveal to the modern worshipper the existential aspect relevant for him. In other words, instead of the myth, faith should focus on the core of religious life, with emphasis on the existential context. This way, the myth with its pretentions of historical truthfulness can become a personal message to the believer. Bultmann’s existentialism might be in dialogue with Lacan’s attempt to break free of the existentialist discourse, but it is important to emphasize that Bultmann was influenced by Heidegger, just as Lacan had been in the 1950s. It may be that this affinity between Lacan and Bultmann through Heidegger’s mediation reflects some kind of mood or zeitgeist of abandoning the naïve faith in the religious myth or any kind of ideological myths for that matter, to be exposed to a different dimension of human existence: God as a “different Spirit” in Bultmann, Heidegger’s Sein, and Lacan’s unconscious and language. The concept that binds them together is therefore the logos. In his return to the logos, Lacan also sought to highlight a different essence of human existence, that of the signifier, through which man is exposed to the otherness that dwells in him.

5 Lacan and Jung (1): The Threatening Affinity

In the previous chapters, I presented Lacan’s main strategy of conceptualizing Freudian motifs as part of the overarching goal of the return to Freud. This aspect appears already in the early Lacan, and is particularly salient in the 1950s, when the return to Freud is combined with the return to the logos, to the signifier. Lacan proceeds with this conceptualization through adaptation discourses from which he derives concepts and renders them into psychoanalytic terms. This is evident in the 1930s, in his use of the Jungian terms complex and imago, and in the 1950s, when he uses Saussurian-Lévi-Straussian terms and motifs such as structure, signifier, the Symbolic order, and kinship relations. Lacan’s use of adaptation discourses enables him to support his strategy of abstractly conceptualizing Freud and formulating his own psychoanalytical discourse. However, these adaptation discourses have exacerbated the Lacanian  dualist dilemma between the body and signifier. The themes from the adaptation discourses have exposed the theoretical developments to the new threat of sliding down two slopes: the occultist (following Jung’s anti-sexual theory), and the metaphysical (following Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism), away from the body and the patient’s unique

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_5

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reality. That is, even if the concepts have been transformed, metaphysical residues persist in the discourse of Lacan, the addressee. This threat has clashed with Lacan’s attempt to deal with the otherness of the unconscious as a total difference related to the corporeality and uniqueness of the subject, as well as to the location of the subject/unconscious within the discourse of the Other, of language. The Lacanian discourse has a conceptualized-metaphysical potential on the one hand, while seeking to relate to the pathology of “everyday life” in the clinic, to the encounter between the analyst and analysand, on the other hand. This encounter is mediated in the Lacanian discourse through themes appropriated from the adaptation discourses. An important adaptation is that of the religious discourse. Using motifs in the Judeo-Christian discourse has allowed Lacan to restore the balance, in which the signifier is embodied in the flesh. This way, the dualism is not annulled, but the signifier no longer remains alone and metaphysical, facing the unique corporeality of the subject.

5.1 The Slippery Slope to Occultism Jung forever remains the “Antichrist”, the enemy of psychoanalysis, which defines itself against him. It all began with the transformation in his relations with Freud, which began in mutual affection between the Father Freud and the Son Jung. Therefore, for Freudianism, Jung was an image, a concept, and an idea, and as such, he was also treated with hostility by Lacan, who considered himself a full-fledged Freudian. However, this hostility can also appear, at second glance, to be grounded in the complex relations between the two theories of the two intellectual giants (as well as in the complex relations between the theories of Freud and Jung). Jung is the ever-present phantom floating above Lacan (and Freud): the threat one must always beware of. The question is, how did Lacan position his discourse with reference to Jung’s image, whether this image was justified or not. Why has Jung threatened, and continues to threaten the psychoanalysts who consider themselves Freudian, including Lacan? Is it just a

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matter of image, of public relations, or is there some essence in the Jungian discourse that produces this defensive or even disgusted reaction to anything echoing Jung? Can the intensity of that loathing be explained in terms of some internal affinity between the Freudian and Lacanian doctrines to that of Jung? In Seminar XIV, The Logic of the Phantasm (1966–1967), in a lesson that addressed, inter alia, the radicalness of the Freudian unconscious and the otherness of sexual reality, Lacan sharpens the Freudian view of these issues by contrasting it with Jung’s. Lacan presents the latter as having given up on emphasizing sexuality in order to reach the beyond, the unthinkable of that otherness. This is opposed to Freud, for whom there is no hidden content beyond the conscious, but only a keen observation of the subject’s irrevocable split.1 Lacan’s continues Freud’s strict line and warns his audience lest they slip away from the Freudian doctrine of sexuality and the unconscious, lest they slip all the way down the Schlammflut, the mud flood of occultism and Gnosticism that seek refuge from corporeality and physicality. It was of course Jung who conversed with Freud and rejected his demands, therefore sliding down that very same slope by insisting on desexualizing the libido and universalizing the Oedipus complex into an abstract concept. Hence that Freudian-Lacanian anxiety of falling down that Jungian cesspool of the hidden unconscious—accessible only with special gnosis—is an anxiety that might be explained precisely in terms of being tempted to fall down the rabbit hole. Here, Lacan relies on Jung’s well-known autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Thoughts (1961). In the chapter titled “Sigmund Freud”, Jung describes his ambivalent relationship with the Father. He tries to demonstrate how dogmatic Freud was in his approach to sexuality, and how he broke free of that demanding paternal embrace. For Jung, this Freudian approach reflected a religious position, in the sense of a Jewish fixation and dogmatism, since Freud had indeed displaced the image of the tyrannical Yahweh onto the dogmatic principle of the sexual libido (this reference to Yahweh as a dictatorial deity alludes to Jung’s sympathy for the  S14: Lesson of January 18, 1967.

1

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Gnostic position, as detailed below).2 In one passage, Jung quotes from a conversation with Freud (the same one to which Lacan refers in Seminar XIV): “My dear Jung, promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all. You see, we must make a dogma of it, an unshakable bulwark.” He said that to me with great emotion, in the tone of a father saying, “And promise me this one thing, my dear son: that you will go to church every Sunday”. In some astonishment I asked him, “A bulwark against what?” To which he replied, “Against the black tide of mud” and here he hesitated for a moment, then added “of occultism.”3

Jung subsequently suggests that Freud uses the word “occultism” to refer to all the doctrines he became familiar with in the beginning of the century (such as parapsychology), doctrines in which he was deeply interested and in which he felt a powerful urge to delve, but at the same time which he was very careful not to slide into, given his fundamental pro-­ scientific approach.4 This is why he needed the dogmatic protective wall, which in fact protected him against himself. Therefore, argues Jung, Freud fought this aspect of his psyche with doctrinarian rigidity that also prevented Jung himself from developing professionally, until he broke free. Is that Lacan’s case as well? Does Lacan also protect himself ferociously against that Jungian potential of what he views as spiritualist psychologism that hangs like a menacing shadow over his own theory? Is Lacan trying to clean up the Jungian residues in his doctrine that have lurked within it since early on, by attempting to conceptualize Freud and the reality of sexuality towards a cultural-symbolic understating of corporeality and sexuality?

 Jung (1961: 148–149).  Jung (1961: 150). 4  On Freud’s approach to superstition, see Gay (1998: 623, 780). An indirect illustration of that may be Freud’s obsession with the number 62 as representing death, in his article “The Uncanny” (Freud 1919b: 237–238). In fact, this number represents Freud’s own age when writing the article. See also the last chapter in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Freud 1901: 239–279). 2 3

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5.2 Jung and Freud Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) had been an active psychiatrist before meeting Freud. Since 1907, Freud considered him his disciple and friend. Freud hoped that Jung would be his non-Jewish hair, but Jung, the son of a Calvinist priest, quickly lost taste for the Freudian emphasis on sexuality and impulses, and for his unsympathetic approach to religion. After having worked together for five years, Jung parted from his mentor and founded a new school, analytical psychology. He developed what Freud saw as “heretical” ideas about the collective unconscious as the foundation for the imaginations shared by human collectives, and similar manifestations of the unconscious in different religions and spiritual movements, especially mystical ones such as Gnosticism and alchemy. Jung diverged from Freud by partly legitimizing faith and archaic religious myths.5 As Freud himself admitted in their famous correspondence, the tension with Jung was Oedipal in essence, and he identified himself as a kind of father to the prodigal son Jung. The question of the father coalesced with the incentive Jung gave to Freud to write Totem and Taboo (1913), which was a kind of response to the recently separated Jung.6 Totem and Taboo was Freud’s manifesto against everything Jungian, with the Oedipal complex now becoming a shibboleth that would from now on define true psychoanalysis in the Freudian sense7—primarily because Jung had abstractly conceptualized the Oedipus complex thereby uncoupling it from its sexual reality (particularly by using the terms imago and complex).8 It appears that this emphasizes the degree to which Totem and Taboo and the abstraction of Oedipus are relevant to the present study, which seeks to examine how Lacan also reconceptualized Freud’s terms, and the myth of Totem and Taboo in particular. The Jungian threat hung  Jung stated that religious dogma was preferable to science in understanding the human spiritual world (Jung 1938: 102). For an analysis of similarities and differences in Freud and Jung’s conceptions of religion, see Palmer (1997). 6  As Freud admitted in his: “An Autobiographical Study” (1925: SE XX). 7  According to Freud, quoted in Gay (1988: 589). 8  Simon and Blass (1991: 172). 5

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ominously over Lacan: the threat of leading his discourse in a regressive Jungian direction, the very thing Freud fought against in Totem and Taboo. Note that in Freud’s lecture “A Question of a Weltanschauung”, he points to the fact that Totem and Taboo emphasizes above all that God is a Father with drives, rather than an abstract entity: The doctrine is, then, that the universe was created by a being resembling a man, but magnified in every respect, in power, wisdom, and the strength of his passions- an idealized super-man. […] Our further path is made easy to recognize, for this god-creator is undisguisedly called ‘father’. Psychoanalysis infers that he really is the father, with all the magnificence in which he once appeared to the small child. A religious man pictures the creation of the universe just as he pictures his own origin.9

Freud’s opposition to subordinating psychoanalysis to a worldview is related to his construction of the myth of patricide as a story of historical (or prehistorical) reality, rather than an abstract principle. However, both Jung and Lacan—each in his own way and for his own reasons—sought to establish an abstract concept. Although with Freud we have the image of the father held by the child, it is an aspect of the real Father. Lacan would seek to examine the extent to which it is possible to preserve within the conceptualization, within the formulation of the paternal function, something of the reality of the paternal presence. I suggest that this is expressed in the references to the split of the jouissant father and to the jouissant and speaking Other, informed by the Judeo-Christian adaptation discourse.

5.3  Weltanschauung and Anti-ideology What concerned both Freud and Lacan about Jung was his spiritual aspect. Why was this aspect so problematic for them in the clinical-­ psychoanalytical context? Freud was opposed to expanding psychoanalytical therapy and its discourse into an overarching worldview, a  Freud (1933b: 162–163).

9

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comprehensive creed of the nature of the world and the nature of humanity. Following Freud, Lacan was also opposed to a metaphysical approach that uses essentialist terms and cannot settle for partiality, and even corroborated the Freudian point of view by stating that “Psyco-analysis is neither a Weltanschauung, nor a philosophy that claims to provide the key to the universe”. In the 35th of his New Introductory Lectures, titled “A Question of Weltanschauung”, Freud highlights the exceptionality of psychoanalysis in not subscribing to a worldview in the German sense of the word, a Weltanschauung that is In my opinion… an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interest us finds its fixed place.10

Even though Freud rejects the term Weltanschauung in relation to psychoanalysis, he viewed psychoanalysis as a special branch of science, whereby even modern science relies on a worldview that “assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe” but “it does so only as a program, the fulfillment of which is relegated to the future”.11 Before Freud progresses in discussing the true enemy of psychoanalysis—religion in all its forms (being responsible for the fixation on a comprehensive and illusory worldview),12 he notes that science is based on studying valid observations while abandoning all types of knowledge that can be obtained from “revelation, intuition or spiration”.13 This returns Freud to his conflict, of aspiring to give scientific value to psychoanalysis on the one hand, and his own attraction to occultism, on the other hand. Jung’s position was just the opposite: he often referred to the word Weltanschauung and saw great importance in shaping the patient’s psyche around a worldview. Moreover, he even sought to guide the patient closer

 Freud (1933b: 158).  Freud (1933b: 158–159). 12  The illusory aspect of religion is elaborated particularly in the essay “The Future of an Illusion” (Freud 1927). 13  Freud (1933b: 159). 10 11

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to his own.14 To him, the overarching value, the objective to which the psychological development of the individual led, was psychic integration or completeness. In that sense, religious faith could be highly beneficial for therapeutic work since it enables one to become attached to that psychic completeness. Clearly, in that Jung was highly opposed by Freud, who viewed religion and faith (as in fact every ideological fixation) as a psychological flaw that had to be resolved in order to lead the individual patient and humanity as a whole to reasonable mental health. Indeed, in Jung’s article “Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung”,15 (which Freud might have responded to), Jung referred to the concept. Like Freud, he highlighted the exceptionality of the German word, and the fact that it represented an approach to life that lay beyond the intellect, beyond rationalism and science. The Weltanschauung was inherent to the individual and could not be denied, having been formulated not consciously, but as part of the (collective) unconscious, in the deepest recesses of the psyche. In Jung’s mind, Freud and the other rational scientists sought to neutralize that aspect of humanity, assuming it was not objective, and that scientific theory could not be based on a uniform worldview. Jung retorted by claiming, “Hence it is always fatal to have no Weltanschauung”.16 With a touch of irony, Jung added that Freudian psychoanalysis also had a worldview: rational materialism. I believe Jung’s claim is not far from the truth, particularly when it comes to materialism and rationalism: psychoanalysis indeed concerns itself with the unconscious, but it is not an antirational discourse, since it operates under the rational practices of modern science: it does not view the unconscious as an irrational entity in the romantic sense, but as a sphere with rules of its own, with a rationale of its own, even if this rationale is inconsistent with that of the conscious ego.17 According to Jung, analytical psychology is not a Weltanschauung in its own right, but it is designed to enable the construction of the patient’s  As opposed to this presentation of Jung, see Jung’s self-defense in Psychology and Religion (Jung 1938: 78). 15  Jung (1927). 16  June (1927: 362). 17  Jung (1927: 365–367). 14

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worldview, which would help him “get into harmony with the historical man in us”18 (“historical”, in the sense of the unconscious layers that contain historical residues of the previous generations). This is all because the Jungian presupposition is different from Freud’s: as opposed to the latter, who views the religious or spiritual individual as a miserable person with mental issues that needs to be cured, Jung considered the faithless or worldview-less person as a sick person who requires healing. Thus, analytical psychology is “a reaction against the exaggerated rationalization of consciousness which, seeking to control nature, isolates itself from her and so robs man of his own natural history”.19 Jung sums it up metaphorically by claiming that analytical psychology seeks to break into the rational prison of modern man. I will use an expression by Fredric Jameson—“the myth of the ego”—to define Jung’s spiritual-­psychological proposition.20 In this sense, Jungian doctrine may be presented as an ideology seeking to reestablish the myth of the whole or near-whole ego (as a psychiatrist, Jung began exposing the split of the various personalities within the psyche, but later on he developed his doctrine in order to unite them into the single Self, which also includes the negative/sexual shadow as part of his practice of uniting the opposites). This runs directly contrary to the move by Freud (and Lacan), who highlighted the split nature of the subject (particularly in the modern, scientific age), as well as the detachedness and finality of the subject. Psychoanalysis thus operates within this split and does not attempt to cancel it out in the quest for an internal, complete essence. This projection of an ideological position by Jung at the patient is manifested particularly in what he calls the individuation process. Jung argues that the archetypes included in the collective unconscious do their profound work to achieve mental balance towards integrity. Therefore, therapy must delve deeply into their meaning for the individuation process. The archetypes represent the objectives of the developmental process where the individual’s transcendent function is expressed: this process occurs, according to Jung, in nature, and he seeks to learn from it:  Jung (1927: 381).  Jung (1927: 380). 20  The Political Unconscious (Jameson 1981). 18 19

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It is in the first place a purely natural process […] The meaning and purpose of the process is the realization, in all its aspects, of the personality originally hidden away in the embryonic germ-plasm; the production and unfolding of the original, potential wholeness. The symbols used by the unconscious to this end are the same as those which mankind has always used to express wholeness, completeness, and perfection: symbols, as a rule, of the quaternity and the circle. For these reasons I have termed this the individuation process.21

In the individuation process, the most important archetype is the Self. This archetype represents the integrity of the psyche: in every civilized person, there is a tendency towards self-discovery, which in fact constitutes, as Jung argues, the psychological parallel of the religious entity of God. Thus, for example, in Western civilization, the Self is symbolized by Christ. The therapist must lead the patient towards that Self. Freud was adamantly opposed to this therapeutic approach. In a 1919 lecture “Lines of Advance in Psyco-Analytic Therapy”, given several years after having parted ways with Jung, Freud emphasized the incompleteness of psychoanalytical knowledge.22 Hence, he argues that one could not demand that a therapeutic method that analyzes (deconstructs) neurotic symptoms would also apply a synthesis (reconstruction) to the patient, whereby the analyst would consult the patient on how to restructure his psyche. According to Freud, this synthesis is carried out by the patient himself “without our intervention, automatically and inevitably.”23 Lacan continues this rigid approach by stating that most of the work needs to be done by the analysand, with the analyst only guiding him. Freud was also opposed to the suggestion of emphasizing the analyst’s “activity” (as suggested by Sándor Ferenczi) and clarified the key principle of his therapy as being conducted by the analyst in a state of abstinence.24 The concept of abstinence was particularly developed in Freud’s “Observations on Transference-Love”, where he emphasized that the  Jung (1972: 186). For more about individuation, see the second part of The Ego and the Unconscious (1971: 266–269), a development upon The Psychology of the Unconscious. 22  Freud (1919a: 159). 23  Freud (1919a: 160). 24  Freud (1919a: 161). 21

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analyst must not respond to the transference-love of the analysand but must be constantly guided by the abstinence from satisfying the yearning of both parties for love, while examining this transference analytically in the service of progress in therapy. This is due to the considerable danger inherent in the therapeutic method: “The psyco-analyst knows that he is working with highly explosive forces and that he needs to proceed with as much caution and conscientiousness as a chemist”.25 This therapeutic abstinence is motivated by the sense of responsibility Freud feels for the patient and the threats inherent in the therapeutic process should he not take exceeding care in all things related to channeling and reorganizing the analysand’s psyche by avoiding the temptation to please the analysand’s yearning for transference-love and an ideal role model. In this sense, the patient’s “privation” must be preserved and not resolved too quickly. Following this explanation, Freud refers directly to the Jungian approach, which he calls here “the Swiss school”: Activity in another direction during analytic treatment has already, as you will remember, been a point at issue between us and the Swiss school. We refused most emphatically to turn a patient who puts himself into our hands in search of help into our private property, to decide his fate for him, to force our own ideals upon him, and with the pride of a Creator to form him in our own image and see that it is good.26

The opposition to that totality, to the idealistic identification, led Lacan to forcefully reject several psychological approaches that tried to soften the inconvenient aspects, from their point of view, in the Freudian therapeutic method. Lacan was particularly opposed to the Anglo-­ American ego psychology with its conformism (as he saw it) of its demand that the patient follow a clear social ideal. In this, Lacan continued the trend of Freud’s own opposition to the method whereby the therapist positions himself as a kind of God (or an Other in the Lacanian sense), as an ideal with which the patient needs to identify and to which he needs to aspire, and thereby be rid of his psychological ills. Although Lacan sees 25 26

 Freud (1915: 170).  Freud (1919a: 164).

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great importance in that the analyst understands his role as an agent of the Symbolic order or of the Other, he must not take the place of the Other. On the contrary: by the end of the analysis, the analyst must point to the split of the sujet-supposé-savoir, who is the subject the patient asks the analyst to portray.27 Following Freud, Lacan opposed that very emphasis in Jungian psychology on the need for a Weltanschauung, a view that forces itself, in his opinion, on the patient. Lacan’s approach to analysis originated in Freud’s and became refined also out of his struggle against what Freud viewed as the failings of Jungian therapy.28 According to Lacanian interpretation, Freud was opposed to viewing the therapist as the patient’s idealized Other, who would recreate the patient in his own image. According to Lacan, the limits of identification between the patient and therapist were critical—symbolic boundaries which could not be blurred in an Imaginary order of identifications. It is therefore appropriate for the therapist to be aware of his own split as a subject in the Symbolic order, or else this would become well-intentioned aggression or aggressive love.29 In this sense, Freud may represent an approach contrary to what Christianity represents in its obsessive approach to love, as presented in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). As argued in that book, well-intentioned Christian love has led humanity to terrible aggression, whether towards the other or back towards the ego in the superego (conscience). This Freudian approach and position with regard to Christian love and its interpretation of the biblical injunction “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ” as an impossible injunction30 is one of the sources for Lacan’s distinction between the Imaginary and Symbolic order. According to Lacan, the Imaginary order contains the psychotic danger of total identification with the other, whereas the Symbolic order allows to constitute relations between the therapist and patient, which position the Other of desire between them (that is, while acknowledging the presence of the split and incompleteness of the Other)—the Other that leaves room to  See especially (S11: 230–244).  Here I rely on Dani Nobus’s book on Lacanian therapy, especially Nobus (2000: 62–63) which quotes Freud from “Lines of Advance in Psyco-Analytic Therapy” as quoted above. 29  See especially Lacan’s “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” (E: 82–102). 30  Freud (1930: 108–110). 27 28

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the patient’s subject, that does not demand to be totally swallowed into it by way of identification. In this sense, is the Jewish-paternal aspect not indeed fundamental to Lacanian ethics? However, does the very transition in the structural style from the Imaginary to the Symbolic enable one to become liberated of any worldview and avoid imposing one on the patient? Or does the structure itself also include content? In other words, does an implicit worldview also penetrate Lacanian therapy, as it might have also penetrated its Freudian counterpart? Can analysis, conceived as a structural rather than a substantive tool, with concepts such as “Unconscious”, “Oedipus”, etc. avoid ideological suppositions regarding what is right and wrong for the patient? Do, as Judith Butler shows, the Freudian Oedipus and the Lacanian Symbolic structural presume the Oedipal family as a social norm that becomes a totality?31 Ironically, Slavoj Žižek (who is of course faithful to the Lacanian discourse) sees the great affinity between Butler and Jungianism (!), as she seeks to cancel out the sexual difference following her criticism of Freud and Lacan’s Oedipal position.32 Renouncing Oedipus, argues Lacan, does not liberate us, but subjects us to the totalitarianism of matriarchy. It appears there are two contradictory aspects to Freudianism-Lacanianism: the one emphasizes Oedipal paternalism, the sexual difference and opposition to the matriarchal ideal, whereas the other emphasizes the partiality and is opposed to totality. In effect, however, these are two sides of the same ethical (or maybe ideological) stance in psychoanalytical discourse: the Oedipality that does not renounce the subject’s place in the Symbolic order, but at the same time opposes total subjugation to the Other (particularly in its maternal-­ imaginary aspects). Only recognition of the human’s position in the order of culture and language will enable him to realize himself as a person, as a speaking body. Can this position be formulated as Judeo-Christian? As presented in Chap. 3 on Family Complexes, Lacan prefers the patriarchal order to the matriarchal one since the aspiration to the latter means—particularly in  See Butler (2000, esp. pp. 45–53). For further criticism of the Freudian-Lacanian Oedipality as predisposing the subject, see Deleuze and Guattery’s Anti-Oedipus (1977). 32  Žižek (1999: 273–275). 31

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the historical context of the 1930s—hidden passion and longing to a perfect totalitarian order. Lacan finds the origins of the patriarchal order in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This association is even more strongly present in Lacan’s subsequent work in the 1950s and onwards. * * * As indicated above, Jung blamed Freud for “rational materialism”. We can say that this materialism indeed guided Freud in his critique of religion, which was emblematic of the struggle against everything seen as dangerous illusion that sought to distract humans from the facts of life, from their finality. It appears that in this materialism, Freud was particularly inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach. Particularly in The Essence of Christianity (1841), Feuerbach sought to present religion as a fiction invented by man to hide his own material and existential anxiety (particularly with regard to death). This view of religion as an illusion also served subsequently as the basis for Marx’s critique of ideology as an illusion concealing humanity’s real experience, and apparently also for Nietzsche and his “death of God” (a concept that expressed, more than everything, the struggle against the metaphysical deity). It appears that Feuerbach’s position also seeped into the Lacanian doctrine through the Freudian prism of religion as an illusion, and perhaps also through the Marxist prism of ideology as an illusion.33 This is evident in the way Lacan formulates the split of the Other while it conceals its own split and even its actual non-existence. But against this Feuerbachian-Freudian background of Lacan, there was also the Catholic background. How did the discursive combination of these elements come into being, particularly in view of being informed mainly by the Freudian doctrine? Given the Jungian position with regard to Weltanschauung and the way Freud and Lacan position themselves as his absolute contradictions, we may perhaps define the Freudian-Lacanian view (at least from Lacan’s own perspective) as a split-oriented worldview, meaning one that points to  On Marx’s influence on Lacan, and through him on Louis Althusser and Slavoj Žižek, see Valente (2003). 33

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the split of the subject, its incompleteness etc. following the discovery of the unconscious, as opposed to Jung, for whom the discovery of the unconscious leads precisely to a worldview of totality and harmony. Put differently, we may also present Freud and Lacan’s anti-ideological “ideology”: the ideology of partiality and split derived from the recognition of the relation between language and the unconscious and the body (as opposed to Jung, at least the way Freud and Lacan saw it). This will help us later on in understanding the way Lacan dissociates himself from anything implying Jungianism, and his alternative thereto, which is actually part of the formulation of his own discourse. This alternative is strongly related to certain principles that Lacan finds in the Judeo-­Christian tradition. As mentioned, what particularly bothered both Freud and Lacan about Jungianism was the supposed need to formulate the patient’s worldview, as well as the spiritualist nature of this worldview. In that, they were also opposed to Jung’s mythological bent, which served as the backbone of his ideology: a “mythology in the sense of a profound reality hidden from view, informing the basic values (ideologies) of man. This derived from Jung’s need to present, within the framework of a rigid dualist position, some kind of spiritual anti-cosmos that the spiritually developed person yearns for. All that in keeping of Jung’s own claim that the collective unconscious is mythological, that is, the collective unconscious within each individual includes archetypes that feature in the mythologies and mystic traditions of the various nations.34 In fact, the difference between Freud and Jung, as the latter sees it, is because to Jung’s opinion, the unconscious is split into two: a personal unconscious similar to its Freudian counterpart, and a collective unconscious—Jung’s contribution. The subject contains a deep stratum in his unconscious which is related to an external, collective fountain of wisdom. Therefore, Jung calls for including the subject in that spiritual-­ unconscious collective in a process which he names “individuation”.

34

 Jung (1972: 187).

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5.4 The Non-libidinal Libido Libido is a key concept highlighted and popularized by Freud. As indicated in the chapter’s opening quote from Seminar XIV, for Freud and Lacan the root of the Jungian problem lies in the fact that Jung transcended the Freudian concept of libido as exclusively sexual and defined it as a general psychic energy. In doing so, the Jungian discourse desexualized the Freudian libido, opening the way to the development of a comprehensive theory with a worldview opposed to the Freudian one. For Lacan, precisely this desexualization was responsible for Jung’s ideology and his aspiration to lead the individual to harmony with himself, with the “soul of the world”, with the collective unconscious, with the Self, etc. In other words, desexualization is intimately related to Jung’s fascination with the occult. As Freud put it in a conversation with Jung: the theory of sexual libido is the bulwark against occultism. However, is the Freud-Jung dispute that simple, i.e., a question of sexual versus asexual libido? And if it is not, what can the complexity of the relationship between Freud and Jung’s theories teach us? Does the Lacanian discourse also desexualize the libido as a by-product of the emphasis on language? Is there a danger of falling into that “abyss”—as both Freud and Lacan viewed Jungianism? After their split, both Freud and Jung chose to present this disagreement as absolute. Thus, in a 1920 addition to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud argued that Jung’s approach in fact undermined his entire psychoanalytical project: It would, however, be sacrificing all that we have gained hitherto from psycho-analytic observation, if we were to follow the example of C. G. Jung and water down the meaning of the concept of libido itself by equating it with psychical instinctual force in general.35

Whereas Jung, in the chapter titled “Sigmund Freud” in his autobiography, describes his (non-sexual…) attraction to archaic myths such as  Freud (1905: 218). Statements of this kind are commonly found in all Freud’s works written following his separation from Jung. 35

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that of the Holy Grail. For him, this fact highlighted his disagreement with Freud: The stories of the Grail had been of the greatest importance to me ever since I read them, at the age of fifteen, for the first time. I had an inkling that a great secret still lay hidden behind those stories. Therefore, it seemed quite natural to me that the dream should conjure up the world of the Knights of the Grail and their quest for that was, in the deepest sense, my own world, which had scarcely anything to do with Freud’s. My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life.36

And why is Freud so opposed to Jung? He burrowed into the “filth” of life, whereas Jung touched upon the “sublime”. Directly following the above-quoted passage, Jung emphasizes his rejection of the Freudian emphasis on sexuality, wondering about the “huge fuss” made around it, and highlighting his aversion to it, perhaps as an expression of his Protestant-Calvinist education: To me it was a profound disappointment that all the efforts of the probing mind had apparently succeeded in finding nothing more in the depths of the psyche than the all too familiar and “all-too-human” limitations. I had grown up in the country, among peasants, and what I was unable to learn in the stables I found out from the Rabelaisian wit and the untrammeled fantasies of our peasant folklore. Incest and perversions were no remarkable novelties to me and did not call for any special explanation. Along with criminality, they formed part of the black lees that spoiled the taste of life by showing me only too plainly the ugliness and meaninglessness of human existence. That cabbages thrive in dung was something I had always taken for granted. In all honesty I could discover no helpful insight in such knowledge. “It’s just that all of those people are city folks who know nothing about nature and the human stable,” I thought, sick and tired of these ugly matters.37

36 37

 Jung (1961: 165).  Jung (1961: 166).

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This section shows how the human being, as such—detached from heavenly spirituality, is a miserable, ugly creature (“the ugliness and meaninglessness of human existence”). For Jung, the body and sexuality are at best the obvious that needs not be treated seriously, and at worst the source of revulsion and disgust. Hence, we can present the Jungian discourse as positioning itself within a dualistic tension vis-à-vis Freudianism: Jungianism belongs to the spiritual world (idealism?), whereas Freudianism belongs to the repulsive world of the flesh (materialism?). And as in most cases of dualism, Jung also prefers the eternal-­ spiritual-­ideal to the ephemeral-corporeal-material, with the spiritual including the material. That is, Jungianism seeks to contain Freudianism, just as the Jungian Self contains the bad “shadow”. Jung has in fact broken away from the Freudian libido38 in order to establish his view regarding the collective unconscious and the archetypes. He argues that this unconscious is mostly asexual. In the chapter on “The Personal and the Collective (or Transpersonal) Unconscious”,39 in The Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung distinguishes between the two: the personal unconscious is the more superficial of the two, situated in an infantile-sexual context; the collective (or transpersonal) unconscious, which is truer and deeper, containing archaic-collective and transpersonal archetypes.40 In a footnote, Jung adds: “The collective unconscious stands for the objective psyche, the personal unconscious for the subjective psyche.”.41 Out of this distinction, Jung refutes the individualist image of his doctrine:42 as the ego is exposed to his inner truth, he reveals a complete aspect within him that is not his, but is general, meaning “objective” rather than subjective—not in the scientific sense but in the spiritual sense of transcending the narrow boundaries of the ego.

 See Jung’s criticism on the Freudian conception of sexuality for example in The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1955), particularly in the chapter on “The Concept of Libido”, pp. 111–128. 39  Jung (1972: 97–121). 40  Jung (1972: 102). 41  Jung (1972: 103, n. 4). 42  See, especially, Jung (1972: 104–121). 38

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As opposed to the collective unconscious, the personal unconscious contains traumatic materials identical to the “shadow”.43 Thus, according to Jung, the sexual, negative, or despicable sexual personal unconscious is in fact the one introduced to us by Freud, whereas he introduces us to the truer and deeper objective aspect of the unconscious, which is spiritual and collective. It may be argued that the personal rivalry between Freud and Jung was displaced by Jung to the level of theoretical rivalry, in presenting the Freudian invention of the “personal unconscious” as the former defined it as more superficial than his own invention of the “collective unconscious”. Freud’s opposition to Jung was expressed, therefore, with relation to a Weltanschauung, but it was a particular aspect of Jung’s worldview that positioned him at odds with Freud: the latter conceived of “libido” in a sexual context, as sexual energy, whereas Jung broadened this concept to energy in general, not only sexual. Indeed, as part of the desexualization of “libido”, Jung promoted a monistic reduction of the meaning of psychic energy in general, whereas Freud was constantly on the verge of the temptation to be consumed by the Jungian approach that viewed everything as libido, and as such, voided the term of any meaning. This aspect highlights the common misunderstanding of Freud’s doctrine as merely “pansexual”. In fact, Freud insists on denying sexual monism: beyond the libido’s sexual drives, there are also the life drives. Conversely, Jungianism is monist, but not in the sexual sense, since for Jung the libido loses all sexual meaning in being expanded to include psychic energy in general. However, even if Freud did present himself as diametrically opposed to Jung, he was aware of the “dangerous” potential of his own doctrine. He fought against this threat, particularly in the 1914 turnaround in his article “On Narcissism”, where he placed against the libido also the narcissist energy of self-preservation.44 Thus, it appears that Freudian theory, as gradually constructed around the issue of  sexuality, always risks sliding down the slippery slope that  Jung explains what he means by “shadow” in a footnote: “By shadow I mean the ‘negative’ side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious.” Jung (1972: 103, n. 5). 44  Freud (1914). 43

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ends with the statement that “all is sexual”, and consequently also risks falling into the Jungian abyss of a psychology of psychic energy in the broadest sense. All that, because it is possible to claim that the split and the distinction between the two types of libido have actually been an expansion of the libido beyond the strictly sexual. How did the affinity between Freud and Jung project on the relation between Jung and Lacan?

5.5 The Imagined Similarity Between Lacan and Jung Based on Elisabeth Roudinesco’s biography of Lacan, it is clear that already during his lifetime, many have attempted to highlight his similarity to Jung. In this sense, what Roudinesco tells us points to the way Lacan could have been perceived, rather than to the “real” core in his (supposedly Jungian) discourse—to the way he responded to the possibility that his discourse be seen as close to Jung’s. Roudinesco describes a scene from Lacan’s life that illustrates this well: a year after proclaiming himself as the only true heir to Freud, in his lecture “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis” (1953), he sought to meet Jung in order to reconstruct memories of Freud. Knowing it would be difficult to meet the Swiss psychoanalyst in person, Lacan turned to his close friend Ronald Cahen, a French Jungian psychiatrist and an acquaintance of Jung. According to Roudinesco, after World War II, Cahen sought to bring Lacan and other psychoanalysts closer to Jungianism—against the background of Jung’s limited number of followers in France (a situation that persists to this day).45 Cahen envisioned the meeting as an opportunity to form a commonground to both discourses: “You know, old boy”, he [Cahen] said, “what with your signifiers and our archetypes, we’re really first cousins”. Lacan was adamant: Jamais! 46 Together with intransigence, this response betrays awareness of the Jungian threat lurking in the dark, suggesting that if signifiers equal archetypes, Lacan is identical to Jung. The response acts therefore as a  On the relative failure of Jungianism in France, see Roazen (2000).  Based on Roudinesco’s conversation with Cahen in November 1989 (Roudinesco 1997: 264).

45 46

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protective wall, designed to prevent any breach or slip into a coalition or collaboration with Jungianism. As we shall see, Lacan’s justification for the radical difference between him and Jung is that the Jungian archetypes are not linguistic signifiers, but images, and that therefore Jung is completely unaware of the importance of the Symbolic order, but completely immersed in the Imaginary.47 To Lacan’s great rejoice, the meeting with Jung finally took place. The story is known to us particularly through Lacan’s proud description of the testimony he elicited from the enemy, in “The Freudian Thing”, his lecture of November 7, 1955 (a year after the meeting with Jung). Notably, the lecture was held in Vienna, the city that has rejected Freud—when he was forced to leave in 1938 after the Anschluss—and now Lacan saw the perfect historical opportunity to rebuke it for that.48 In his attempt to refashion Freud’s figure, Lacan used Jung’s words to show how radical Freud was and how he despised the American way of life. His denigration of Americanism was expressed repeatedly in Lacan’s seminars, as he himself was a French European attached to the cultural and intellectual heritage imported to the US, as suggested by the Statue of Liberty. For Lacan, Freud’s hubris led to the ironic revenge of Nemesis, in that the European psychoanalysts who were forced to make the same Atlantic journey in the 1930s and 40s sought to adapt to the spirit of capitalist America, thereby taking the edge out of Freud’s radicalism. It was therefore Freud himself who became afflicted with the plague, as were psychoanalysis and Europe as a whole.49

 The Jungian “obsession” with images is perhaps manifested most strongly in the collection of articles, including by Jung himself, titled Man and His Symbols (Jung 1964), as well as in his work “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy” (Jung 1974: 91–256). 48  In September that year, Austria was reconstituted as a sovereign state, having previously been occupied by the Allies (Muller and Richardson 1982: 124–125). 49  E: 336. There, Lacan refers to Freud’s trip, together with Jung and several other psychoanalysts, to Clark University in 1909. Note that when Lacan refers to that journey, he ironically describes the relations between Freud and Jung as consisting of an Oedipal tension between father and son (S1: 15). Note also that Jung was invited separately to lecture as an expert on schizophrenia, i.e., he was not treated as Freud’s accompanier, but had a professional status of his own (Gay 1988: 372). 47

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Jung’s testimony was invaluable to Lacan: the anti-American Freud sought to infect America with the psychoanalytic plague that could transform America and its capitalism and conformism. In fact, Lacan’s identification with the sentence, “They don’t realize that we are bringing them the plague,”50 is highly consistent with his aforementioned position against Jungianism itself and against the Anglo-American ego psychology. According to Lacan, both seek to make life easier for the patient and guide him through identification with a moralist or conformist idealization of the ego. Herein lies Lacan’s irony: Jung quotes Freud, while inadvertently criticizing himself. Lacan argued that all other approaches that consider themselves psychoanalytical, particularly Anglo-American ego psychology, “betrayed” Freud. By that, he positioned himself as the only loyal disciple. The betrayal of Freud was related mainly to the conception of sexual libido. For Lacan, all alternative approaches, from Jungianism to ego psychology, were uneasy with Freudian radicalism, which positioned human sexuality at the center of the psychoanalytic experience. Out of conservatism and a desire to adjust to their sociocultural environment, these approaches “re-repressed” the Freudian unconscious with its disturbing focus on sexuality.51 In “The Function and Field” (1953), Lacan identifies a trinity of enemies of psychoanalysis, three that are one: ego psychology, the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and the American way of life. The three are one because since the 1930s, ego psychology has been the dominant school in the IPA (with which Lacan altercated so often);52 in fact, it constituted American psychoanalysis. Its origins lay with Anna Freud and her emphasis on the ego, and a theory of (mostly Jewish) Austrian psychoanalysts who have emigrated from Europe to  E: 336.  Lacan was ambivalent toward Melanie Klein’s object relations theory. On the one hand, he criticized her for the absoluteness of the terms “good” and “bad” in reference to the breast and the mother, but on the other hand, he appreciated the fact that she did not lose touch with the importance of sexuality in Freud’s theory. 52  According to Jacques-Alain Miller, despite the altercations with the IPA, Lacan had no intention of following in Jung and Adler’s footsteps and found new psychoanalysis, but to proclaim himself as Freud’s follower. This is why, Miller argued, Lacan called his own school in 1964 École freudienne (Miller 1995: 5). 50 51

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America after the Anschluss. Ego psychology emphasizes the ego at the expense of the id, and according to Lacan, overemphasizes the “autonomous ego” and adaptation.53 According to Lacan, ego psychology flourished so much in America because it was well adapted to the American way of life and to what he referred to as its Factor c, “a constant that is characteristic of a given cultural milieu: the condition, in this case, of ahistoricism.”54 A-historicism in the sense of diminishing history and flattening historical depth and the signifiers “happiness”, “adaptation”, “human relations”, and “human engineering” indicate this adaptation.55 It may be argued, however, that ironically—and despite the Lacanian attempt to present both ego psychology and Jungianism as two formidable opponents of the true psychoanalytic spirit given their conformism— it appears that Jung himself had a tendency to condemn capitalist American individualism.56 In Lacanian discourse, we can find the idea that Americanism contains both personal happiness and conformism, in the sense that the apparent contradiction is actually a relation of complementarity: the individual seeks his personal, simple happiness, and achieves it by giving up on his desire and conforming to society. Surprisingly, such a Lacanian formulation is reminiscent of Jung’s reference to the need not to give up on your “real” ego for the persona—the ego-mask we create in order to function in daily life.57  See especially Heinz Hartmann’s book, which according to Lacan was pivotal in pointing out this trend: Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (Hartmann 1939); see also Van Haute (2002), who delves into Lacan’s interpretation of the term “adaptation”. 54  E: 204. 55  Ibid. See also Lacan’s criticism on ego psychology and the American way of life in his 1958 article, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” (E: 489–543). The opposition to ego psychology is almost identical to Lacan’s criticism of Sartrean existentialism with its belief in an autonomous ego. This discussion begins in his article on the mirror stage, where he attacks both Sartre and Anna Freud and the ego psychology (as well as the aggressiveness of Christian philanthropy). Already in the opening sentence, Lacan highlights the contradiction between his thought, grounded in psychoanalytic practice, and any philosophy deriving from the cogito, such as existentialism (E: 75–82). Lacan’s extensive discussion of the cogito will be addressed in detail later in the book. An exhaustive analysis of Lacan’s criticism of ego psychology may be found in the chapter “Lacan’s Critique of the Ego Psychology” in Fink (2004: 38–62). See also the collection Lacan in America, which discusses the implications of Lacanian theory on psychoanalysis in the US (Rabaté 2000). For the lack of tolerance for America in French intellectual life, and particularly in Lacan, see Roazen (1997). 56  See, e.g., Jung (1934: 266–270). 57  See, e.g., Jung (1934: 269). 53

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In this sense, Jungian discourse may share the “religious” position in Lacanian discourse, such that both recognize the inner otherness in the human psyche. It may also be said that both Jungianism and Lacanianism aspire to disengage the individual from the normal and happy “routine” in favor of some kind of inner metaphysical truth (as much as Lacanians would be opposed to this phrasing and argue that this is not really an inner truth but a structural truth of the human subject). As we have seen, although Lacan, who sees himself as Freud’s follower, prefers to present himself and his discourse as completely different from Jung and his discourse, it may be argued that both share thematic but also rhetorical similarity. Initially, both Lacan and Jung sound very ambiguous and “metaphysical”, that is, they share at least superficial similarity in their obscurity. However, this superficial similarity depends on another thematic similarity: the conceptualization of Freudian theory in more abstract terms.

5.6 Abstraction and Obscurity 5.6.1 Lacan and Jung’s common denominator Freud’s criticism of Jung is, actually, very similar to what has been later said of Lacan. In the “History of the Psychoanalytic Movement”, an abrasive article written in 1910, at a time when the memory of the traumatic separation from Jung and his “betrayal” of Freud was still fresh, Freud found an opportunity to attack his opponents from within—Adler, and especially Jung: On the other hand, Jung’s modification has lessened the connection between the phenomena and the impulses: besides, as its critics (Abraham, Ferenczi, Jones) have already pointed out, it is so unintelligible, muddled, and confused, that it is not easy to take any attitude towards it. Wherever one touches it, one must be prepared to be told that one has misunderstood it, and it is impossible to know how one can arrive at a correct understanding of it. It represents itself in a peculiarly vacillating manner, since at

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one time it calls itself “a quite tame deviation, not worthy of the row which has arisen about it” (Jung), yet, at another time, it calls itself a new salvation with which a new epoch shall begin for psychoanalysis, in fact, a new aspect of the universe for everything else.58

Later in that text, Freud presents the Jungians as a cult of confused individuals struggling to convince themselves of the validity of their leader’s theory. Surprisingly enough, these statements may also be applied to the obscurity of the Lacanian text and the suspicion that it enables the Lacanian to avoid all criticism. Indeed, anyone aware of the criticism against Lacan’s discourse may gain the impression that these things could have been said of Lacan in a different time and place, and little would have changed had the latter’s name replaced Jung’s within the quote: his theory’s obscurity and incomprehensibility could be used in self-defense against the criticism. Perhaps what is revealed here is also recognition of the disingenuousness of one who presents himself simultaneously as a moderate reformist of Freudianism, still loyal to Freud, and as an innovator and revolutionary in terms of having created psychoanalysis anew. Lacan’s rhetoric, characterized by obscurity and incomprehensibility, which have only increased as his theory developed, is the most dominant characteristic any reader or listener encounters. The following case illustrates this well. In 1970, one of the first academic books about Lacan was published. Written in French by Belgian scholar Anika Lemaire, it sought to present the key principles of Lacanian doctrine in an introductory and relatively systematic way. Lacan himself added a special foreword, and jestingly focused on the impossibility of composing any academic study of his doctrine.59 In those years, Lacan was preoccupied by the insight on the relations between the various discourses, one of them being the university discourse—the scientific discourse that seeks to organize reality schematically-formulaically and reduce the particular into an abstract conceptual (actually metaphysical) principle—as opposed to the

58 59

 Freud (1910: 448–449).  Lemaire (1970).

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psychoanalytic discourse.60 Against this background, Lacan argued that his important book Écrits could be taken “as is” or put aside, rather than mix it with the academic discourse: “Mes Écrits sont impropres à la thèse, universitaire spécialement: antithétiques de nature, puisqu’à ce qu’ils formulent, il n’y a qu’à se prendre ou bien à les laisser”.61 The preliminary and “healthy” intuition of an academic focused on Lacan’s theory would be that these words represent the psychoanalysts’ defense against academic criticism. Worse than that, Lacan thereby joins the clergymen who are liable to argue that only they can truly understand the scriptures. Despite that intuition, however, which has much that is true in it, that academic might begin to suspect that perhaps there is a certain block in Lacan’s writing/speech that prevents others from reading, analyzing, and understanding him clearly and immediately. It appears that the obstacle to an academic reading of Lacan is due to his very speech, as eventually conveyed in seminars or lessons designed to train psychoanalysts. This characteristic of didactic speech is indicated by the fact that Lacan himself asked his students to attend to the language, to his enigmatic/baroque/obscure language, as part of their professional training. In other words, it was for them to give meaning to his speech, to construct their own private Lacan. This was also the insight that guided Lacan in preparing his diagrams, which contained multiple elements whose interrelations could be interpreted in different ways. In Lacan, there is a dilemma between the material and metaphysical (as well as between the signifier and body): the Lacanian text is misleading as it inheres a constant and almost irresolvable tension between the demand for speech about the concrete-subjective and the sliding towards or the temptation of the metaphysical. This dilemma is also realized on the rhetorical level: Lacanian speech ranges between the particular and conceptual—between the clinical-particular-subjective and the philosophical-­metaphysical-formulaic. Although Lacan keeps insisting on avoiding a metaphysical psychoanalytical discussion, in my opinion this is an internal war against his own tendencies, expressed as mentioned  Lacan presented the distinction between the four discourses (of the master, university, hysteric and analyst) in Seminar XVII (1969–1970). 61  AE: 393. Two years later, in Seminar XX (1972–1973), Lacan proclaimed a similar position (S-20: 34). 60

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in his attraction to the philosophical discussion, to the linguistic conceptualization of the father figure, and at the end of his theoretical path, to mathematical-logical-topographic representations of psychoanalytic principles.

5.6.2 Freud’s Rejection of Jung’s Style To return to Freud, in “The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement” it appears he attacks Jungianism for seeking to diverge from the Freudian view of sexuality in “how the material of the sexual ideas originating in the family complex and in the incestuous object selection can be used to represent the highest ethical and religious interests of mankind”.62 Freud goes on to say that it could be that the Jungians took fright of mixing religion and ethics with sex, and therefore cancelled out the importance of sex altogether.63 Further on in his article, Freud states that the theological history in the lives of many Swiss is not to be diminished in their attitude to psychoanalysis,64 referring of course to Jung’s own religious biography as the son of a Calvinist priest. This immediately makes us wonder about the case of Lacan, who indeed came from a different denomination (Catholicism), but whose religion nevertheless had a certain effect—as I see it—on his approach to psychoanalysis. Indeed, he was one of those who led to a very particular transformation of Freudian psychoanalysis— the abstraction of the concept of parenthood, and especially fatherhood. It is precisely against this conceptualization that Freud rails when he sharpens his criticism of the concept of the Oedipus among the Jungians, who use the term “complex” in a spiritual and asexual sense.65 As shown in Chap. 3 with regard to family complexes, Lacan’s abstraction of the father figure contained Jungian motifs, but my assumption is  Freud (1916: 449).  Jung rejected the claim that his theory was strongly philosophical and even theological, by arguing that he uses those ideas “for the exclusive purpose of illustrating the psychological facts” (Jung 1974: 64). 64  Freud (1916: 450). 65  Freud (1916: 450–452), for the full quote see Chap. 3. 62 63

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that the concepts of the father of the late Lacan and Jung are not identical. Lacan’s view positions the symbolic against the imaginary father, who is in fact the imago of the father that became the basis of the late Jung’s thoughts of the paternal archetype. What is important for now, however, is that Jungianism and Lacanianism are in danger of being seen as identical in their conceptualization of the father figure. Beyond the similarity in rhetorical style between Lacan and Jung, there is a more substantive similarity. Although Lacan presented Jung as completely antithetical to his own and Freud’s doctrine, things are not that simple. Several Jungian discussions seek to embrace Lacan within the archetypical arms of Jungianism. Moreover, several contemporary post-­ Jungians seek to highlight the great similarity between Jung and Lacan, since both speak of an unconscious that is in fact universal. Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s son in-law and “heir” who continues to develop the Lacanian discourse, was aware of the Jungian threat and the fact that certain readers read Lacan as a softcore version of Jung. In his lecture “The Other Lacan”, held in 1980, a year before Lacan’s death, he discusses the “interpretation mania” that has gained popularity following Lacan’s well-known formula—“The unconscious is structured like language”—referring specifically to the American deconstruction fad inspired by Derrida. As the title of the lecture alludes, there is another Lacan who does not stop at this formula, and who has broken free of the dominance of the signifier—the late Lacan, who has pointed to the Real, and to the non-existence of sexual relations. Miller’s words may imply that Jungianism has always been at the doorstep of Lacan as the structuralist of the signifier, who could have quite easily been associated with the Jungian archetype, as well as at the doorstep of Lacan (of the same period) of desire, who could have been perceived as a new version of the desexualization of the libido. Note that the Latin word libido originally means desire, not necessarily in the sexual sense, a sense charged by Freud, followed by Lacan.66 Miller turns to ask whether Lacan has also undergone this transformation and has desexualized the Freudian desire as the literary critics and philosophers who read Lacan in academia after the current fashion could  Miller (2016).

66

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have thought. Miller must be alluding to the American researchers whom he underrates following the tradition of his mentor and father in-law. In this sense, Lacanianism once again marks itself as labeling Jungianism and conformist Americanism as the worst enemies of psychoanalysis and having a radical and uncompromising discourse: Does Lacan offer anything else? Why did the philosophers and scholars who read Lacan and learned from him to reread Freud make such a case of metonymy? The reason is simple: they found there a means to desexualize desire. Yes, they have turned Lacan into another Jung, the Jung of the signifier. Wherever Lacan’s influence has been felt, his teaching has been used to exalt the play of signifiers. But this is not what Lacan is about, not at all.67

Miller is aware that the postmodernist enthusiasm of the “endless” interpretation relies (among other things) on Lacan, whose style encourages to a certain extent such delirium. However, he proclaims, this is not Lacan at all. Note that what is important in Miller’s words is not the argument itself, but the very fact it is being raised, the very refusal to compare Lacan and Jung in any way. Conversely, the Jungians—perhaps after falling out of the “fashion” of American academic discourse—seek warmth near the fire of the fashionable American-academic Lacanianism by trying to discover the “Lacan” in Jung and the “Jung” in Lacan. The parallels between Lacan and Jung are indeed related to the structural foundation of Lacan and to the importance of the signifier in his work. Lacan’s structuralist transformation in the 1950s contained the implicit potential of sliding towards what could be understood as a new version of Jungianism (or of the metaphysicality of the subject). This is because Lacan arrived in the 1950s with a Jungian charge, following his processing of the concepts of “imago” and “complex” into his own discourse. In Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985), one of the most important active post-Jungians, Andrew Samuels, tried to suggest several theoretical

67

 Ibid.

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parallels to Jung’s doctrine, including Lacanian discourse.68 Samuels summarized all the similarities other post-Jungians often raise.69 The most important aspects in his words are: presenting Lacan primarily as a structuralist, a fact that helps, in his view, to compare him to Jung; mentioning the biographic detail of Lacan’s meeting with Jung; presenting Lacanian theory through the three orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary and Real, which are parallel to various Jungian concepts; and noting the Jungian term “complexes”. Concisely and consistently, Samuels offers several important parallels certain Jungians seek to make between Jung’s psychology and Lacan’s psychoanalysis.70

 Although the following passages may seem anachronistic since they were written by post-­Jungians after Lacan’s death, I find it important to mention them since they point to a potential inherent to Lacanian discourse of which Lacan himself was highly aware. 69  Samuels (1985). More recently, other post-Jungian theoreticians have expanded on his work, this time in the poststructuralist direction. In Jung and Postmodernism, Hauke (2000) suggested that the postmodern theoreticians, who are suspicious of Enlightenment and reason, are in fact close to what Jung has suggested. The same goes for Lacan, whom Hauke sees as a postmodernist who views man’s location in language a possibility for countless interpretations of reality in the Nietzschean spirit. See especially Chap. 8, “Image, Sign, Symbol: Representation and the Postmodern”, where Hauke emphasizes Lacan’s link to poststructuralism (as opposed to Samuels), and consequently his opposition to the Western tradition of enlightenment and progress. As we have seen, Miller is opposed precisely to this relativist approach. A similar approach may also be found in Rowland (1999), who connects Jung to what is presented as postmodern theories of literary criticism, including Lacan’s. In her book, Rowland presents Lacan as having deconstructed the structuralist tradition, thereby manifesting his similarity to Jung. In particular, Rowland highlights Lacan’s concept of sexuality and relates it to Jung’s (see esp. pp. 31–37 and 96–94). Another scholar opposed to Lacan’s stereotypical view of Jung is the post-Jungian Kugler (1978), who highlights the importance of the perception of language in Jung. Kugler, who seeks to introduce structuralist thought into the Jungian discourse, has had quite an influence on the aforementioned post-Jungians, who sought to press Jung and Lacan together into the same structuralist mold. 70  Samuels (1985: 40–41). 68

6 Lacan and Jung (2): The Difference Between them and the Judeo-­Christian Tradition

6.1 Lacan’s Struggle Against Jungianism and the Difference Between the Imaginary and the Symbolic The first detailed argument against Jung appears already in Seminar I. In this seminar, Lacan argues that Jung does not understand the difference between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and since he is immersed in the Imaginary order, he misses the meaning of the Freudian unconscious and slides to the world of illusionary images. While the Imaginary is the order of the bodily image, of the narcissist images and the mutual relations with the other, the Symbolic is for Lacan the order of language, of the linguistic and social relations of exchange, and of the Law of the father. Already in the first lesson of Seminar I, Lacan declares the similarity and the difference between Freudian psychoanalysis and Jungian psychology. He emphasizes the difference between Freud and Jung, and consequently between Jung and himself, and the clear Freudian difference between the Other/analyst and the analysand in the framework of a clear structural relationship, which assumes that both sides are split neurotic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_6

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subjects, a structural relation that is not subject to dissolution.1 As mentioned in the previous chapter, Freud as well as Lacan wished to be distinguished from what they presented as the therapeutic dissolution in Jung between the therapist and the patient, which they interpreted as an imaginary narcissist dissolution, with its aggressive aspect of identification. Lacan acknowledges that Jung holds a structural perception, but a different one. In the 1950s, the “hottest” concept in the French intellectual arena was “structure”, following the structuralist discourse of Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan emphasizes that the Lévi-Straussian structure (as well as the Freudian), is different from the Jungian structure. How is the Jungian structure different from the Freudian? This is linked to the central discussion in Seminar I about the conception of narcissism in Freud. In the seventh lesson, Lacan wants to sharpen the difference between Freud and Jung, as Freud does in his significant 1914 essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction”. This text is first and foremost a reaction to Jung’s arguments against the Freudian perception of libido. Freud, who had just parted from Jung, wishes to distinguish his dualism (of the sexual drives and the drives of the self ) and Jung’s monism. Freud sees this monism as an aspect of a totality that swallows everything, including the sexual libido, within a general vague psyche. However, as Borch-Jacobsen notes in The Freudian Subject, Freud does this while clearing out of the way and wiping under the carpet any possible similarity between Jung and himself, even though it is possible to argue that such similarity exists.2 This manner of pulling away from Jung has an implication on the relation of Lacan to Jung, as he seeks to refute any proximity to him. In order to do so, Lacan first points at the term “structure”, as it is a term that is common to both Jung and him, through which they attempt to abstractly conceptualize the Freudian theory as a mental structure. However, Lacan rejects the Jungian structure since it is an in-depth structure that contains imaginary archetypes. Conversely, he will repeat that his structure has no depth, and has relations between one signifier and the other according to the structuralist line of thought.

 S1: 3.  Borch-Jacobsen (1982: 57).

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Lacan reads in “On Narcissism: An Introduction” Freud’s words about Jung. According to Lacan, Freud wants to distinguish neurosis from psychosis, a distinction that for Lacan is the basis for his important distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic order. This, in a way, is an opportunity for Lacan to re-biologize the Freudian discourse. Freud himself notes in his essay that his observations on libido are the consequence of biological discourse. Lacan transforms Freud’s distinction between ego-libido and sexual libido into a distinction between the Imaginary and Symbolic orders. This conversion actually joins other conversions of Freudian concepts with biologistic characteristics into neutralized objects with a wider cultural context. Freud argues in his essay that the neurotic (hysteric or obsessive) renounces the connection with reality but does not renounce his erotic relations with people or objects. He keeps these relations in phantasy (imaginary); this is contrary to the psychotic (whether paranoid or schizophrenic), for whom the disconnection is total and who does not create phantasmatic replacements.3 Lacan emphasizes that in Freud, the sexual-­ objectal libido is distinct from the libido of self-preservation, since he is not related to the material reality of the subject, but to phantasy. All this is true of neurosis. By comparison, in psychosis, the situation is even more complex. The libido is not even sexual, it is not interested in external objects, and does not give them phantasmatic characteristics. In other words, in psychosis there is a kind of expansion of the libido. Lacan argues that this is the point that has created the problem in articulating Freud’s theory of the libido.4 Jung tried to solve this by taking the psychotic case and expanding the libido into something general. That is, Jung’s point of departure was the psychotic experience and from it he concluded about the libido in general. In this sense, the psychotic experience as well as Jung’s theory of libido returns the libido to its definition prior to the narcissistic stage, that is, to the stage of auto-eroticism (or the stage of primary narcissism in which there is no external object), in which there are no subject/object relations and the self/ego is completely immersed in itself while  Freud (1914: 74–75).  S1: 114.

3 4

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completely abandoning the outside world (and having no interest in it, even not on the level of phantasy).5 This is why, says Lacan, Freud felt the need to distinguish between the self/ego-libido, which is more connected to the stage of auto-eroticism, and the sexual-objectal libido, which is related to the phantasy and the stage of secondary narcissism, in which, even if limited and phantasmatic, some object/subject relations begin to build. Lacan notes, following Freud, that the ego does not exist from the beginning, but develops, and therefore the secondary narcissism appears only after the primary narcissism and auto-eroticism. Lacan further adds that this secondary narcissism, in which the ego was created as an image of the body (the object is the ego=the body itself ), is actually adjacent to his mirror stage, in which the ego is constructed.6 According to Lacan, what counts is that Freud emphasizes the distinction between the detachment of the neurotic from the world, and the detachment of the psychotic. For the neurotic, there is an imaginary escape as a result of the refusal to acknowledge reality as it is. This is a function that Lacan argues cannot be named “imaginary”. When he speaks about the Imaginary, he refers to the relationship of the ego with his identifications and with reality, which he conceives in an illusionary way.7 By comparison, for the psychotic, according to Freud, there are no imaginary supplements. Lacan notes that this Freudian argument is not that simple, and that it calls for a reasonable explanation. This leads him to the distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. According to Lacan, this distinction is found in Freud’s essay on narcissism. Contrary to the neurotic, the psychotic—in order to rebuild his world—uses words, rather than the Imaginary.8 Lacan argues that due to the difficulty of the Freudian discussion it must be conceptualized. Lacan notes that Freud’s saying—that the

 S1: 113–115.  Ibid. 7  S1: 116–117. 8  S1: 117. 5 6

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psychotic does not dream—is not related to the Imaginary. The Imaginary and the unreal are not identical.9 Freud distinguishes between the real objects and the imaginary ones (die realen Objekte durch imaginäre).10 The German word “imaginäre” is a good equivalent for the French “imaginaire”, and hence according to Lacan, his concept of the Imaginary and the way Freud conceives of the neurotic by turning his object libido towards these imaginary objects are parallel. Regarding the objects of the psychotic, which are internal, Lacan sticks to Freud’s expression irrealen Objekte,11 which he uses only once. For Lacan, there is a gap between unreal objects and imaginary objects. The psychotic, therefore, is subjugated not only to the Imaginary order but to another order, which is organized differently, not through images but through words—the Symbolic order. However, Lacan says that this is a “symbolic unmarked by the unreal”.12 Why does Lacan argue that Jung misses the distinction between the Symbolic and the Imaginary? According to Lacan, Freud was able to do it because he made a distinction between the two types of libidos: the sexual libido and the libido of self-preservation. The latter is tied to the primary, auto-erotic stage (disconnected from the Real) while the sexual libido is tied to the Imaginary. Consequently, out of the psychotic auto-­ eroticism Lacan extracts the Symbolic order as an automatic order that activates the psychotic subject through words. It is perhaps under the influence of French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault that the early Lacan learned of the automatism of the psychotic’s speech (Lacan clarified this term in Seminar III: The Psychoses, as the total subordination of the psychotic subject to the Other, to language).13 That is, the Symbolic order precedes the Imaginary order, and the Imaginary order wraps it with illusions. According to Lacan, this whole distinction is lost on Jung, because for him there is only one libido, and therefore there is no distinction between focusing on the I in the auto-erotic sense and  S1: 116.  GW 10: 139. 11  GW 10: 152. 12  S1: 117. 13  See in particular the first chapter in Seminar III, where Lacan mentions the influence of de Clérambault (S3: ch. 1). 9

10

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focusing on fantasy. It is all the same: the I and the outside are one—pantheism. In this discursive strategy Lacan wants to turn Freud’s text into the basis for the construction of his theory on the tension between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. For that purpose, he also uses Jung’s theory, for his needs and presents it in the most negative light in order to make clear who is Freudian and who is not. It may be mentioned that just as Lacan presents himself as the most Freudian, he also criticizes Freud, and there is no contradiction: his purpose is usually to make clear how Freud himself is not Freudian enough, not radical enough considering his own discoveries. It is also possible to find in Lacan the hidden criticism that Freud could not detach himself from the Imaginary of the neurotic—because the neurotic’s attraction is sometimes so powerful that even the analyst may fall prey to it. In the 1950s, Lacan will seek to move to the symbolic realm of the neurotic and the psychotic, paying less attention to the imaginary phantasy of the analysand. This may be the outcome of his work on psychosis, which led him to examine the place where the subject does not only encounter imaginary phantasy, but also what he calls the Other. As mentioned, Lacan emphasized the distinction between the Symbolic and the Imaginary by contradicting it with Jung’s opinions, which deconstruct this distinction, just as the psychotic himself tends to do (Lacan argues in Seminar III that the psychotic, like Schreber, makes an imaginary reduction of the symbolic).14 Lacan presents this distinction for the first time in the same years Seminar I is given (1953–1954), and emphasizes its outstanding contribution to the psychoanalytical discourse.15 Furthermore, in his lesson on Narcissism16 Lacan contemptuously presents Jung’s conception of the soul as something confused (psychotic/ auto-erotic in fact); that is, as contrary to the Freudian structurality as he himself conceives it. According to him, the expansion of the term “libido”, particularly in Jung’s Transformation of the Libido (1911–1912), leads to  S3: 39–43.  S1: 117. 16  S1: 107–128. 14 15

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its neutralization, and that is why the libido must be bounded and kept away from anything that relates to the external reality and to self-­ preservation. The problem is how to relate to psychosis with relation to the libido. Jung’s solution is “Introversion”17 (which, as Freud notes, is a concept that does not enable the distinction between psychosis and neurosis); therefore, for the psychotic, as well as for the neurotic, the libido is turned inward to fantasy. Contrary to Freud, who distinguishes between autoeroticism and narcissism (parallel to the mirror stage in Lacan), just as he distinguishes between the neurotic and the psychotic, Jung dissolves the difference between the Imaginary and the Symbolic, between the psychotic and the neurotic, and between narcissism and auto-eroticism. In Lacan’s opinion, Jung only leaves behind impractical beautiful metaphors that are a direct continuation of traditional-conservative thinking, thus going against the Freudian orthodoxy, which is radical in its severity and accuracy.18 As Lacan emphasized, Freud pointed at the theoretical struggle he conducted with himself in “On Narcissism: an Introduction” with relation to Freud’s heretic theory, since in Freud’s partial de-sexualization of the libido, in presenting the drives of the I, he drew somewhat closer to Jung; however, ironically, it was the only way that enabled the theoretical difference between them: for Jung, everything was libido and therefore nothing was libido. By comparison, in Freud there is a reduction of the libido that enabled its preservation, or, as Lacan said in the same seminar about the conception that expands the libido—if one over-generalizes the conception of libido, it becomes neutralized.19 As mentioned, in Jung the distinctions dissolve; this dissolution leads to a “spiritual” and “poetic” speech about mental universal energy that moves from one place to another. It is particularly with relation to this aspect that Lacan seeks to differentiate himself from Jung. Contrary to his (and Lévi-Strauss’s) universal structurality, there is Jung’s cosmic spirituality. Jung’s spirituality also contradicts Freud’s structurality, as Lacan

 Jung (1952: 151).  S1: 115. 19  S1: 113. 17 18

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perceives it, and prevents an appropriate therapeutic working plan. It may add some color and interest, as Lacan says, but nothing more. It is possible to suspect that in the disrespect for Jungian “poetics”, Lacan wishes to distinguish himself from Jung, particularly considering what could be conceived, for him, as a threatening proximity as a result of the simple fact that Lacan’s style is sometimes vague, sometimes poetic, moving from one direction to another, etc. Actually, it is possible and even more probable that Lacan received similar reactions to his lectures, in the same words he hurled at Jung (for example, similar to Freud’s criticism of Jung’s chattiness as presented in the previous chapter). This relation between Lacan and Jung may be described in Lacanian terms: Lacan repeatedly emphasized with relation to the brothers at the mirror stage that they are attracted to one another aggressively and erotically, therefore being alienated particularly due to their extreme closeness. Inside this aggressiveness each of the brothers wishes to become distinct, and create a separate, autonomic gestalt ego. In other words, the threatening gaze at the Jungian mirror forces Lacan to create a strategy that separates him from who might be conceived as his fellow doctrinarian, a brother by the same father-Freud, in order to remain the only son, the loyal son. This way, Lacan chooses to construct his theory=gestalt (structure and borders) with his own self-identity, which has only symbolic identification with the Name of the Father (Freud), and not an imaginary one with a heretic brother (Jung).20 However, against such a presentation of personal (negative) identification, it is important to emphasize that most of the struggle here is discursive and not personal, despite its seemingly personal appearance. The Lacanian discourse presents the Jungian discourse as an opposite processing discourse, as a mirror discourse that contradicts it (and Freud) in some significant theoretical and ethical principles.  This follows the arguments of Gallop on the imaginary relation of Lacan to his competitors. Gallop analyzes the sentence “The meaning of a return to Freud is a return to Freud’s meaning” (E: 307), through which Lacan sought to clarify the meaning of his return to Freud. Gallop shows that the meaning of the word sens in the original French quote is also direction and emphasizes Lacan’s doctrinarian tendency in relation to his return to Freud: there exists, according to Lacan, only one correct direction for this return. Gallop also argues that Lacan creates here an imaginary identificatory aggressiveness (in the sense of the mirror stage) against brothers of the same father, who compete over the gospel, as the one who has it has the sole knowledge of the right direction (Reading Lacan, Gallop 1985, ch. 4). 20

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As said, Lacan maintains the Freudian distinction between the sexual drives and the ego drives. For him, this distinction is the basis for the distinction between psychosis and neurosis, as well as between the Imaginary and the Symbolic. All this is contrary to Jung, who, due to his aspiration to construct a general theory of the libido and his statement that everything is libido, actually exterminated the otherness of the sexual libido, and consequently the distinction between neurosis and psychosis and between the Imaginary/phantasmatic and the Symbolic/linguistic order.21 That is why Jung could not, according to Lacan, connect the unconscious to the structure of the Symbolic order, which includes the otherness of sexuality as well as of language. According to Lacan, sexuality can only be understood in the framework of kin relationships and the social order, and that is why it is also connected to the structure of language.

6.2 Jung’s Psychotic Imagination and Freud’s Materialism According to Lacan, the rhetorical problem with Jung is that he slides towards a psychotic discourse. It is possible that Lacan has read the following words, in which Jung describes how he is exposed to the collective unconscious in the early stages of his career, at a time when the connection with Freud began to tear apart.22 Jung mentions there his reaction to the reading of the book by Georg Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient: In the course of this reading, I came across Friedrich Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten and that fired me! I read like mad, and worked with feverish interest through a mountain of mythological material, then through the Gnostic writers and ended in total confusion. I found myself in a state of perplexity similar to the one I had experienced at the clinic when I tried to understand the meaning of psychotic states of mind. It was  S1: 119.  The citation I gave from Seminar XIV at the beginning of this chapter may indicate that Lacan knew, and even read Jung’s autobiographical book, from which the following quote is taken. 21 22

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as if I were in an imaginary madhouse and were beginning to treat and analyze all the centaurs, nymphs, gods, and goddesses in Creuzer’s book as though they were my patients.23

According to Lacan, such a paragraph could prove his assumption that one must not stop at imaginary hallucination: one should first examine the problematics of the symbolic with the psychotic, rather than its imaginary component. Again, we go back to the assumption that Jung treats the imaginary-visual layers of the psyche, that is, the archetypes, while Lacan’s focus is on the linguistic signifiers. Compared to Jung, who wishes to study the unconscious, the dreams, and the psychotic hallucinations under the level of the image, Lacan wishes to diverge from this discussion and treat the linguistic aspects of the unconscious and the psychotic hallucination, as he showed in Seminar III: The Psychoses. Thus, Lacan wants to study the fixation of the signifier on a single signified (through what he calls the “master-signifier” or the “quilting point” [Point de capiton]), the signifier of the “Father” that enables “normal” speech. For the psychotic, this signifier is defective, and due to this fault, the entire linguistic system is confused. It creates a kind of chaos and a fixation on one meaning for every signifier, without understanding the metaphorical aspect of language. This is the exceptionality of the psychotic: he always knows. Therefore, the Lacanian would say that in Jung there is an indefinite interpretation of the image; however, once moving to language, i.e., to the level of interpretation, Jung does not perceive the image as given to interpretation (because it is extra-linguistic), but as having a single meaning. An important summary of the points presented above can be found in Lacan’s essay: “On the Question Prior to any Possibility of Treatment of Psychosis” in the Écrits, where he differentiates between Jung’s emphasis on the Imaginary and Freud’s and his own emphasis on the Symbolic and the symbolic context of the Other’s unconscious: It is of the utmost importance to observe—in the experience of the unconscious Other where Freud is our guide—that the question does not find its  Jung (1961: 162).

23

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outlines in protomorphic proliferations of the image, in vegetative intumescences, or in animastic halos radiating from the palpitations of life. This is the whole difference between Freud’s orientation and that of Jung’s school, which latches onto such forms: Wandlungen der libido. These forms may be brought to the fore in a mantic, for they can be produced using the proper techniques (promoting imaginary creations such as reveries, drawings, etc.) in a situable site. This site can be seen on my schema stretched between a’ and a—that is, in the veil of the narcissistic mirage, which is eminently suited to sustaining whatever is reflected in it through its effects of seduction and capture. If Freud rejected this mantic, it was at the point at which it neglects the guiding function of a signifying articulation, which operates on the basis of its internal law and of material subjected to the poverty that is essential to it.24

In this paragraph, Lacan highlights the contradiction between Freudianism and Jungianism by presenting the difficulty of the latter in the framework of the imaginary. Compared to the unconscious of Freud’s Other, which belongs to the order of the Symbolic, the discussion of Jung always moves within the beautiful images of the seductive, delusional Imaginary. Lacan develops his famous L scheme here. According to Lacan, the Jungian discourse does not believe in the unconscious axis S------A (from the subject to the big Other), but only in the imaginary axis a-------a’, that is, in the network of narcissist connections, from the ego to the little other. Sarcastically and parodically, Lacan mentions the famous Jungian twin terms “anima” and “animus” (the masculine and feminine in the mental setting), explaining that the human being in Jung’s theory does not even have a narcissistic status, which is itself the basis (less significant than the Symbolic but present) of human consciousness (as Lacan argues in his discussion of the mirror stage).25 If the Other is removed, the human is diminished to the status of the animal, and what is left in Jung is this diminished man: the anima (the feminine element in the psyche) sticks back, like a rubber band to the animus (the  E: 460–461.  The imaginary, as Lacan pointed out in his essay on the mirror stage, is given to a situation he defines as “paranoid recognition”. In this situation, there is a dissolution between the I and the Other: there is no difference between subject and object (through this distinction, the I keeps the object relations with the other, either by reality or by fantasy): E: 76. 24 25

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masculine element), and the animus—back to the animal, whose relation to the Other may be considered as non-existent. The human in Jung, therefore, is detached from the Other, from the function of language, and for Lacan, man is first of all a subject of language, and not of any other medium (like the visual). Lacan emphasizes the great gap between the otherness of the Freudian unconscious and the Jungian unconscious, which does not have a dimension of total otherness, but of proximity that is not even narcissistic, but animalistic, when reality turns into one nature in the pantheist sense (unlike the anti-totality of Freud and Lacan). This is derived from the de-sexualization of the libido: the sexual libido is the condition for understanding that the unconscious is immanently Other for us, as human creatures. Furthermore, it is important for Lacan to emphasize that the school that evolved out of the original Freud, namely ego psychology, is not essentially different from Jung. The proximity between the schools is greater than it seems; this is because for Lacan, Freud’s followers in America avoided the “plague” that Freud wished to bring them by eliminating the element of the Other, the radical Freudian unconscious in its otherness. According to Lacan, the two approaches have the same malfunction: moving away from the Freudian unconscious and focusing on the Imaginary and the imaginary identification with the therapist. They both side with individuality, but such that is completely conformist: how will the individual fulfill himself in the social setting, that is, in the Other? How will he merge into it? Contrary to these approaches, Lacan wishes to point at the impossibility of the relationship between the subject and the Other: at the traumatic encounter between them, but at the same time at an extimate relation between them which paradoxically includes this traumatism. Lacan notes that nothing remains of Freud’s logos (Verbe). The meaning of “logos” is not only Freud’s speech, but also the sense that Freud, according to Lacan and to his perspective on language, was the theoretician who emphasized the significance of logos, of speech, of language, in psychoanalysis. This ties Freud with Judeo-Christian culture which highlights, according to Lacan, God’s being a speaking entity, an entity with whom the encounter is traumatic.

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Lacan makes a distinction between himself and other psychoanalytical approaches that were heretic of Freud, making his way with a discursive strategy that is based on the articulation of a unique Judeo-Christian position. What is mentioned here hints at what Lacan sees in Jung: spiritualistic religiousness of the Gnostic type that seeks detachment from the body and from the recognition of the body and thus—from the recognition of the presence of the body and language of the jouissant body which is also a speaking body. In Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), Lacan’s words that will be presented below sharpen this point even further; and thus, even though Jung can be understood primarily as a religious mystic, and Freud and Lacan as anti-religious, a different and more complex approach may be suggested in examining Freud and Lacan’s ethical position. Each such position may be presented as close to another type of religiousness: in Jung’s case—spiritual religiousness, and in Lacan’s—linguistic religiousness in the Christian sense of the incarnation of logos in language: the speaking body. Lacan says in this context: This is important particularly at a moment when it is obvious that, even if one once located them there, there is no point now in seeking the phallus or the anal ring in the starry sky; they have been definitely expelled. For a long time even in scientific thinking, men seemed to inhabit cosmological projections. For a long time a world soul existed, and thought could comfort itself with the idea that there was a deep connection between our images and the world that surrounds us. This is a point whose importance does not seem to have been noticed, namely, that the Freudian project has caused the whole world to reenter us, has definitely put it back in its place, that is to say, in our body, and nowhere else […] Read a little Luther; not just the Table Talk, but the Sermons as well […] His choice of words is in the end far more analytic than all that modern phenomenology has been able to articulate in the relatively gentle terms of the abandonment of the mother’s breast; what kind of negligence is that which causes her milk to dry up? Luther says literally, “You are that waste matter which falls into the world from the devil’s anus.”26

26

 S7: 92–93.

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Lacan follows here what we will call the “bodily materiality”27 of Freud, who wished to reduce the spiritual to the structure of the unconscious and his theory of the sexual drives. This is the materiality which Lacan sees as a key to a psychoanalysis which is not a worldview. Lacan sees Jung as someone who wanted to diverge from the phantasy, to understand the spiritual bodies as parallel to the emotional structure of the human, as he connects the micro to the macro. Lacan plays here with associations to Jungianism: the way he describes the libido is identical to how he mockingly presented, in other places, Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious: archaic, with multiple forms, etc. Lacan adds that all these archaic forms are the fruit of our phantasy when we tie our sexuality to the external world. There is no point in searching for the phallus or the anus under the starlit skies. Here we connect back to Lacan’s objection to the metaphysical position, which is also a product of a look up to the sky: seeing the world as eternal and infinite (in the static, unchanging sense), as expressed in Aristotle. The opposition to metaphysicality and mystification of the world, also in the scientific world, is expressed in Freud, whose project is the elimination of the projection of our emotions on the world. There is no more world-soul; there is no more world-sorrow (Weltschmerz), which the romanticist experiences: there is no real sorrow in the world, and the world does not really have a soul that the romanticist absorbs and expresses in his poetry. The Freudian position is a materialist one. Even if Lacan does not state it explicitly, the question is whether he refers to Freud’s Jewish origins, the Judaism of the flesh, of the body, of what Paulus acknowledged but wished to divert from? Does he mean the biblical Yahweh who created the world of the flesh and remained (in the Gnostic sense), the Yahweh who created the material world through language, when the biblical man did not move away towards the celestial in the metaphysical sense, neither towards the celestial in the mystical-­ Jungian-­psychotic sense of projecting feelings and thoughts on the outer world? Jung might have understood this, as he claimed that Freud  Here I follow Slavoj Žižek who emphasizes the materialistic aspect in the Judeo-Christian tradition in contrast with the spirituality of the religious world in Eastern Asia, such as Zen Buddhism (particularly in its Western version), and the neo-spiritualism of Jungianism and the New Age. See Žižek (2003), particularly Chap. 5. 27

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replaced Yahweh with sexuality.28 Consequently, we may argue that Lacan does express a certain type of biblical-Judaic position: identification with the way Freud knew how to recognize the Symbolic order, which is an order of the body created by language (in the Judeo-Christian sense of the speaking God), against idealistic conceptions that seek to see the world as existing separately from the body; platonic positions about the relation between the spirit and the flesh, as well as Aristotelian metaphysical positions about the essence of God. Lacan adds, in the above citation from Seminar VII, that when Freud put the world back in its place, in the body, he actually rephrased the Christian position of Satan—who represents corporeality. Note that Satan in Christianity is the revelation of the (Jewish) drowning in the world of the flesh, materiality, without acknowledging the celestial spiritual. This is how it is with Luther, in the way he presents the world of the flesh, the world of Satan. However, it must be clarified that Lacan does understand Freudianism as located in the Christian world, but the Christian position has always been suspicious of the flesh, seeing it as a satanic essence. Lacan operates ironically here: identifying with the objected position of Christianity, with what it objects to. According to Lacan, Christianity and Luther’s acknowledgment of our fall into the world of sin is identical to Freud’s conception. The Christian acknowledgment is articulated through sexual images, as expressed in Luther’s quote by Lacan. This position, adds Lacan, is that which finally overcame the modern man as he was banished from the premodern, pre-­ Cartesian spiritual cosmos, and Freud is the one who gave the final seal by returning the false archetypes to “…where they belong, that is in our body”.29 And here is the important contradiction that is connected to the way Lacan conceives the Judeo-Christian discourse: it is the anti-idealist basis of modernity and of Freudian psychoanalysis. According to Lacan, in Freud there is the biblical Jewish recognition of the limited existence of human beings in the world of flesh, in the body. Historical Christianity partially shares this recognition, while in Freud there is full expression of 28 29

 Jung (1961: 151).  S7: 93.

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this recognition: this is how he signifies the modern detachment from the infinite spiritual skies and the phantasy of the spirituality of the world in itself. Conversely, in Jung we find a reactionary attempt to go back to the old phantasies, while rearticulating them in a pseudo-scientific-­ psychological way. Such an argument about Jung can place him in the traditions of romantic spirituality, and inside madness itself. As I tried to show in the previous chapter, in Lacan’s articulations we can find a clue for a possible argument that Jung himself was carried into the psychoses he researched so much. At this point it is worth mentioning a detail that is relevant for our purposes: the scholarly basis of Jung and Lacan is psychiatry, and both conducted much research early in their careers into psychoses, even more than Freud, who was informed by the treatment of neurosis. The question is how much each of them was influenced by the nature of his research, and how much each of their discourses was deeply embedded in the abyss of psychosis? It is possible that Lacan was aware of this, and therefore tried not to slide down this slippery slope, as may have happened to Jung. Freud understood the religious-mythological position with which Jung identified so much as the position of the paranoiac. For example, in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901): The gap between the paranoiac’s displacement and that of superstition is narrower than appears at first sight. When human beings began to think, they were obviously compelled to explain the outer world in an anthropomorphic sense by a multitude of personalities in their own image; the accidents which they explained superstitiously were thus actions and expressions of persons. In that regard they behaved just like paranoiacs, who draw conclusions from insignificant signs which others give them, and like all normal persons who justly take the unintentional actions of their fellow-­ beings as a basis for the estimation of their characters.30

Therefore, when Lacan positions Jung in an anti-Freudian position of reflecting the spiritual projection back onto the world, he puts him in the  Freud (1901: 259).

30

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position of insanity. Note that Lacan was also aware of Freud’s own attraction to theories of the occult (such as numerology) and the supernatural (he was interested in superstitions related to death and used to calculate the day of his death by coming across fatal numbers), which he deals with in the same chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). However, Freud always knew not to lead his theory to the realms of occultism; unlike Jung, who projected his aspirations on the outer world, as he linked the psychological microcosm to the external-universal macrocosm. Lacan argues that this failure by Jung originates in the romantic nature of his discussion of an unconscious spiritual Being—unlike Freud, where there is a structural discussion of the unconscious. This argument is developed in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). Even if Lacan is already detached from his attraction in the early 1950s to the Lévi-Straussian structuralism, he still bases his objection to Jung and his romanticism on the same line of thought. Thus, following Lévi-Strauss and his structuralism, he articulates in Lesson 2 of Seminar XI his conception of the unconscious and the signifiers that create the world of human beings. A clear structural articulation was still missing in Freud’s theory, but for Lacan, it sits well with the Freudian conception.31 Lacan chooses to summarize his words in the famous formula: “The unconscious is structured like a language” (l’inconscient est structuré comme un langage).32 For him, the opposite of this notion is Jung’s romantic conception: Freud’s unconscious is not at all the romantic unconscious of imaginative creation. It is not the locus of the divinities of night. This locus is no doubt not entirely unrelated to the locus towards which Freud turns his gaze— but the fact that Jung who provides a link with the terms of the romantic unconscious, should have been repudiated by Freud, is sufficient indication that psyco-analysis is introducing something other.33

 As is expressed in the early Freud, who examined the grammatical work of the unconscious, for example in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). 32  S11: 20. 33  S11: 24. 31

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True, Freud’s origins can be found in German romanticism (as Lacan mentions later, Freud even reminds us in a comment in The Interpretation of Dreams an articulation of the unconscious by a romanticist philosopher named Edward von Hartmann). However, Lacan wishes to find the uniqueness of the Freudian unconscious. In Jung there is a regression to an unconscious that may not be understood based on the linguistic discussion, but on the imaginary setting of images. This is also the origin of Lacan’s iconoclastic position, which prefers the signifier over the visual representation (a preference that may be related to Judaism). Lacan mentions that Freud was powerfully tempted by the mystical and the unnatural, but in research he always limited himself to the physical, and his unconscious did not become a Being in the metaphysical and romantic sense as in Jung’s case. Furthermore, Lacan notes that Freud may have quoted in The Interpretation of Dreams the motto Flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo (“If I cannot bend the higher forces, I will stir up the underworld”),34 but he never reduced himself to comparing the unconscious with the lower forces, similar to the Gnostics who talked about the “in-between” beings between man and God. On the contrary: he discussed the satanic, underworld materiality of the unconscious, the bodily symptom and hysterical speech. This anti-gnostic aspect in Lacan is related, as said, to his structuralist perception. Through his objection to Jung, Lacan points at an important aspect of structuralism and poststructuralism: there is no depth, there is only the surface of the signifiers, where the speech of the subject is limited to his discourse (connected to the discourse of the Other) and cannot divert from it towards a deeper spirituality. The unconscious is not deeper—it is a contrast, a negation, in the sense of a repression of the conscious. Hence, Lacan is suspicious towards every psychological tendency to reveal the “depth” of the psyche, like, for example, Jung aims to do with the term “archetype”. In Seminar I, Lacan specifically contrasts the Jungian archetypes to the structuralist approach.35

 Like the motto that opens the Interpretation of Dreams (1900: ix), taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, Part 7.  S1: 267.

34 35

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It is also possible to argue that Lacan, who presents the radical difference between the subject and the Other (against the scale of medium and small others), wishes this way to follow Freud, who belonged, in his view, to the Jewish-Christian culture, and not to the Gnostic heretics: they both present man facing a definite Other—if not the biblical God, than the unconscious as a total otherness. It is an otherness that is not a being in the metaphysical sense, just as the unconscious is not an ontological Being, as Lacan notes in Seminar XI.36 This is why Freud did not slide into metaphysical or mystical-romantic discussions of the unconscious and its being an extra-human or collective experience. Lacan argues that the Jungian assumption is that there is a meaning “out there” that may be extracted in a hermeneutical framework. This is the reason that Lacan mentions Jung again in Seminar XI, this time in the context of the hermeneutic thinking of Paul Ricœur, who attempted to describe Freud’s theory not as science, but as a hermeneutic discourse.37 Lacan fundamentally objects to Ricœur’s suggestion to “interpret” the unconscious and thus give it meaning. To him, hermeneutic thinking goes against structuralism, as it assumes that there is some meaning “out there” waiting to be interpreted.38 For Lacan, Jung had problematic pretension to speak about the world from within the psyche, to enlighten and charge the physical world based on the psychological one. The problematics of this pretense, according to Lacan, also evolved from the mere presence of a worldview at the center of Jung’s psychology. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Lacan, following Freud, argues that psychoanalysis has no worldview, and it does not aspire, like philosophy, to describe the outer world, but rather limits itself to speaking about the subject. Furthermore, it has no worldview also in the sense that it does not have a view, a philosophical standpoint, and it also has no view of the world, whether physical or spiritual.  S11: 30.  Paul Roazen, who could surely not be blamed for favoring Lacan, and can be describes as a “heretic” supporter of Jung, supports Lacan’s argument about the connection between Ricœur and Jungianism (Roazen 2000: 52). 38  S11: 153. 36 37

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Freudian psychoanalysis is not an ideology or a form of idealization of the therapist or any kind of Other—it is only a study, an analysis, of the subject. The subject is only the part of man which is a product of language; from the encounter with the language as otherness is created the unconscious part of the human, which is the subject in the Lacanian sense. This subject, for Lacan, is not the self in the sense of ego, and is not the subject that controls itself, but a subject that maintains complex and extimate relations with the otherness of language. However, as I will argue further on, the contrast between the Jungian and the Lacanian discourse is not only a consequence of the presence/ absence of a worldview in them, but also of the difference in the ethical standpoints at the basis of each. By “ethics”, I mean that these two discourses are for Lacan two different forms of relating to myself, the other, and the world. Subsequently I will point at an alternative ethical position within the Lacanian discourse, an anti-metaphysical position which particularly includes the two following elements: 1. The significance of the status of the Father (the symbolic Father) 2. Acknowledging the split condition of the human

6.3 Anti-Jungianism and Anti-Gnosticism: Split in the Face of Harmony As presented above, it may be said that in Lacan there is a dualist dilemma regarding the conceptualization of the Freudian myths: on the one hand, the need to conceptualize, de-mythologize and de-biologize key essences (the Father, the Other, the unconscious, the phallus, etc.) and on the other hand the attempt to keep these essences within their bodily context, that is, not to turn them into metaphysical essences. For this purpose, Lacan uses the cultural-religious processing discourse: he uses religious rhetoric through the metaphor of the incarnation of the logos in the flesh in order to speak of a body where the signifier is realized. Here

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Lacan encounters the dualist tendency embedded in his discourse; all that, owing to the project of the return to Freud and the abstraction of concepts that accompanies it. This aspect has an extimate and dialectic dimension (not in the sense of progress, but in the sense of complex relations between interior and exterior, between subject and other, between subject and the social order). This extimate aspect joins Lacan’s aspiration to locate his discourse (and Freud’s) within the Judeo-Christian anti-Gnostic tradition. Lacan chooses to position his view against the dualist phantasy of spirit and matter and the ability of the ego to merge harmoniously with spirituality through detachment from body and matter. For Lacan, Jung is an exemplar for such Gnostic dualism, in which the world receives a dualistic meaning of matter vs. spirit, and henceforth his psychology aspires to lead man to an idealist-escapist detachment from the material to a perfect harmony with the spiritual. As said, Lacan and Freud perceived their doctrine as anti-doctrinal, anti-philosophical and anti-metaphysical that points at the absence and partialness in Being. This, in a straight opposition to Jung who allegedly led his doctrine and his patients to the illusion of internal harmony and totality. This Lacanian position is tightly connected to his relation to the general religious/cultural Judeo-Christian position, which he sees as an ethical position of splitting and anti-totality. This religious discourse was for Lacan a cultural processing discourse that enabled him to locate his own discourse in a distinct cultural position. Furthermore, this Judeo-­ Christian position that Lacan uses in the early stages of his work would subsequently enable him the transition from the discourse of the Imaginary in the 1930s and 40s, and the Symbolic in the 1950s to the discourse of the Real and its theoretical extensions (excess jouissance, object little a). In this manner, the later Lacan extracted himself from the theoretical clinical trap of sliding towards a metaphysical or mystical discussion following the conceptualization of the Freudian theory. In the late seminar, Seminar XV: The Psychoanalytic Act, there was even a harsher articulation in which Lacan contrasted two camps:

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( 1) Freud and the Judeo-Christian tradition (2) Jung and the Gnostics.39 The meaning of the term Gnosis here follows the Greek word γνώσις (“knowledge”), i.e., the spiritual and religious movements that were active particularly in the beginning of Christianity (and even before it), and influenced it, but also challenged its mainstream, which will consolidate in the first decades AD. These movements claimed particular “knowledge” regarding the real divinity, which exists beyond the God that the Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledged as the creator of the material world (Yahweh). These movements saw in Jesus, usually, the messenger of this real divinity. This is a manifestation of the distinction between the purity of the spiritual and baseness of the material, a motif that is actually anti-materialist. The Gnostic movements lost their power, but throughout the history of Christianity there were often heretic movements that contained similar elements.40 The discussion in Seminar XV was about the impossibility of speaking of a sexual relationship, following the biblical text (Genesis 1: 26-27) that spoke about Adam and Eve as having been created separately, unlike the harmony in the Platonic sense (the myth about the androgynous that split and is waiting to merge back). For Lacan, the Judeo-Christian tradition acknowledges the split, the castration, the fragility, and is not nostalgic for harmony: male and female were born separately and not together, as Lacan says: “God created them male and female. The castration is supposed to be the preparation for the connection of the enjoyments”.41  See also the words by Lacan’s brother, Benedictine monk Marc-François Lacan, who argues in an interview with Paul Roazen that Jung is very dangerous and contradicts all that Christianity stands for. According to Marc-François Lacan, Jung “did everything but psychoanalysis”, and he was completely strange to the real Christian tradition and was even a dangerous diversion from that tradition. Roazen adds that Marc-François, who says that Jung wrote “stupid, crazy things”, actually reflected Lacan’s view. Furthermore, Roazen mentions the close relations between the two brothers, and their agreement on matters of culture, religion and psychoanalysis (Roazen 1996: 327). 40  For a review of the gnostic phenomenon and all its aspects, see Rudolph (1977). In particular, see the two collections of the writings of Nag Hammadi: these were discovered in 1945 and reveled to us a whole corpus of Gnostic writings that were unknown until then (what was known were only quotes in the writings of Church Fathers) (Layton 1987; Robinson 1990). 41  S15: Lesson given on February 21, 1968. 39

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Castration here is not biological, as can sometimes be understood in Freud; it is a symbolic castration in which the jouissant body is being formed through language, through initiation into the order of the Name of the Father. Lacan knows that somewhere else in Genesis (2: 21-22; KJV), another, less equal relation is described: “And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man”. That is why Lacan leaves it for the rib to take the place of object a.42 By indicating that the rib from which god made woman is object a, Lacan implies that the Judeo-Christian tradition in its biblical origin knows object a, the same object that eludes all definition and avoids totality. In comparison, the Gnostic Jungian tradition seeks harmony and connects to Eastern traditions of yin and yang, cosmic masculinity, and femininity, in which there is no memory of what fell out of the chain of signifiers, of object a (the real object that eludes symbolization, which is a remnant of the encounter between the subject and the Other). The church implicitly acknowledges the Freudian position of life in the flesh, although it would perhaps rather live in a “spiritual” world that coheres with Jung’s position.43 This might explain the ambivalence of Catholicism to the Freudian position. In this respect, Jung is an anti-modernist,44 and not only anti-Judeo-­ Christian, since he seeks to return to the lost psyche and reunite it with the psyche of the world. Compared to him, Lacan wishes to locate his discourse within the Judeo-Christian tradition that is actually realized in modern Western culture, in modern science, and henceforth within psychoanalysis, when man gives up the phantasy of totality towards looking at his own split, as he is a speaking being. This Lacanian  Lesson given on February 21, 1968 (S15).  Ibid. 44  According to Žižek (1997: 86), Jung made the “anti-modern reversal of psychoanalysis” as reaction to the loss of the hidden wisdom in modernity, suggesting the return to our real self, which is the archaic self. 42 43

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position is consistent with Lacan’s preference for the paternal order instead of the maternal one (that began in his work on “Family Complexes”). Lacan highlights Jung’s anti-modernity also in Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966), in a well-known lesson titled “Science and Truth”.45 There, he seeks to articulate the particularity of psychoanalysis in relation to science and religion: psychoanalysis alings with these two discourses at some points, but also diverges from them in its relation to the question of truth (the unconscious truth). However, even if this text is antagonistic towards the church, and demands that the psychoanalytic institution stay away from any aspect that reminds of the (Catholic) Church, it still affiliates with the Judeo-biblical position in a way that aligns with the above discussion of the relation between Lacan and Jung. This is because according to Lacan, unlike Freud, Jung, did not know how to perform the scientific reduction of the subject to the Cartesian cogito, and therefore he regressed towards a subject with a soul, with spiritual depth, who has hidden knowledge. Indeed, according to Lacan, the cogito, the subject of science, is a consequence of the religious Judeo-­ Christian tradition.46 The question is what keeps Lacan away from Jung? What theoretical dilemma leads Lacan to object to Jung? Is it an internal dilemma regarding the place of the body in psychoanalysis? His place in relation to language? What is Lacan’s alternative, and how does he connect it to the way

 Published separately also in the Écrits.  E: 728. Compare also to the discussion in Lesson 12 in Seminar XIII: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (S11: 149–161). This is a lesson discussed above, in which Lacan contrasts Freudian Psychoanalysis and the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the hermeneutics of Ricœur and Jung. Freud and Lévi-Strauss are part of the Cartesian Revolution in science, which reduces the subject to the cogito, unlike traditional conceptions of a subject with soul and depth. 45 46

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he reads the Judeo-Christian tradition?47 It may actually be argued that Jungian thought, which speaks of the need for internal equilibrium, and integration of the psyche in its collective unconscious, has reactionary potential. This potential connects to Lacan’s argument against Jung’s anti-modernity as well as to the contradiction between his theory and the essence of Judeo-Christian tradition. Some argue that Jung’s reactionary position is already expressed in his own life. An example is Noll’s study,48 which argues that throughout World War II, Jung enthusiastically supported the Nazis and was even a member of the Nazi party out of hope that Nazism would save the world from Judeo-Christian-Freudian rationalism in favor of the mysticism of the Arian collective unconscious. In contrast to the anti-modern Jungian position, Lacan’s position may be presented as a recognition of the split as an integral part of  A severe opponent of Jung from the Jewish side was Martin Buber. Buber responds to Jung’s lectures in Psychology and Religion (1937). According to Buber, Jung eliminates the significance of the divine Otherness in favor of the psyche of the individual through the reduction of the religious experience to the psychological experience: everything is psychological and there is a dissolution of the me-you relation (a relation that is the focus of Buber’s thought). In this respect, Buber sees in Jung the enemy of religious belief, particularly in its Jewish meaning. He blames Jung’s Gnostic side and claims that this side is that which turned Jungianism into a mysterious religion with hidden and “individual” knowledge, while the motif of the unification of contrasts cancels the me-you relations. See this discussion of Buber and his severe response to Jung’s book Answer to Job (1952). This correspondence appeared in its entirety in German in the periodical Merkur (Buber 1952: 171–176). On the relationship between Buber and Jung, and Jung and Gershom Scholem, see Margolin (2004). However, it should be mentioned that while Buber presented the me-you position as reflecting Judaism (in contrary, for instance, to Jungianism) there were also some who disagreed with him, and particularly Levinas and Lacan, as each of them argued separately against the motif of mutuality between the I and the you and related to Buber’s non-acknowledgment of the radicality of otherness. See Levinas (1993) and Lacan’s words in Seminar III (S3: 309). On the relation between Buber’s ethics of an equal me-you and the ethics of I-other of Levinas and Lacan, see Rabaté (2005). Regarding the relation between Christianity and Gnosis, one should pay attention to the attraction of both Protestantism and Jung (whose sources are more Protestant than Catholic) to the phenomena of Gnosis. For example, Ioan Couliano (1990) argues in Tree of Gnosis that Protestantism is the modern Gnostic revolution. Regarding the nihilist and therefore reactionary potential of modern Gnosticism, see the famous article by Hans Jonas, “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism”. The paper was added as an epilogue to the late English edition of Jonas’s book The Gnostic Religion (1962), which, as its name testifies, tries to find the nihilist common denominator between Gnostics and existentialism, particularly of the school of Heidegger (Jonas 1962: 320–340). Also see Margolin (2004: 11–19). However, see also Jung’s self-defense against Nazism in Psychology and Religion, attacking Protestantism as responsible to the Nazi transformation of the German psyche (Jung 1938: 81). 48  Noll (1997). 47

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Judeo-­Christian tradition (as he understands it) in which both man and the figure of God are not complete or perfect (the figure of God/the Other reflects on the figure of man). In comparison, the Jungian position is exactly the place of sliding to pre-Jewish or anti-Jewish I-myths, like those of Gnosticism, which point at a “knowledge” (Gnosis) about the psyche being perfect, as much as about its relation to perfect spiritual essences, that are separate from the body. This is in contrary to the biblical text, which points at the human being located in the body. Another question is whether there is a tight connection between the ethics of Judeo-Christian tradition and the ethics of psychoanalysis of the Freudian-Lacanian school, in terms of the place of the Other and otherness in the life of the subject. Theoretician Eric Santner, in his book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig,49 seeks to connect Rosenzweig’s modern Jewish theology and Freud’s psychoanalysis: What Freud and Rosenzweig have done, then, is to elaborate the ethical relation introduced into the world by Judeo-Christian monotheism—love of God as love of neighbor—as the basis of a distinctly modern ethical conception: my obligation to endure the proximity of the Other in their “moment of jouissance,” the demonic and undying singularity of their metaethical selfhood (in Freud’s view, it is perhaps only psychoanalysts who—at least ideally—embody this ethical attitude). To put it most simply, the Other to whom I am answerable has an unconscious, is the bearer of an irreducible and internal otherness, a locus of animation that belongs to no form of life.50

It looks like Santner follows Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, where Lacan connects the psychoanalytic ethics to that of  Santner (2001). See also Žižek’s theological book, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Žižek 2003), where he points at the firm connection between psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition. Compare to the collection of essays that connects Levinas and Lacan: Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter, (Fryer 2004), and the great affinity of the two doctrins: Harasym (1998). 50  Santner (2001: 82). Santner actually creates a “Levinasization” of Rosenzweig and a “Lacanization” of Freud by emphasizing the aspect of otherness in both; this way he indirectly connects the philosophy of Levinas and the psychoanalysis of Lacan. 49

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Judeo-­Christianity by analyzing the biblical commandment “Love thy neighbor as thyself ” and the way Paul understands this commandment, particularly in the Epistle to the Romans.51 Santner further argues that what is common to both ethics is the assumption that the human being is eternally lacking due to his place in the body, in the otherness of our body and the body of the other, of the jouissance of the other.52 The healing, according to Santner, is the recognition of the eternal, exilic state of the human, and the detachment from the trustworthy sense of home.53 Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis may be connected to the ethics of Judeo-Christianity, but why should Jung be connected to Gnostics? Most of all because Jung himself connected his psychology to the religious gnostic position. This was expressed in the vast interest he had in the writings of Nag Hammadi, discovered in Egypt in 1945, and in promoting research on these writings. This research had great influence on the widespread research of Jung called Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self.54 Jung’s Gnosticism was expressed in his belief that the body and soul are two sides of the same essence. Consequently, the body and soul in Jung direct to a transcendental spiritual essence, as written in his Mysterium Coniunctionis.55 It should be noted that Gnostics is dualist as it presents a clear distinction between good/spirit and bad/matter. Jung supposedly contradicts it by demanding the unification of contradictions, but it seems that both Gnosticism and Jungianism are similar in the idealist tendency that has a two-stage strategy: the first creates the dualist assumption, and the second presents the spiritual side of the equation as totally favorable. The spiritual side is what enables one to be exposed to a unitary world, which contains both sides, the good and the bad. Jung searched for historical proof for his unconscious internal experiences, and found two: one is the Gnostics, and the other is alchemy,  More on the conception of the neighbor in Paul and regarding the ethics of Lacan see my book: Benyamini (2012). 52  Santner (2001: 45, 82). 53  Santner (2001: 45). 54  See Jung (1951, esp. 184–221), and his selected writings on Gnostics, Jung (1992). 55  Storr (1973). 51

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which is a modern transformation of the Gnostic experience.56 Acording to Jung, alchemy, like Gnostics, has hidden knowledge about the unconscious; they both express the mental liberation from matter and the progress of the I that is exposed to the collective unconscious towards collaboration with the self.57 That is why Jung found so much interest in Gnostics and alchemy, which despite the Christian (and Judeo-Christian) oppression transformed into the collective unconscious and found breaches.58 One of these breaches is, of course, Jungian psychology, which expresses scientifically, according to Jung, the Gnostic truth all anew. It is no coincidence that Jung contrasts the Christian religion, particularly Catholicism, with the Gnostic heresy. Both Jung and Lacan would agree that Christianity, like Judaism, is a cultural framework, an ethos that exceeds their religious dimension. And thus, Lacan attributed himself to the Catholic as well as Jewish culture, and particularly to a certain tendency in the Judeo-Christian culture which sees its origin in the biblical text and with the relationship of the believer with the biblical God. It is important to emphasize that this is not a transcendent divinity in the Greek or anthropomorphic sense, but a divinity of proximity and distance at the same time, a divinity which is the total otherness, as the unconscious is conceived in the Freudian psychoanalysis. Also, it is not a Gnostic divinity, such that contains some hidden truth, some mysterious “knowledge” that must be revealed. This position is held by various theologians in both Judaism and Christianity, such as Yehuda Halevi, Buber, Rosenzweig and Pascal. Christianity, to some extent, particularly the Catholicism, emphasized the aspect of the body (and not of transcendency) by crucifixion, as seen already in Paul’s epistles. It is Paul who spoke of the sin in the name, and from the point of view of a hypothetical “I”, by using an example from everyday life “because of the infirmities of your flesh” (Romans 6: 19; KJV) regarding the battle, which has to do with the internal proximity in  See Jung (1938: 97–99).  Segal (1995: 26–27). See also Jung’s study of the system of symbols in dreams and alchemy (Jung 1974: 91–256). 58  Jung (1972). 56 57

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human life between sin and law. This battle takes place outside the lustful flesh in which man is placed (in contrary to the mind which is the basis of faith). In this sense, Paul constitutes an “I” out of the experience of the flesh, and not out of a Gnostic-cosmological discussion on the spirit.59 Although he came from the Hellenistic tradition that contained such Gnostic messages, he chose to oppose them and emphasize our being in the body (Romans 7-8). Paul’s position was contradictory, therefore, to the Gnostic movements (as they were known in the Western culture through the Christian prism that reached Lacan), which aspired to reach the real hidden knowledge, which is one side of the dualism: truth and hidden spirituality on the one side, and falsehood and matter on the other. Knowledge is supposed to redeem man of the dualist situation towards unification with the spiritual element alone. On the other hand, it is possible to say that Christianity, as based in Paul and in the Gospel of John, solves this dilemma by uniting the material with the spiritual element through the incarnation of the spirit in the flesh and through recognition of the soul within the sinning body. In this respect, it may be argued that Lacan is part of a Christian, anti-metaphysical movement, but it should be emphasized that it is not a tendency that only attempts to solve dualism with regard to the signifier, but also wants to linger on the spilt, the paradoxical relation between the signifier and body.

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 Altizer (1985: 63–66).

7 Lévi-Strauss and Lacan following ‘Totem and Taboo’: What Is a Collective Unconscious?

In Totem and Taboo Freud revives the figure of the Father-God as part of the drama of the murder of the primal father who transformed into a metaphysical God after his death. Freud does it following the Christian myth of the sacrifice of God and against the metaphysical representation of God. This description of God, evolved from Freud’s anti-religious position which was anti-metaphysical; Freud presented the primal father as real flesh and blood, walking on the face of the Earth. However, when Freud described the memory of that primal father, a memory which constituted the collective human unconscious, he stuck to the biological discourse in order to create a foundation for his anti-spiritual discussion (against Jung’s conception). Doing so, Freud also slipped to a discourse of a metaphysical nature, about a primal unconscious that diverts from the personal and is inherited from one generation to the next. This is the background for Lacan’s motivation to render the Freudian Oedipus more abstract: a desire to detach from biologistic-Lamarckian remnants that are prevalent in Freud’s writings, as well as protect the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_7

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a-metaphysical status of the Father and the Other. It is in this fashion that Lacan requested to “return to Freud” and at the same time to constitute an independent discourse that saves the father figure, by making a distinction between the real-biological father, the imaginary father (the relationship with the father’s body image, the imago) and the symbolic Father of language (father as signifier, Name-of-the-Father). Through this distinction Lacan converted the Freudian-Lamarckian collective unconscious into the collective Lévi-Straussian unconscious (which constitutes the big Other as a function of the Symbolic order), and the real primal-­ biological father into the Father as a cultural function and a signifier. This way, the connection between the unconscious and language and the Symbolic order was emphasized in Lacan’s theory, while subjugating the subject to the collective symbolic unconscious. Another question remains as to the way in which Lacan asked not to distance himself from the bodily dimension via the signifier, but to find the connection between them. The main Lacanian transfigurations of Totem and Taboo can be schematically presented as follows: 1. Psycho-biological collective unconscious > symbolic collective unconscious 2. The primal bodily father > the dead father as a signifier In the 1930s and 40s Lacan turned his discussion about the Imaginary towards a structuralist discussion of the unconscious that is structured like a language, considering the Freudian discussion of the Father. Calude Lévi-Strauss’s conceptions helped Lacan solve a theoretical dilemma in conceptualizing the Freudian Eodipus. As I have already mentioned in previous chapters, this was the main purpose of Lacan in the context of his desire to revise psychoanalysis. Still, it remains to see whether this purpose caused his theory to slide towards a metaphysical discussion of

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the Symbolic order and of what Lacan calls “the big Other”, and whether biological metaphysics was transformed into structural metaphysic.1 For this purpose, it will be interesting to examine the way in which the concept of the big Other evolves, inter alia, from the rereading of Lévi-­ Strauss and his rereading of Totem and Taboo. Metaphysics constitutes one side of Lacan’s dilemma between the clinical-­particular and the theoretical and abstract, the universal and the contingent, a dilemma which is well embodied in his ambivalent relation to philosophy (also following Freud’s relation to philosophy). This discussion is inspired by the arguments of Derrida, Lacou-Labarthes and Nancy, who claim that the Lacanian theory is embedded in metaphysics, despite its struggle with it, and especially because of its structural basis.2 It is significant to mention that this deconstructive position consists here only as an inspiration that drives me to read Lacan and find in his own discourse the dilemma surrounding metaphysics.

 Jacques-Allan Miller notes that it is possible to define Lacan of the 1950s as Structuralist. See for example Miller (2000: 46–48). Also see in Dor (2000) an elaboration of the connection between the unconscious and language in Lacan, and on the importance of language for him in relatively late stages of his teaching; in particular, see the opening chapter (ibid., pp. 1–8), in which it is argued that Lacan’s return to Freud was completely dependent on his relation to language, beginning with “The Function and the Field of Speech” (1953). In this sense, Dor sees Lacan first of all as a structuralist psychoanalyst. Leader (2003: 48), presents a clear argument against the presentation of Lacan as distant from his structuralist roots. Contrary to them Slavoj Žižek (1990: 89) prefers to emphasize the later Lacan. For him, the important Lacan is the later one, who is not logocentric—as Jacques Derrida presents it—but relates to language to speak of what diverts from it. 2  The critical discourse on metaphysics is rooted in the Lacanian discourse that follows the criticism of the school of Jacques Derrida, particularly in the writing of Derrida and Lacou-Labarthes and Nancy. Particularly see Derrida (1996) where he posits his deconstructive criticism on the discourse of Lacan. The collection of articles by Muller and Richardson (1988) presents the argument between Derrida and Lacan about Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. Saal (1994) relates to Derrida’s criticism of the metaphysics of the signifier in Lacan, but also brings Lacan’s words at the end of his life about Derrida: “maybe what is different between us is that he does not have to deal with suffering”. A sharp presentation of Derrida’s criticism of Lacan may be found in the dialogue of Derrida and Roudinesco (2004: 166–196). An important criticism on Lacan may be found in Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1973), who show how in his essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”, Lacan on the one hand goes against the metaphysics of the sign, and on the other hand constitutes the metaphysics of the real and the absent. 1

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7.1 The Anxiety of Metaphysics It is well known that Freud was opposed to the philosophical discourse and to the unified world view that it often presents (as Freud conceived it).3 Lacan too was suspicious towards the philosophical/metaphysical/ abstract discourse, as well as towards any unified system which revolves around the concept of man. As I already mentioned, Lacan perceived the analytical discourse as opposed to the university and the scientific discourse, which aspire to organize reality in a schematic-equational manner and narrow down the particular to a concept. On this background Lacan argued that his book Écrits should be treated as is, or put aside, and not mixed with academic/philosophical discourse. It seems that the barrier that blocks academic reading is pinned in Lacan’s style of speech as is often expressed in the seminars that he gave, with the purpose of training psychoanalysts. Contrary to the shallow impression that the Lacanian text is anti-metaphysical, there is an incessant and almost insoluble tension in it between the demand to speak about the concrete subjective and the slide or temptation towards the metaphysical-philosophicalschematical.4 Indeed, Lacan emphatically rejected a psychoanalytical metaphysical discussion based on the schematics of language or on the unified worldview which is at the basis of the philosophical discourse. However, it is an internal war against his own tendencies, which are expressed, as mentioned, in his attraction to the philosophical conversation, to the linguistic transformation of the father figure, and at the end of his teaching—to the mathematical-logical-topological representations of the psychoanalytical principals. That being the case, all throughout his teaching Lacan consolidates his discourse around theoretical entities that precede discourse, delimit it, and enable the project of the return to Freud, which is also the conceptualization of Freudian motifs in abstract terms.  See for example Freud (1926: 95) in which he presents an anti-philosophical position, but also Herzog 1988 on the myth of Freud as an anti-philosopher. On Lacan’s relation to philosophy see Chap. 4 in Macey (1988) and also Shepherdson (2003) and Borch-Jacobsen (1994b). On the relation of Freud and Lacan to philosophy see Boothby (2001). 4  Compare to the arguments of Bowie (1991), Chap. 3 “Language and the unconscious”. 3

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Lacan feared that his concepts would become disconnected from the physical and get obfuscated. A typical example of the connection between these two aspects may be found in the term “big Other”. Often its meaning is the Symbolic order into which the subject is “thrown”, and that is why it contains his being-almost-transcendental and may even sound as a new name for an old figure: God. In the same way the concept of the Name-of-the-Father has a metaphysical status as such that is beyond, transcendental to the subject. It seems that the transcendence of these structural concepts, is also the reason for obfuscation: it is not always clear what is the meaning of one concept or another in the system as Lacan the structuralist of the 1950s is more interested in the internal-systemic relations between the concepts; these are well expressed in the famous L scheme that describes the imaginary axis—the I (a) and his specular other (a’)—in meeting the symbolic axis of the unconscious (subject/id S and the big Other A). However, the metaphysicality is not only of the entities themselves, like the small other facing the big Other. The metaphysical principal that is represented in this scheme is actually found in the acute distinction between the two types of otherness (this distinction is clearer than the definition of any theoretical entity in the axis) and between the imaginary axis and the symbolic axis.5 Since the concept of the “big Other” is one side of a structural setting, it contains a sequence of meanings which can be counted along the theoretical work of Lacan between the 1950s and the 1970s: the Father/the primordial mother/the unconscious/the Symbolic order/language, the treasure of signifiers/the fellow man in an ethical context/God/the woman in jouissance (in the late Lacan)/ the government, the party, a political leader, the king, and so on (other meanings are exemplified in the writings of Slavoj Žižek). Henceforth, the meanings of the term “the big Other” oscillate between two poles:

 See Wilden (1968: 162) on the difficulty of understanding the L scheme, and Fink (1997: 218) on Lacan’s work with the theoretical structures throughout their constant transformation. 5

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1 . The big Other as a concrete function represented by a certain figure. 2. The transcendental order of language and the rules of civilization (the relations of kinship). The meaning of the term oscillates between the pole of the Other as a figure that fulfills a certain role but has a physical presence for the subject, and a type of a cultural setting which may be represented for it metaphysically. Therefore, the term “big Other” has a metaphysical status in the Lacanian discourse first of all, due to the meanings it contains as an Other with a transcendental status towards the subject (while crashing into its anti-metaphysical status);6 secondly, due to its characterization as a term with various meanings which may be theoretically transformed according to such and other discourse requirements; thirdly, as a term whose status within the discourse is that of a metaphysical term which precedes the discourse and founds it. This dilemma, in Lacan’s discourse, between concreteness and metaphysics exemplified in the analysis of the term “the big Other” demonstrates the broader dilemma regarding the construction of Lacan’s theory in itself: on the one hand the tendency to deal with the real dimension of the clinic, and on the other hand, the need to organize the psychoanalytical knowledge in a conceptualized manner. This dilemma was a consequence of the attempt to disconnect the Freudian discourse from its biological remnants; however, during the conceptualization of Freudianism and the abandonment of the biological realness of the subject towards an a-biological realness, the Lacanian discourse needed the theoretical metaphysical support of the structural discourse of Lévi-Strauss.

7.2 The Jealous Father of ‘Totem and Taboo’ In Totem and Taboo Freud composed his “myth” (Freud himself call it: “scientific myth”7) about the birth of humanity, basing it mainly on the works of Fraser and Darwin, and integrating the familial/tribal relations,  In this context it should be mentioned that in the “Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious”, Lacan says that the reason he moved from the signification of a small other to the big Other is to present the beyond (au-delà); E: 435. 7  On the way Freud himself perceived Totem and Taboo as a myth see Brunner (1995: 156–157). 6

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which are structured according to the Oedipal complex of the father-son relations into his perception. Totem and Taboo offers the most important Freudian discussion of the figure of God as an ideal reincarnation of the figure of the primal father. The members of the primal tribe murdered the father, in order to gain jouissance (incest with the mother and sisters), which until then was kept for the father alone. However, the murderous sons were ambivalent: on the one hand they felt hatred and fear, and on the other hand admiration. They wanted to appease the father, as consequence of their guilt, and that is why the dead father had ultimately won—what he has personally forbidden until his murder, became even more sinful due to the psychological construction of the superego.8 Since then, claimed Freud in Totem and Taboo, the prohibition of incest, the law-of-the-dead-father, became the basis of religion, culture, and human morale as a sublimation of the feelings of guilt towards the father (who was reincarnated as the monotheistic God9). It seems that the figure of God was designed by Freud based  The term “superego” is later than Totem and Taboo that was written in 1912–1913. However in later texts, from the 1920s and 1930s, Freud uses this concept to describe the internalization of the father figure in Totem and Taboo. 9  See Eliade (1963) on the tendency in the study of religion to search the “original” religion, a tendency which Freud shared. For a critique of the form of developmental thinking in Freud and in modern science see Küng (1990). For an anthropological critique of Totem and Taboo see in particular the studies of Freud’s contemporaries: Malinowski ((1927) 1960) and Kroeber (1920). Eliade criticized Freud for emphasizing only one aspect of religion—the psychological aspect—on account of the historical, cultural and social, and thus oversimplified religion (Eliade 1963: 19). Other criticisms (which preceded Eliade’s) argued that Freud’s psychoanlaytic research in Totem and Taboo has no scientific value because it relies on anthropological research from the nineteenth century by Darwin, Fraser, Robertson, Smith, Atkinson, and others, which were already outdated. Freud replied to these arguments in his late essay Moses and Monotheism, a study which has also been criticized for relying on historical studies which are not relevant to Freud’s contemporary historical research. Thus, for instance, regarding the arguments about the incorrectness of the work of Robertson-Smith, on which Freud based Totem and Taboo, he answers: “Above all, however, I am not an ethnologist but a psychoanalyst. I had a right to take out of ethnological literature what I might need for the work of analysis. The writings of Robertson Smith—a man of genius—have given me valuable points of contact with the psychological material of analysis and indications for its employment. I have never found myself on common ground with his opponents” (Freud 1939: 130–131). It is worth mentioning that Freud admitted elsewhere that in his research he actually verifies his assumptions: “I read thick books without being interested in them too much, since I already know the conclusions; my instinct tells me that. However, the conclusions must find their way through all the reading material in the subject” (quoted in Jones, Ernst 1953, vol. 2: 394). 8

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on the patriarchic images of the biblical Yahweh: a jealous God-Father who takes vengeance of the primal sin, a god who imagines the Israelites as his sons, and demands of them to fulfill his commandments (thus Freud ignored all motherly/feminine representations of divinity, as he neglected the mother figure in his Oedipal psychoanalytical theory; this disregard led to the claims against the phallo-centrism of his theory). However, the biblical God, as perceived in the time of Freud and in his cultural environment, was identical to the Christian God, and particularly to the modern-Protestant “fashion”, that presented him as a cruel and revengeful God, in contrary to the God of love, his son Jesus. In “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) (which preceded Totem and Taboo in pointing at the connection between the obsessive pathology and the religious ritual) this Christian inspiration was manifested in Freud’s words: Some part of this instinctual repression is effected by its religions, in that they require the individual to sacrifice his instinctual pleasure to the Deity: ‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.’ In the development of the ancient religions one seems to discern that many things which mankind had renounced as ‘iniquities’ had been surrendered to the Deity and were still permitted in his name, so that the handing over to him of bad and socially harmful instincts was the means by which man freed himself from their domination.10

“Vengeance is mine” quotes Freud the monotheist God, the Lord, der Herr, who is, like his name, the master (the big Other) in the Lacanian sense. In his obsessive mastery, the Other forces the subject to waive his jouissance so that he, the God, will be able to re-experience it through the exact same subject, but this time in partnership with the abuses of the superego. As Freud articulates: “we see this same ego as a poor creature  Freud (1907: 126).

10

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owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego.”11

7.3 The Processing of the Theory of Lévi-­Strauss in the Lacanian Discourse In the beginning of the 1950s Lacan presents his famous distinction between the small other (l’autre, the specular image in the mirror, the other with which I have reciprocal narcissistic relations) and the big Other (l’Autre, the order of language and speech, the Symbolic, organized under the function of the symbolic father). This distinction was inspired, inter alia, by the research of Claud Lévi-Strauss (in particular those provided in the Elementary Structures of Kinship, 1949), in which he founded his anthropology upon the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Lévi-Strauss understood the Symbolic order as organizing all social relations and relations of kinship. Under the inspiration of Lévi-­Strauss, who raised the idea about “universal laws” and the “Symbolic system of signifiers” into which we are born and to which we adapt, Lacan founded the term of the symbolic law. Henceforth this concept in Lacan does not relate to a specific law, but to a basic principle, which constitutes the network of social relations. The Law contains a network of universal principles, which enable the social existence and the structures which control all forms of social exchange: the giving of gifts, the exchange of women between families for the purpose of marriage (the exchange that is the consequence of the taboo on incest) and so on. The basic structure of the exchange is communication itself, and that is why the symbolic-­patriarchal law is structured as a linguistic entity like the Law of the signifier, of language. 11

 Freud (1923: 55).

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Lévi-Strauss had a significant impact on Lacan in those years, and he continued to accompany Lacan’s theoretical development thereafter.12,13 The word “impact” usually evokes its passive dimension: the “external” dimension casts its spell on a certain thinker, and he is captured in its charms. However, one should not ignore the active dimension: the discourse of a certain thinker demands internal theoretical processing of another discourse, in order to solve various theoretical dilemmas. This is the case with the discourse of Lacan: like most French post World War II thinkers, Lacan was also filled with wonder and enthusiasm from the new theory of Lévi-Strauss, but for him it was not only an arbitrary encounter with another theory, rather a sort of revelation since it solved for him a theoretical problem which he tried to solve throughout the 1930s and the 1940s following the development of his discourse. As mentioned in Chap. 3, in Family Complexes Lacan tried to render the Freudian theory in more abstract terms. The purpose of this conceptualization was to situate the motive of the Oedipus complex, as expressed particularly in Totem and Taboo, inside a conceptualized principle in which the father figure is a cultural function, rather than a flesh and blood figure (or a biological genetic essence). But, as I showed, Lacan risked sliding to metaphysical positions. In the beginning, these positions were at the risk of being drawn too close to the Jungian conception of the psyche and of the collective-archetypical-unconscious. From this point it seemed that the theory of Lévi-Strauss supplied Lacan with what he searched for and could not find until that stage: a  More on the impact of Lévi-Strauss on Lacan, as well as on the difference between them see in particular Dunand (1996) and Leader (2003). In the same context it should be mentioned that Lévi-­Strauss’s impact on Lacan was not mutual; although Lévi-Strauss was a friend of Lacan, he found almost no interest in his theory. In an interview held with him, Lévi-Strauss spoke of his difficulty to understand Lacan’s theory (Lévi-Strauss and Eribon (1988: 73–74). Lévi-Strauss also admits that Lacan’s turning into a “guru” at a certain stage made him distance himself from him even further; furthermore, he argues in the same interview that he does not understand why Lacan is being attributed to the “structuralist pantheon” (ibid.: 74). 13  The anthropologist Clifford Geertz discusses in Chap. 2 of his book Works and Lives (Geertz 1988), Lévi-Srauss’ mode of writing of the work Tristes Tropics. Geertz characterizes structuralism as losing connection to life with its disgust of the carnal and the formalistic metaphysics of being. It seems that Lacan had to deal with this detachment in the processing he made to the structuralist discourse already at an early stage, putting an emphasis on the place of the fall from the chain of signifiers (the Real). Read more Geertz on Lévi-Strauss in Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz 1973: 345–359). 12

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theoretical position which will enable him to rethink the Freudian Oedipus in abstract terms, but at the same time will have a scientific rather than a spiritualistic dimension (as Lacan perceived Jung’s theory). The processing of the Lévi-Straussian discourse and its internalization into the Lacanian discourse was actually part of Lacan’s attempt to establish a psychoanalysis of rational-scientific methods towards its constitution as an a-human science that does not revolve around the autonomic ego of the individual. Lacan had to pay a for the processing of the Lévi-­ Straussian discourse into his discourse by distancing from the singular corporeality. However, how has Lacan’s self-defense against Jungian spirituality not caused him to fall into another trap: that of the structuralist “spirituality”, i.e., the metaphysics of the Symbolic order and the big Other. It is true that Lévi-Strauss enabled Lacan to maintain the discussion on the essence of language and social structure, but at the same time the discussion moved to a dimension that included a holistic and metaphysical conception of the human being. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan’s motivation was to find the singularity of their theories vis-a-vis Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious (the origin of this contradiction already existing in Freud). However, the question is, has the abstract conceptualization of Oedipus as a type of a collective unconscious in the sense of the Symbolic order and the big Other, not actually sustain Jung’s grain of thought about the totalistic collective unconscious, which is beyond the existence of the individual, beyond singularity? Do Lacan and Lévi-Strauss not slide towards a metaphysics of the human psyche? The name “Lamarck”, or “Lamarckism”, which Lévi-Strauss wished to shove out of psychoanalysis and anthropology is the consequence of the above discussion. The discussion of Freud and Jung’s Lamarckism, together with the self-defense of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan from it will highlight the problematics in Lacan’s distancing from Jung. It was indeed the major problem Lacan faced: how does the universal-collective Symbolic contain the contingent. It should be mentioned that the Lamarckian legacy, which sled both to Jungian and Freudian discourses, contained exactly this danger—the ego as a function of the collective, both in the corporeal and the psychological dimension. Indeed, as will be further explicated, LéviStrauss and Lacan wished to reorganize the Freudian discourse in the

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1950s and emphasize the synchronic dimension of Totem and Taboo, while banishing the myth from its Lamarckian heritage. However, it should be examined to what extent the collectivist potential remained valid even after the structural aufhebung of the Freudian Lamarckism. It seems that Freud’s attraction to the Lamarckian insight was a result of his dilemma on whether to base his theory on a concrete father figure, or rather on a father function which organizes the universal order of the human culture. Since Freud did not live to encounter structuralist linguistics and anthropology, he turned to the biological principle which offered him the universal dimension. However, in that way Freud also sled into a metaphysical dimension in his theory. This metaphysical dimension, sled into Lacan’s theory as well through the presentation of the big Other and the father. One should not paint Freudian theory in Lamarckian shades, but it is worth pointing at this shade in his work, Totem and Taboo, that Lévi-Strauss and Lacan attempt to contend with.

7.4 Lacan Following Lévi-Strauss: The Mechanism of Language and the Metaphysical Danger As I have already shown, Lacan, like Freud (after the separation from Jung), was disturbed by the mere comparison between him and Jung and tried to distinguish between his own theory and methods of treatment and those of Jung. Since the 1950s, Lacan severely objected to anything that has to do with Jung while being assisted by the theory of Lévi-Strauss. Thus, as early as Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (1954–1955), Lacan presents himself as a structuralist who protects the distinctions of Lévi-Strauss and thus opposes Jung. However, already at this stage, problems with the new processing discourse emerge, as can be read in the lesson titled “The Universal Symbolic”. Lacan, who protects his and Lévi-Strauss’ conception of the symbolic, is also aware of the fact that the “pure” structural method holds a metaphysical danger which may project on his psychoanalysis. He warns that the Lévi-Straussian Symbolic order might bring back, through the back

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door, the old God of theology. In other words, he is afraid that the symbol will be non-other than a new revelation of God in a mask. Thus, according to Lacan, Lévi-Strauss put into question his own separation between the level of the Symbolic and that of nature.14 It seems that the reference to God here is not to the biblical divinity, but to a transcendental divinity which comes to the monotheistic religions from Aristotelian metaphysics. As we will later see, Lacan’s defensiveness against this metaphysical position is a way to return to the big Other in its biblical sense, that is, a big Other who is not static and abstract; an Other that represents the Symbolic order for the subject. Lacan’s defense against the theological metaphysical representation of the Other/God, will derive, therefore, from a specific tendency of the religious framework—the anti-metaphysical tendency in Judaism and Christianity. Lacan and Lévi-Strauss were thus aware of the danger of sliding to a metaphysical discussion of the subject, the big Other, and the Symbolic, due to the universal nature of the latter. In the same lesson of Seminar II another danger appears: the danger of sliding into a Jungian psychology that conceives the Symbolic as a collective unconscious that is seemingly separate from the personal unconscious. Lacan also adds there that according to Lévi-Strauss, the Symbolic always works from the beginning, it is always primary and whole, and he is always there for the human creature. For Lacan, it is not different from how the unconscious works in analysis. However, Lacan reports that in a conversation that he had with Lévi-Strauss, he was hesitant about the constancy of the unconscious and almost sled into a psychologistic position (in the sense of self and individual psychology). Thus, Lacan emphasizes in his lesson that his conversation with Lévi-Strauss was not about something of the type of the Jungian collective unconscious (a mental essence which is at the same time individual and general), but about a system in which the subject is embedded and in which it operated mechanistically. This is in opposition to the psychologistic distinction between two types of unconscious: private subjective vis-a-vis external-objective.

14

 S2: 35.

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Lacan explains this mechanistic position while testing the relationship between the science of cybernetics and psychoanalysis.15 In fact, this is also in response to the interest Lévi-Strauss himself found in this field. In his influential essay from 1951 “Language and the Analysis of Social Laws” Lévi-Strauss says that there is a human field which enables mathematic research of the kind that Wiener’s cybernetics offers, a field that is different from all other fields of research that relate to man.16 Therefore, Lévi-Strauss sees in language a field that must be studied in light of the insights of structural linguistics particularly in phonology. He notes that language is a social phenomenon, which has unknown implications for us.17 Thus, according to Lacan, who follows the lead of Lévi-Strauss, there is a mechanistic dimension in the unconscious, a mathematical-universal dimension that controls us as marionettes, as we are speaking subjects that live in a language which has its own rules. I.e., the unconscious is always collective, and there is no private-personal unconscious. This is also the exact point that calls for the resistance of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan to Jung. As we have already seen, the parallel between Jung and Structuralists, and particularly Lévi-Strauss, is always a source of comparison of various Jungians between Lacan and Jung. All this while relying on the structuralist position of Lacan which includes the assumption that we pre-conceptualize the world through intellectual structures. Since Lacan had taken a great deal from Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, and since this point is the basis to the comparison between Lacan and Jung, it will be interesting to dwell first on the resistance of Lévi-Strauss himself to the psychology of Jung and to the mere possibility of comparison with him.

 See his lecture “Psychoanalysis and Cybernetics or on the nature of language”, of 22nd June 1955. The lecture was given at the Société Française de Psychanalyse and was added to the volume of Seminar II (S2: 294–308). This lecture was part of a series of lectures in which some of the great minds of the humanities in France at the time participated. These peoplerelated to the points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other discourses. Among others were present: Alexander Koyré, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emil Benveniste, and Claud Lévi-Strauss himself, to whose lecture “Kinship in the relation of the family”, from the 30th of November 1955, Lacan had related in detail in his lesson on “the Symbolic Universe”. 16  Lévi-Strauss (1963: 56). 17  Lévi-Strauss (1963: 56–57). 15

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An attack by Lévi-Strauss against Jung which is relevant to our discussion may be found in his essay “The Structural Study of Myth” in his book Structural Anthropology (1963).18 Lévi-Strauss argues in this essay that psychology and research of the myth in Jung are the opposite of hermeneutical openness since they do not recognize the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure regarding the arbitrariness of the relations between signifier and signified.19 According to Lévi-Strauss, the Jungian position represents the death of hermeneutics. This is also Lacan’s perception: Jung’s hermeneutical openness is imaginary, due to the Jungian assumption that there is an inherent “meaning” to the content of the unconscious (as expressed in the Jungian interpretation of dream and myth). In comparison, Lacan (following Lévi-Strauss) sees in the mechanism of language the place of hermeneutical openness, since paradoxically it is actually the mechanic, rigidness of the laws of language that enable subjective hermeneutics within it. This mechanism does not enable, according to Lacan, to understand the Symbolic as a spiritualist essence (God, the spirit of the world, etc.), but as a function which is cultural-social-­ linguistic. To him, the concept “spiritual essence” consists of a danger of the Symbolic turning into a pantheist entity (equality between God/the Symbolic/the spiritual and nature). On this background Lacan attacks Jung in Seminar II, emphasizing that there is no distinction between collective unconscious and individual unconscious as Jung wishes to make.20 The two types of unconscious are one: it is the Symbolic order which the individual is completely tied to, he exists inside it. The unconscious of the individual is a function of the control of the Symbolic as an order that is the total otherness of language.  Lévi-Strauss expressed his objection to Jung already in “Introduction a L’œuvre de Marcel Mauss” (Lévi-Strauss 1950: xxxii), where he tries to distinguish between Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious as containing symbols without any general symbolic system, and the conception of Mauss that acknowledges the existence of a single cultural symbolic system. Compare also to Jung’s own words, according to which Mauss and Lévy-Bruhl are writers who preceded him in his arguments about a collective unconscious: Jung (1938: 51). However, it appears that Lévi-Strauss expressed regret for his attack on Jung at a later stage, out of the assumption that Jung was open, in his last years, to structuralist research (see in the quote from an interview held by George Steiner with Lévi-Strauss (Chemouni 1997: 206)). 19  Lévi-Strauss (1963: 208–209). 20  S2: 30–31. 18

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In this context it is worth mentioning Anthony Wilden’s claim that there is a correlation in Lacanian theory between the enigmatic term the “big Other” and the “unconscious” as his formulas from the 1950s “the unconscious is the discourse of the big Other” and “the unconscious is structured like a language” suggest. For Wilden, since the big Other represents the collective order of language, the Lacanian unconscious (and the Freudian, according to Lacanian interpretation) is therefore always a collective unconscious. Wilden even brings Freud’s words as an answer to Jung: “the unconscious is collective in any case”.21 A reinforcement of Wilden’s words may be found in Lacan’s essay “The situation of psychoanalysis and the training of psychoanalysts in 1956” from Ecrits.22 Lacan argues that the Symbolic order is exterior to man.23 It is the basis for the existence of the unconscious. Lacan stresses that for Freud the fact that the unconscious is both personal and collective goes without saying, and it is the same Freud of Totem and Taboo and of Moses and Monotheism, who spoke of the unconscious that passes from one generation to the next. However, for Lacan, the meaning of the inheritance of the unconscious is that the unconscious is beyond the individual, it is something which is related to the signifier.24 Wilden makes his argument in light of Lacan’s essay “The Freudian Thing” (1958), which connects the Freudian unconscious and Lévi-­ Strauss perception of the Symbolic order.25 According to Wilden, the common denominator of Freud, Lévi-Strauss, and Lacan is that they conceive of incest as the border between nature and culture. The prohibition is a contradiction that serves and encourages the act of exchange in human society: the social rules as well as the grammatical rules of language. Therefore, according to Lacan, following Lévi-Strauss, Freud understood the unconscious first of all in its sexual dimension, when the sense of the concept “sexual” here is not biological and/or bodily, but related to a wide cultural-social dimension, that is, it is the system of  Wilden (1968: 266).  E: 384–411. 23  E: 392. 24  Ibid. 25  E: 359. 21 22

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kinship and marriage relations, the system of exchanges of women between families in a society. Henceforth, the unconscious, which is a function of human sexuality, is also a function of human language—since the language is also a system of relations of exchange (an exchange of signifiers and of women). This is the connection between the sexual Freudian unconscious and the Lévi-Straussian and Lacanian Symbolic. All these are united under the term the “big Other” or the “Symbolic order” which is the dimension of language, of relations of exchange, and at the same time of human sexuality. The Freudian unconscious, for Lacan, works under the law of this Symbolic order, of the laws of kinship which are the social parallel of the laws of language. This reference from Lacan highlights his attempt to unite the dimension of sexuality with the dimension of culture, as he wished to do from the beginning. Human sexuality and Freudian libidinal unconscious are actually collective universal, since they are the consequence of man’s functioning in language. At this point, a question arises: did this structural strategy of Lacan already contain the danger of sliding towards Jungianism, in which the Freudian unconscious is losing its bodily-sexual dimension in favor of the cultural or collective dimension?

7.5 Lévi-Strauss and Lacan Rereading ‘Totem and Taboo’ The abstraction of corporeality is particularly acute in a new reading of Lévi-Strauss and Lacan of Freud’s Totem and Taboo. Lacan of the 1930s saw Totem and Taboo as a Freudian myth with an internal psychoanalytic truth, even though it was a myth invented by Freud himself. This was Lacan’s stance even before he was exposed to The Elementary Structures of Kinship by Lévi-Strauss (first published in 1949). Lacan’s position strengthened even further following the reading of this important work of Lévi-Strauss, which founded the structural anthropology that Lacan was so influenced by in the 1950s, particularly regarding his concept of the Symbolic order and the relations of kinship.

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Lévi-Strauss’s theory presented in the Elementary structures of Kinship can be read as a structural explanation of Freud’s mythical theory of the law forbidding incest as the basis to all human culture. Lévi-Strauss is the one who gave Lacan the thrust to develop his early insight, by saying that Totem and Taboo may be an invented myth, but it describes a real synchronic situation of the human condition, not necessarily at the dawn of history, but at any given moment in human culture. Lévi-Strauss argued that Totem and Taboo does not point at an event that happened in reality as Freud tells it, but it symbolically expresses an ancient eternal dream, i.e., a fantasy about our relation to kinship and to the prohibition of incest. Lévi-Strauss thus points at a paradox in Freud’s work: the historical theory of Freud about the origins of human society actually speaks of the condition of humanity in the present.26 According to Wilden, in his a-historic position Lévi-Strauss tried to neutralize the Lamarckian and genetic sides in Totem and Taboo.27 I.e., Freud’s attempt to find the connection between the ontogenesis (the development of the individual) and the phylogenesis (the development of the collective).28 It was part of the resolute resistance of Lévi-Strauss to what he called “illusion of the archaic”, particularly as expressed in Jung’s theory of archetypes.29 The Jungian theory is mentioned as flawed since, like other psychological theories, it wishes to make a deduction on the psychology of the primitive or the archaic from the psychology of the child or the mentally ill, and vice versa. Lévi-Strauss also counts Freud’s theory in Totem and Taboo as one of these theories.30 It raises the question whether indeed Freud and Jung’s theories were so deeply rooted in the genetic-biological discourse, and did they include an attempt to liberate themselves from this discourse?

 Lévi-Strauss (1949: 491).  Wilden (1968: 252). 28  Lévi-Strauss (1949: 491). 29  Lévi-Strauss (1949: 84–97). Also see his essay “The Concept of archaism in anthropology” which was published in his book Structural Anthropology (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 101–119). 30  As Lévi-Strauss notes, Freud expressed this position in particular in Chaps. 2 and 4 of Totem and Taboo (Lévi-Strauss 1949: 88, n. 1). 26 27

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7.6 Jung, Freud, Lamarckism Both Freud and Jung describe the development of human history in relation to the development of the individual from infancy to maturity; the comparison of the primitive with the child is derived therefrom. Jung’s anthropological psychological point of origin (and Freud’s who was influenced by him in this aspect) is that the archaic primitive is more real and deep and therefore should be revealed. This is also the root of the Jungian conception of the collective unconscious—it is more archaic and deeper than consciousness and even more than the personal unconscious. It is worth emphasizing that Jung’s tendency was to go from the archaic towards the pathological individual and learn about it (Jung studied cultural symbols of the archetypes that are included in dreams and psychotic hallucinations), and Freud’s tendency was to go from the infantile and the private-pathological towards the human and the archaic. This is apparent in particular in Totem and Taboo and in Freud’s conception of God as a projection of the father figure, and of the ambivalent relations of the son with his father. Freud wished to distinguish himself from Jung in composing Totem and Taboo. For him, they both link the figure of God with the figure of the Father, but the link is from completely different directions. In this context, it is interesting to note that Freud cites Jung’s book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912) mentioning that it “is governed by views differing in certain respects from mine.”31 However, in the same chapter (a few pages later), in the context of an Oedipal inter-generational struggle of Gods in the various mythologies, Freud sends the reader again to Jung and notes the great affinity between them, which is at the same time the reason to the great distance between them: “The view maintained by Jung (1912) that the god who kills the animal is a libidinal symbol implies a concept of libido other than that which has hitherto been employed and seems to me questionable from every point of view.”32 This quote constitutes our point of departure regarding the theoretical relations between Freud/Lacan and Jung: the way in which Freud and 31 32

 Freud (1913: 146, note 1).  Freud (1913: 150, note 1).

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Jung interpret the concept “libido”—the one in a sexual direction and the other in a general direction –reflects great proximity and distance at the same time. However, is the collective unconscious of Freud and Jung also identical in its meaning? Each one of them, based on the biological-­ genetical research, processed it: Freud took it to the psycho-biological direction and Jung to the direction of ideas. Freud and Jung’s shared fantasy on the primal origin is tightly related to the Neo-Lamarckian influence. How Lamarckian was Freud? How Lamarckian was Jung? The answers to these questions may help us in trying to understand anew the structuralist processing of Lévi-Strauss / Lacan to the Lamarckism of Totem and Taboo. Jung preferred to present the collective unconscious as spiritual and mythical in contrast to the sexual Freudian unconscious. He even noted that the collective unconscious is inherited, i.e., we are born with it (it seems that there is a Platonic influence here regarding the concepts that are engraved in us since birth). The archetypes are hence inherited collective images: The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period, that is, the residues of ancestral life. Whereas the memory-images of the personal unconscious are, as it were, filled out, because they are images personally experienced by the individual, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not filled out because they are forms not personally experienced.33

According to Jung, human consciousness has a very long history, and it operates on modes established in the distant past (just as in the biological level, the DNA “remembers” the biological data of previous generations). According to Anthony Storr, “this view of consciousness originates in his (Jung’s) anatomy studies.”34 Perhaps the reason that Jung disavowed Lamarckism is its biological dimension. It may be said that the Jungian theory is a psychological/spiritual processing of this dimension in the science of biology.  Jung (1972: 57) (emphasis in the origin). On Jung’s contending with the Lamarckian doctrine see for example Nagy (1991: 131–144), and Palmer (1997: 100, 173). 34  Storr (1989). 33

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The Lamarckian argument has been abstractly conceptualized both in the Jungian and in the Lacanian theory. As said, Freud was tempted to conceive the unconscious as a collective unconscious memory in the biological genetic sense. However, when Lacan structurally processed Totem and Taboo, he created an Aufhebung, an elevation which preserves a certain dimension of this memory and this collectivity: “Following in Freud’s footsteps, I teach that the Other is the locus of the kind of memory he discovered by the name ‘unconscious’ […]”.35 On the other hand, in Jung there is an imagined conceptualization of the biological unconscious towards the presentation of the collective unconscious as cultural-ideal that primarily contains memories of images.

7.7 Lacan’s Processing of Freud’s Lamarckism As said, Lacan processed the structural discourse that objects to a narrative analysis of the human condition and to diachronic research, and thus objected to the Jungian position that slides to occultism and to the exposure of the “deep” archaic unconscious. However, by doing so, he also went against the position of Freud himself, who was influenced, as mentioned, by Jung, and who based his theory of the human condition on the revealing of the infantile origin of humanity. Freud himself assumes that the infantile origin of man explains almost deterministically his more mature stages. Lacan presents human sexuality as part of the conflict between the individual and the Symbolic order of language, but the question is whether the metaphysics of this Lamarckism also found their way into the Lacanian discourse? Indeed, his notion of The Name-of-the-Father evolves from the discussion in Totem and Taboo, as the Name-of-the-­ Father represents the figure of the dead father. Is the Name-of-the-Father an abstract structural essence beyond the concrete? Or perhaps it is a cross-generational function as it is in Jung’s theory? As we have already seen, the early Lacan adapted two concepts coined by Jung—“complex” and “imago”—and with them began to generate the 35

 E: 479.

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revision in psychoanalysis towards a wider conception of fatherhood and motherhood in the cultural, non-biological sense. Jung’s twist echoes in this Lacanian approach. At this stage, these concepts were central to Lacan’s theory, and they will constitute the basis upon which he could later build his more mature theory on symbolic fatherhood, the Name-­ of-­the-Father and the big Other. It is worth mentioning that the early Jungian conceptualization of “imago” was later replaced by the concept of the archetype.36 It is possible to argue that Lacan’s imago was later replaced by the Name-of-the-Father as the fundamental signifier. And if so, it may be argued that the Jungian imago, as an internal mental image, was both the source for the Jungian conceptualization of the Oedipus complex and the libido under the term “archetype”, as well as the origin for the Lacanian conceptualization of the signifiers and the Name-of-the-Father. Therefore, since the Jungian collective unconscious consists of imaginary archetypes and the Lacanian unconscious consists of linguistic signifiers, then the Jungian “imago” is the origin for both post-Freudian psychoanalytic metaphysics that conceptualizethe Freudian concretization: for Jung it is an imaginary metaphysics that puts the image in the center, and for Lacan it is a structural metaphysics that puts the linguistic signifier in the center. Does the transformation of psychoanalysis in Lacan also include the danger of sliding into a moralistic position which forgets sexuality, the body, and the unconscious in its sexual contexts? Freud’s remarks about Jung’s conception of the Oedipus complex may possibly be just as relevant to the manner in which Lacan conceptualized the Oedipus as consisting of an imago of the father, a father that is not real but symbolic. Is this a conceptualization that processed Freudian Lamarckism towards a conception of the Name-of-the-Father as a cultural function, but at the same time did not exceed the collectivist dimension of the same Lamarckism in a way that the Lacanian subject is totally embedded in the Symbolic order, lacking a dimension of contingency, subversion, corporeality and singularity? Lacan extricated himself from this metaphysical  Jung (1972: 101–102).

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fixation in the later years of his teaching in his discussion of feminine jouissance. However, as will later become clear, already in the 1950s we may find the deviation from the metaphysical splint by the processing of motives from the Judeo-Christian anti-metaphysical discourse. * * * Lacan wished to contend with the Freudian Oedipal position, attempting to present it as imaginary, in the sense that Freud conceives the father as a figure or as something that is real-biological (biological in the Lamarckian sense of bequeathing the memory from father to son). This is expressed in the way that the father had taken shape in Totem and Taboo and became the ancient father murdered by the sons. Lacan argued that the importance of the father for the subject is not in being an imaginary or real figure, but in being a social-symbolic function. In this respect, from the beginning Lacan de-mythologized the father figure in Freud and distinguished between three kinds of fathers: the real-biological father (the castrating), the imaginary (threatening) father, and most importantly—the symbolic father called “The Name-of-the-Father”. Lacan’s attempt to abstractly conceptualize the father figure coincided with his will to disconnect psychoanalysis from Western philosophy, which presented the Other metaphysically. The danger was that conceptualizating the Freudian Other (in the sense that the unconscious is the Other of the subject) and of the Freudian father could have led psychoanalysis to an abstract metaphysical positioning of these figures. Furthermore, it could have led to a Jungian position of the abstract, imaginary collective unconscious, and to a de-sexualization of the libido. Throughout Lacan’s work there are two prominent negations of Jungian concepts: The collective Jungian unconscious ≠ The collective Lacanian Unconscious The metaphysical God ≠ Lacan’s big Other

On the other hand, the Judeo-Christian anti-metaphysical position, which I will present in the following chapters, enabled Lacan to conceptualize his discourse in the affirmative: the collective unconscious of

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Lacan, i.e., the Symbolic order or the big Other, is not an order with “spiritual” depth or “metaphysical” essence, but it is reminiscent of the biblical conception (as Lacan reads it) of a God who is not-almighty, and not-abstract—a God who is a speaking subject. As I will argue in the following chapters, Lacan designed the concept of the big Other, the unconscious and the Father, as standing in two polar positions: on the one hand he conceptualized the Freudian figure of the father and the Other, and on the other hand—following Judeo-Christian anti-metaphysical position which emphasized the religious experience, the terrible unmediated encounter with God/the big Other—he presented his big Other as split, castrated.

8 “I am who I am” (“Eheye asher Eheye”): The Name-of-the-Father, the Other, and the Biblical Position

The relationship between pathology and its cultural-religious context is crucial to the understanding of Lacan. Lacan positions Freudian psychoanalysis in a specific cultural context and opposes the examination of psychological pathologies as detached from the cultural context of the subject. As I have demonstrated in Chap. 5, Lacan presents two different ways of thinking: On the one hand, the Freudian psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition (as he understands them), and on the other— Gnosticism and Jung. The first one places the subject’s relationship with the Other in what Lacan terms extimacy, i.e., a relationship that does not allow for any harmonious exchange with the Other but is not altogether disconnected from it, as it is not a binary relationship between body and psyche. For Freud, the spiritual and linguistic dimensions are the same, and the language as radical otherness is inherent in the subject. Vis-à-vis this school, Lacan positions Gnosticism and Jung, characterized by the dualism of spirituality/materiality and its resolution through the merging of the subject with the Other, which in Jung is represented by the collective consciousness. This is also why Lacan objected to Jung’s distinction between the collective unconscious and personal unconscious. For Lacan,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_8

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everything is a collective unconscious: The subject exists in the Symbolic order in a manner that continuously subverts its very rules and enables subjective interpretations of its signifiers. In contrast to this, according to Lacan, because Jung presents the collective unconscious as a more profound and truer dimension of the subject, all that is left for the subject to do is to identify this deep dimension of the psyche and harmoniously blend with it. During the 1950s Lacan formulates his notion of the Judeo-Christian tradition with more clarity. During this period, usually perceived as Lacan’s structuralist period, Lacan analyzes the biblical idiom “Eheye asher Eheye” (I am the one who am), which represents the divine subject in the biblical tradition.1 To clarify the origin of the psychoanalytical subject, who, according to Lacan, is part and parcel of the Western Judeo-­ Christian tradition, Lacan both conflates and contrapositions this idiom with the Cogito. Thus, Lacan works his way to the relation between the big Other and the notion of God in the various religious traditions. But does Lacan project onto these traditions his own idea of the Other, or instead, does he extract from their different approaches to the relation between the believer and their God to construct the relationship between the subject and the Other? This complex question binds together several theoretical and cultural themes, at the heart of which resides the tripartite context within which Lacan operated: religion-psychoanalysis-science. Therefore, in addition to Lacan’s approach to science, I will also present his criticism of the Cartesian Cogito related to this position. This will also help us clarify the status of psychoanalysis concerning religion and the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Lacan’s discussion of the Other in Seminar III, The Psychoses (1955–1956), he draws an analogy between his perception of the big Other and that of divinity in Christian Catholicism in general, and in Jansenism, in particular. Lacan presents biblical Jewish themes in a Christian manner. In addition, he reads an anti-metaphysical trend within the Judeo-Christian tradition that had been repressed by Aristotelian influence, a foreign influence that colored the biblical God of  S3: 277–278.

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the Revelation in static rational nuances. For Lacan, the biblical discourse is a processing discourse, one which he defines for his own purposes. For him, it is impossible to ignore the unique characteristics of the cultural space that led to the birth of psychoanalysis, notwithstanding his criticism of this space.

8.1 The Name-of-the-Father and Psychosis In his essay “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”, that appeared in Écrits, Lacan succinctly describes the arguments presented in The Psychoses. As J.A. Miller points out, in the psychoanalytical experience, the Oedipal Father (the symbolic Father, the Name-of-the-­ Father), is language itself. In Freudian psychoanalysis, the patient is directed towards the lost object, the missing object of desire. The Father represents the order of the language, that which removes us from the mother’s materiality; he is The Signifier, the death of primal jouissance.2 We recognize three conceptual trends regarding the conception of the Father in the Lacanian discourse: Freud’s imaginary-realistic one, Jung’s conceptual-imaginary one, and Lacan’s linguistic-symbolic one. Miller points out that Jung sought an alternative therapeutic approach to the “lost object;” and in doing so, led his patients toward a Platonic solution, i.e., a metaphysical one. As I pointed out in previous chapters, in Freud’s presentation of the Oedipal Father figure and its internalization surfaces the dilemma of whether the father figure is the one present at home (as part of the modern bourgeois family unit) or rather, a collective function, at whose heart rests the primordial father. Freud’s resolution was to perceive the collectiveness of the internalization of the father figure in its biological-­ evolutionary context. Disregarding the linguistic dimension, Freud articulated the universality of memory of the father figure, which is in fact the unconscious, through biological discourse. Nowhere is this more salient than in Totem and Taboo, where he maintains that the memory of the murdered father has been internalized and passed on from generation  Miller (1989: 43).

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to generation by means of biological heredity.3 It is in Freud’s footsteps, that is, following the Freudian dilemma, that Lacan sought to abstract the father figure but at the same time to stay away from the Jungian-­ spiritual abstraction. And he achieved this via linguistic abstraction, letting the universal-linguistic particulars formulate the essence of the collective unconscious. The three concepts, the Big Other, The Name-of-the-Father, and the Symbolic order, are interrelated. For, if the unconscious is the other order of the subject, who is subjected to the Symbolic order of the language and the laws of kinship, then the symbolic Father or the Name-of-the-­Father is the principal signifier of the Other, which organizes it and gives it its meaning and function. Lacan will also define this signifier as the ‘quilting point’ (point de capiton). In their linguistic contexts, these three concepts rendered a whole set of concepts, which fundamentally altered the Freudian Oedipal theory. The biological-real father or the father figure is replaced with the father-signifier, and the collective-biological unconscious is replaced with the linguistic unconscious that is also the Other or the Symbolic order (the cultural setting organizing the subject’s functioning and the social order). The relation between the Father and the Other is quite lucid in Lacan’s discussion of psychosis. In “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” (1956), Lacan articulates what happens in psychosis as “foreclosure of the Name-of-the-father […] the failure of the paternal metaphor.”4 The signifier-Father is responsible for the subject’s proper functioning within the Other/symbolic order and its rejection leads to psychotic pathology. But how is the father figure perceived as a signifier?

 It seems that Freud was influenced not only by the depiction of the biblical God as angry but also by its depiction as name, as signifier (in the Lacanian sense). In the second essay in the Totem and Taboo, “Taboo and Emotional Ambivalence”, he describes the taboo on the articulation of names of the dead in primitive societies. This figure of the dead will be presented by Freud as the father whose murder leaves behind his image/name. For, this father, who is envious and violent, and banishes his sons so that he can have his daughters all to himself, will turn into a mere name. Lacan weaves all the threads together and discusses the trinity of the Father-Death-­Signifier. The father figure becomes the foundation of law and civilization (Freud 1913). 4  E: 479. 3

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As I pointed out in Chap. 3, already in his first studies of psychosis, Lacan offers two presuppositions: 1. the father figure in modern society is in crisis; 2. The visual dimension (the imaginary-narcissistic) of ego reflections in the ego is of crucial importance. The combination of these two results in an image of a cruel, threatening father that is first and foremost a visual representation rather than a linguistic one and is active in the hallucinatory world of the psychotic; it is an imaginary father, rather than the father as name. It is a punitive father, who is a threat both to the subject as child and as adult, i.e., the parent’s imago is preserved as the image of the punisher (and from this derives the figure of the punitive God). This approach towards the Father is tantamount to Lacan’s discussion during the same period of the superego in negative identification, versus the ideal-ego in positive identification. For Lacan, both Jung and Freud (at least in some of their studies) are fixated on the punitive imaginary father figure. During the fifties, Lacan’s distinction between the good and the bad father becomes the principal source for the development of the father figure. As reflected in his lectures and seminars during this period, particularly in The Psychosis, acceptance or rejection (foreclosure) of the Name-of-the-Father is the most relevant factor to the study of psychosis, especially in the case of Schreber. Lacan understands the figure of the bad father as a visual manifestation that attacks the psychotic in his hallucinations because the symbolic father, the Name-of-the-Father (the good father), has been barred (foreclosed) by him. In its capacity as metaphor for the mother’s desire, for the conversion of the mother’s desire, the Name-of-the-Father is responsible for the subject’s formation. On a certain level, a religious drama unfolds here, involving crime and punishment. The “accident” whereby the father figure is foreclosed as cultural function, as a symbolic father, leads to a severe punishment of the subject in question, i.e., to his psychotic state. However, Lacan works his symbolic father signifier, The Name-of-the Father, first and foremost, within his tripartite subjective structure the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real and within the distinction that he makes between the two axes—the imaginary and the unconscious—in his famous L scheme. These categories, distinctions, and axes are essentially metaphysical and, in fact, construct the notions of The Name-of-the

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Father and that of the Other as metaphysical objects in the Lacanian discourse. It is fair to postulate that they represent the super-signifiers of Lacan’s theory and that all its other components and their subsequent clinical reality are subjugated to them. Following Lacan’s position, we would argue that Freud should have been more Lacanian in Totem and Taboo, should have walked the extra mile to the perception of the father as signifier and not merely as a historical/biological figure. According to Lacan, Freud could have learned this from the monotheistic religions that he criticized, precisely because they acknowledge the existence of the Name-of-the-Father.5 Lacan himself emphasizes that he borrowed the Name-of-the-Father from the monotheistic religions, particularly from Christianity, and he presents the theological context of the Father-God figure. Thus, this concept exposes an illustrative example of how Freud conceived of the relation between the father figure and that of God’s: the father figure is internalized by the child as superego, which according to Freud is no other than the long-lasting tradition taken on by the father and his father before him. But in Lacan, the father figure, which is responsible for the regularization of the collective unconscious, is not a flesh-and-blood figure, nor a genetic essence as Freud will have it, but a cultural signifying function. Seen in Lacan’s theoretical light, the Father-as-signifier might begin to seem as an abstract, metaphysical force, rather than represent a concrete one. Lacan’s resolution is to position the signifier “father” within death, following Hegel’s philosophy and Christian tradition, both of which discuss the “death of God” not as an atheist observation, but as a paradoxical, non-chronological, recognition of God’s simultaneous existence and death. Thus, Lacan associates the father-signifier with death also because the signifier is a dead object. The father as word, as signifier, is thus dead, just as it is in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Of course, there is no need of a signifier to be a father, any more than there is to be dead, but without a signifier, no one will ever know anything about either of these states of being.

 Lacan (E: 464).

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[…] How, indeed, could Freud fail to recognize such an affinity, when the necessity of his reflection led him to tie the appearance of the signifier of the Father, as author of the Law, to death— indeed, to the killing of the Father—thus showing that, if this murder is the fertile moment of the debt by which the subject binds himself for life to the Law, the symbolic Father, insofar as he signifies this Law, is truly the dead Father.6

Thus, the notion of death satisfies both the necessity to position the father in the concrete and in the abstract, for death is an abstract form of the father: while he is non-existent, in death he has a concrete body, so that he exists in his non-existence. This is also true for the structural aspect of the father: his perception as death is related to his being a signifier within a system, or a chain, of signifiers, termed by Lacan, “the big Other”. This Other contains the memory, which is also the subject’s unconscious, a memory that subsists in the subject.7 This entire signifying chain is originally constructed through the primordial symbolization of the presence/absence of the signifier, as expressed in the child’s game (fort/da), described by Freud in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. In this game, the child would substitute the mother for his toy, and through the presence and disappearance of the toy, the child would learn to control his destiny, so to speak. Lacan emphasizes the signifiers themselves fort (here, present) and da (there, away), which come into existence as to exchange the mother’s presence for her absence.8 This is actually the Name-of-the-Father, not in the sense of a real father rescuing his child from the arms of his mother (coming and going capriciously, independent of the subject’s agency), rather, insofar as it is the means for creating a primordial symbolic signifier which thus allows for the organization of reality. This foundational law is logical, and it organizes (beginning with the child’s birth into language) the order of the big Other, that is, the Symbolic order of the subject. This Other, for Lacan, is that which possesses and contains the signifiers, which drives and organizes signifiers, it is the Name-of-the-Father, the master signifier, responsible for the “normative” functioning. Normativity  Ibid.  E: 479. 8  Freud (1915: 157–158). 6 7

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is here enclosed in quotation marks, as, even for the ‘normative’ subject, there always exists some form of pathology. In this respect, the Name-ofthe-Father is what protects the subject from psychosis. As will be demonstrated below, it is the Name-of-the-Father, in its imaginary and symbolic Judaic and Christian realizations, which—according to Lacan—protects the subject from psychosis. Concurrently, this Name-of-the-­father is also indirectly responsible for the pathology of the neurotic or of anxiety. In moving forward, before turning to Lacan’s discussion of “I am the one who am”, this investigation will present the notion of the Cogito as pertains to modern science, as such contexts constitutes the theoretical background for the analysis at hand.

8.2 Science and Psychoanalysis following the Cogito Lacan poses “I am the one who am” (je sui celui qui suis) against the “I think therefore I am” (Je pense, donc je suis) of René Descartes (1596–1650). In Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes casts doubt on all his surrounding reality and presents the wicked demon—the God deceiver— wagering the following: I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me […].9

In the Second Meditation, Descartes says that this God deceiver could lead one to doubt everything, with one exception: In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.10  Descartes (1641: 15).  Descartes (1641: 17).

9

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The Third Meditation occasions Descartes’ answer as to whether God could be a deceiver. Therein, Descartes elaborates his idea of perfection, and he finds that since God is perfect, God cannot deceive. Ultimately, Descartes employs the Aristotelian description of divinity, as preserved through medieval Scholastic theology. Accordingly, if such a perfect idea exists in a partial, finite creature such as man, it indicates the existence of God: The idea is flawless, thus its source cannot be the partial self, but divine perfection itself.11 Descartes, who received a Jesuit education that emphasized the importance of mathematical sciences,12 deployed a theological ruse to donate authority to reason. To put it otherwise, the case for the Cogito is built upon the proof of God’s existence and God could not be wrong as God is perfect; thus, Cartesian metaphysics holds God as a bridge between the subjective world of thought and the objective world of scientific truth. The existence of perfection guarantees perception, and accordingly the existence of a perfect God guarantees the subject’s existence. Alexander Koyré—a historian of science who greatly influenced Lacan, as will be explained below—elucidates how the God of the philosophers undergoes a transformation with Descartes.13 Unlike the Medieval thought, according to which man is weaved organically into the world created by God, whose laws are analogous to the divine thought, for Descartes, God is disconnected from the world. Descartes’ God is not manifest in actions, or arcane revelations, but in human reason: cogito. Descartes thus lays the foundation for a science based on mathematics, understood as a function of the human mind,14 such that God can no longer be the assurance of the ‘real world;’ rather, God is manifest in human intelligence that produces science. Descartes, then, erased the rich and colorful world of  Descartes (1641: 31–33).  Feldhay (1995: 110–200). 13  Koyré (1957: 100). 14  Ibid. 11 12

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Aristotle, rendering it exclusively intelligible by way of mathematical formulae.15 Koyré argues that Descartes operated on the same lines as the Copernican revolution that created a shift from the “fixed stars” sky (as in Aristotle, where fixed points are the arbiters of truth) and an infinite, unchanging God, to endless sky and the concept of the infinite, anchored in the metaphysical thinking of the infinite God researched and verified by science (following Descartes, the infinite heavens of science did not require this religious prop anymore). Following Hegel’s analysis of Western culture and the philosophy of history (as mediated by the teachings of Alexandre Kojève), as well as Alexandre Koyré’s work, Lacan assumed that modern science was born with Descartes and that Cartesian skepticism of modernity lead to the modern subject, which he calls cogito.16 This subject is a subject of science.17 But at the same time Lacan introduces his critique of the Cartesian tradition, stressing the unconscious side of the cogito: the Cartesian subject is illusory because there is no conscious cogito that is able to say to the unconscious “I think” and “I am.” According to Lacan, Descartes’s thought under this forced conceptual framework causes the thinking subject, the empty subject, acting under the limitations of the signifier, to diminish his own existence and jouissance.18 As we shall see, in Lacan’s terms, even if psychoanalysis is not a science in the modern sense of the word, it could not have existed as a phenomenon until after the invention of modern science, and in relation to it. Therefore, the cogito is also the subject of the unconscious, in relation to which Freud invented psychoanalysis. In fact, this is  Ibid.  Koyré (1957: 88–109). 17  Lacan’s relation to the term “Cogito” was less ambivalent in the beginning of his teaching. For example, at the opening of his 1949 lecture on the mirror stage, he says: “It should be noted that this experience sets us at odds with any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito.” E: 75. At this stage, Lacan relates the concept of the “Cogito” to the modern concept of the autonomy of the self (as expressed in Sartre’s existentialist philosophy), seeking to show that autonomy is an illusion that attempts to create the equation Subject=I=consciousness (e.g., as in ego psychology). According to Lacan, the ego is a fictitious construction built on deception. 18  The discussion of the concept of science and Lacan in Kojeve’s wake is based and focused specifically on the study of Jean Claude Milner’s book: L’oeuvre Claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie (Milner 1995). Also see Burgoyne (2003, especially pages 77–83) on Koyré’s influence on Lacan. 15 16

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reflected by Lacan’s own ambivalence concerning modern science: on the one hand arguing that modern science seeks to schematically organize unformulated reality and diminish the particular to an abstract principle (as opposed to psychoanalytic discourse), while on the other hand, attributing scientific qualification to psychoanalysis. Putting it otherwise, despite all the criticism that Lacan directed towards cogito and modern science, until the 50s he still chose to place psychoanalysis amongst its ranks. Lacan would later abandon the position of the subject as cogito, preferring rather to define the subject as the subject of jouissance. As Lacan notes in the opening lesson of Seminar XI, psychoanalysis is neither religion nor science, but an intermediary between the two trends that can clarify them both. Lacan did not seek to qualify psychoanalysis as science, but rather to interrogate the very concept of science, as well as the status of psychoanalysis in relation to it. He criticizes science for its evasion of questions of truth towards formulas, in contrast to Freud’s efforts.19 Science has become thus entangled infinite interpretations. In his article “Science and Truth”,20 Lacan attributed this epistemic fallout to Descartes: once Descartes presented God as a guarantor of truth, it freed man from searching for truth and turned science into a self-­ referential discourse reduced to a simple binary value.21 For Lacan, psychoanalysis recognizes no clear dichotomy between truth and untruth, as unconscious truth can manifest in a lie. Psychoanalysis does not have to be a science, but the latter is the very condition for the existence of psychoanalysis. Lacan claims that there is a break, a clear-cut distinction between antiquity and modern times (and the spirit of science), yet the Judeo-­ Christian tradition, especially in its biblical core, is immanently wed to this rupture. Thus, Judaism is also the source of modern science (and not, as perhaps expected, the Greek Aristotelian-tradition). Lacan seeks to expose the Judeo-Christian roots (or rather the biblical Jewish ones, as Judaism is at the origin of Christian tradition) of modern science, to  S11: 14.  E: 726–745. 21  Fink (1995). 19 20

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better understand the subject of the unconscious. The biblical origins are echoed in the Cartesian cogito, as a later self-manifestation of the biblical God pronounced in the phrase: “I am the one who am.” Descartes’ divinity is fundamentally the Aristotelian metaphysical God, while the deceitful and misleading God of the bible lies in wait behind him. The unique biblical God is suppressed to some extent, even though he is always there as a threatening option for the believer. Lacan presents God as the culmination of this conceptual lineage, not due to the barren-metaphysics spoken in relation to God throughout the Judeo-­ Christian history, but due to the special interest he finds in the anxiety-­ provoking affect that such a Judeo-Christian God has on the believer. This is the reason for Lacan’s discussion of the mental foundation of the Judeo-Christian tradition, touching less on the meditative theological aspects therein. And so, beyond cogito, beyond reason, the unconscious awaits; the same as behind Descartes’ Aristotelian God, the biblical deity of the God deceiver awaits. Lacan’s interpretation of Descartes’ God spurs Lacan to put in abeyance the first stage of the Cartesian act provided in the Meditations, before Descartes compromises existence in favor of thought. It is noteworthy that Lacan recourses to the cogito in order to combat anti-Freudian positions, such as the Jungian position. For Lacan, modern science since Descartes obfuscates the Imaginary order. The Jungian theory finds its place precisely within the pre-Cartesian imaginary. As clarified in Chap. 6, Lacan’s argument in the opening lesson of Seminar XIIV, The Object of Psychoanalysis (1965–1966) is that Jung—unlike Freud— rejected the scientific reduction of the subject to the Cartesian cogito and had therefore regressed to the subject with the “soul”—the subject of spiritual depths and occult knowledge. Conversely, for Lacan the cogito, the subject of science, is the result of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, which is also the foundation of Freudian theory, whose basic ethical position is not directed towards the occult and the spiritual. Lacan’s discussion of the cogito allows him to increase the tension between Jung and Freud, as the difference between the two sides (Freud-­ Lacan vs. Jung) is not only of a theoretical nature, but also has far-­reaching religious and cultural consequences. Such consequences evince the different religious bases of the two approaches: on the one hand, the Jungian

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position sympathizes with a gnostic and/or platonic (and neo-Platonic) tradition of striving to harmoniously blend with the soul of the universe while abandoning loathed materiality (a strongly dualistic position); and on the other hand, the Freudian-Lacanian position that seeks to identify with the tradition of biblical Judaism (in accordance with Lacan’s exegesis) which is not spiritual, but rather anti-idealist. Lacan’s position does not seek to place the subject within a clean and pure psychic world, rather precisely to face the subject with its inherent otherness, without abolishing the duality between the body and the signifier, between the subject and language. Lacan’s interpretation of the cogito allows him to stress and clarify that this cogito is modernity’s threshold: all attempts to restore the harmonious world shattered by the cogito are driven by so-called reactionary sentiment, while Freudian psychoanalysis has been precisely entrenched in the Cartesian world of doubt and the split subject. It’s impossible to go backwards. However, what is most surprising in Lacan’s stance, which will be described as follows, is the archaic origin of the modern cogito: the biblical scripture.

8.3 Lacan’s Seminar III: The God of Schreber In Seminar III: The Psychoses (1955–1956), Lacan presents for the first time the distinction between the scriptural nucleus and the Greek-­ Aristotalian inclination within the Judeo-Christian tradition. He does so by recognizing the opposite conceptions of divinity in those traditions, which blended in Christian theology. He seeks to highlight the repressed dimension of the scriptural nucleus that, for him, is more fundamental and real. The biblical phrase “I am the one who am” carries considerable weight here for Lacan in relation to the distinction between these religious concepts. Seminar III is important for the purpose of this present analysis as it allows a certain exposure of the theological contexts of Lacan’s theoretical output, especially in handling Schreber’s case of psychotic hallucination, which was of definite religious character—the story of Schreber’s intercourse with God. The seminar is presented during a crucial decade for Lacan, the 50s, an epoch during which Lacan developed his three registers of the psyche: the “Symbolic”, the “Imaginary”

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and the “Real”, as well as his central ideas of the “big Other” and the “Name-of-the-Father.” From this perspective, this seminar is also an illuminating example of how Lacan is formulating his psychoanalytic theory on psychoses from one lesson to another. Daniel Paul Schreber was a German judge who had experienced hallucinations in which he underwent a process of feminization, married God, and brought a whole new race into the world, as a result of their intercourse.22 The character of God is prominent in Schreber’s diaries, and both Freud and Lacan base their analyses of psychosis on these accounts.23 Freud grounds his discussion of narcissism in Schreber’s identifications with God, his father, and his psychiatrist, Professor Paul Flechsig. By Lacan’s estimation, Freud places too much emphasis on the imaginary aspect of Schreber’s illness, even if he, Freud, also took care to account for the linguistic aspects of Schreber’s hallucinations. Such lingering on the Imaginary is evinced by Freud’s central emphasis on the imaginary father and interpretation of Schreber’s psychosis—and psychosis in general (namely paranoia)—as a defensive response to a pathological homosexual desire for the father figure (as homosexuality is closely linked, for Freud, with narcissism, as love for the same sex). Lacan seeks to stray from this discussion, claiming that a central aspect of psychosis is expressed by linguistic distortion and rupture. While the psychotic subject cannot dwell in the Symbolic order the same as the neurotic, he replaces the symbolic big Other with egos, in respect to which he shows constant love and aggression under the same disrupted Symbolic order. Schreber’s God- father (in accordance with the Freudian observation) is characterized as attempting to deceive Schreber and undermine him as part of their ambivalent relations of aggressive erotism. For Lacan, Schreber’s God moves between the Judeo-Christian scriptural stance of a non-­ metaphysical, personal, present, deity endowed with a voice; and on the other hand, a presence that perhaps eliminates God’s otherness as God is reduced to the level of ego.

 See the diaries of Schreber (1903).  Freud (1911).

22 23

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The question is not whether or not the other exists for the psychotic, but what is his relation to this threatening Other, who is relentless and jouissant, an egoistic living being.24 Lacan’s claims rely on the words of Schreber himself: God has a body, he enjoys, as He himself personally penetrates Schreber; God speaks to Schreber as he always spoke to humanity, to the chosen peoples; that is, in their own language. God is not omnipotent.25 For Lacan, the gap between the ancient and modern world concerning the relationship between God and external reality finds its expression in Schreber’s erotic attitude towards the heavens.26 The opening chapter of Schreber’s memoir showcases his hallucinatory theory about God’s relation to heavenly bodies. This theory has an Aristotelian dimension, owing to the presence of a fixed heaven and stars. And so, in his hallucination, Schreber occasions elements of two trends from the Judeo-Christian tradition. As mentioned, Lacan seeks to distinguish between the biblical trend of the absolute Other (including the ‘neurotic’ psychology of doubt and anxiety) and the Greek-Aristotelian trend of the constant and unchanging heavens (including the psychotic psychology of absolute uncertainty). God’s nerves branch out into the world, and these nerves are “infinite and eternal” (contrary to human nerves).27 They are referred to as “rays”, and through them divine creation is manifest. Therefrom stem Schreber’s musings on the relationship between bodies of the eternal God of heaven and those questions that draw upon modern astronomy.28 Schreber references Immanuel Kant’s theory of 1775 and the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Laplace as concerns the creation of galaxies from gas clouds during the nascence of the universe. This theory was to abolish so-called faith in divine creation, but Schreber referred to it differently: he interpreted this God as a personal God, one who does not contradict science. Lacan, too, wants link between the God of Judeo-Christianity  S3: 274.  Schreber (1903: 30–31). 26  S3: 66. See the first chapter of Schreber’s memoirs: Schreber (1903: 19–25). Such are the pages that Lacan reads to his students and which we are dealing with: S3 66–70. The Schreber quotes do not appear in the Seminar, only a great reference to the source, the same first chapter in Schreber. 27  Schreber (1903: 21). 28  Ibid. 24 25

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and modern science, i.e., to demonstrate that there is no necessary contradiction between ‘religion’ and ‘science’. In this regard, Lacan (like Freud) sees Schreber’s memoir as a source of “real” knowledge, of great importance, central to psychoanalytical research.29

8.4 Seminar III: The Constitution of Modern Science and the Judeo-Christian Tradition In trying to better understand the figure of Schreber’s God, Lacan faces the quiddity of the Judeo-Christian deity, already, early on in his Seminar. By the fifth lesson, entitled “On a God who does not deceive and one who does”, he presents Judeo-Christian culture (especially in its biblical core) as one that knows the relation between the subject and the Other. Speaking is a function of this relation. This discussion holds consequences for the question of psychoses, as the psychotic’s speech (being a speaking-­ subject) functions under the Other following the small other (ego), against which aggressive erotism is directed. Therefore, instead for the psychotic, subject of the unconscious, standing vis-à-vis the big Other, the Other that organizes his being, in the sketch of schema L the psychotic places himself only vis-à-vis small others, including the big Other, such as God, which becomes a sexual object and the object of paranoid aggression and persecution. The narcissistic aspect of psychosis is the decisive disposition to the big Other, according to Lacan and as demonstrated by Schreber. Yet despite the psychotic’s sinking in the Imaginary, Lacan seeks, in Seminar III, to examine psychosis in its symbolic-linguistic context, and not in the imaginary context; that is, to go beyond the narcissistic relation towards understanding the linguistic failings associated with the psychotic’s mechanism of foreclosure. What of the big Other’s relations with speech? The relation between the subject (of Western culture) and the big Other supposes of the latter that it is also a subject. This is because, according to Lacan (stemming from his exegetical efforts), the Other of the Judeo-Christian tradition  See Freud’s words ar the end of Schreber’s case study, Freud (1911: 218) and, Lacan’s words from S 3: 45. 29

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speaks; it is split, and not abstract and absolute. The Other as God found in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is, according to Lacan, the God deceiving the speaking subject. Lacan adds that paradoxically even though this Other represents the Symbolic order, its definitive characteristic defies symbolization: there is always a Real place that does not deceive (Real in the sense that it is the material that has not been represented, neither in the Symbolic nor in the Imaginary). Lacan’s schema describes the axis between the subject and big Other. This schema also allows him to present the functioning of the big Other at the level of speech, parole, (i.e., as a speaking subject). This function is necessary for the development of science because the same culture that acknowledges the deceiving big Other, can also assume the existence of an actual or material big Other, which is not deceiving.30 The human act of recognizing something that cannot deceive, through the dialectic of a deceiving against a non-deceiving other, can only exist in the Judeo-Christian tradition. This dialectic invites an act of faith.31 According to Lacan, the Judeo-Christian tradition recognized this dialectic of the big Other as deceiver/non-deceiver, as exemplified by Descartes, who belongs, despite everything, to the spirit of modern times (in contrast to Aristotle). However, as Lacan ironically highlights, the people who are ‘free’ of all religious ideas are attempting to deny this.32 In other words, for Aristotle, there is a structure for relationships with the other, but it is different from that which takes place in the core of biblical Judeo-Christian culture. One can understand through Lacan’s words that the same people of his epoch, those people “free” of any religious idea, find the origins of science in rational philosophy as products of Greek and Aristotelian thought, rather than of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In other words, they cannot see any link between modern science and ethical injunction (in the sense of moral reference, which is not necessarily moralistic, to the world, to the other and to oneself ) in a religious tradition but assume rather that behind science lies no ethical stance, only a philosophical/rationale  Ibid.  Ibid. 32  S3: 64. 30 31

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foundation. It seems that Lacan too goes against the popular opinion here, against the image of the Judeo-Christian tradition as culpable in arresting the development of science since the Greeks during the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance’s “liberation” from the clutches of religion. As previously noted, following Koyré, Lacan argues that Judaism and Christianity are the source of modern science. And so, he seeks to expose the Judeo-Christian roots of modern science (and really—its biblical Jewish roots, as they are the origin of Christianity itself ) as to better understand the subject of the unconscious. At the same time, Lacan also describes a rupture in the Judeo-Christian tradition—between its Jewish origins and subsequent Christian position—even though he refers to Judeo-Christianity elsewhere as though it was homogenous. However, as will be explained in the following, the foundational distinction of biblical Judaism here is a distinction that comes from a certain Christian theology and through the lens of Christianity: as part of a debate intrinsic to Christianity itself. Lacan assumes as a key principle of Judeo-Christian culture the theological principle of creation ex nihilio, which is actually much more than a theological principle. This is a fundamental ethical principle with respect to the world: the assumption that the law, language, were born from nothing, rather than out of a developmental stance. There is a debate between what Lacan presents as the conflict between Aristotelian rationalism and a theological voluntarism that assumes the irrationality of God, and the caprice of the God creator of the world ex nihilio, from his absolute freedom. This principle, which is at the core of Judeo-­ Christian anti-metaphysical and anti-rational theology constitutes the basis for the Lacanian stance that language was created ex nihilio and the depiction of the big Other (the agent of the linguistic order) as speaking and as capricious, rather than a static/celestial metaphysical entity. The radicalism of this capricious and deceptive Judeo-Christian God led to an act of faith in a terrible Other, thus inaugurating the neurotic, anxious, western subject. Lacan’s notion reflects his ambivalent relation with Judeo-Christian culture: he is aware of the locus of psychoanalytic

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discourse within the cultural field, while criticizing the fundamental position in the same field of faith, anxiety and neurosis.33 In contrast to the dialectic of the deceiving Other of Descartes, which includes the Real, non-deceiving one, Lacan brings forth the Aristotelian God, who is never deceiving; the perfect and unchanging God as in the celestial spheres that expresses this divinity.34 Lacan adds the Christian context of this influence, thus implying that the Aristotelian thought (which includes the imaginary dimension, the imaginary meaning imposed on the world, according to Lacan) is located within the Christian layer of Western tradition in contrast with the Judaic-biblical layer that is focused on the symbolic meaning of the worship of the signifier, and not on a meaning imposed on the outside world.35 Lacan notes, therefore, that this is not only the heritage of the scholastics, but also a natural stance for a person—to look upon heavenly bodies, and to assume of them confirmation of the absolute and unchanging intrinsic truth. He adds to his argument that Western culture in his time is different from the position of the Ancient Greek “logical” one, as “our culture is an exception, since it consented, very recently, to follow the Judeo-Christian position strictly.”36 This tradition includes the recognition of the enigmatic Other: foreign and anxiogenic. For Lacan, this foreignness is reflected in Freud’s conception of the unconscious as a descendent of Western Culture and the Judeo-Christian tradition; this is in contrast with the ancient world and pre-Cartesian science (expressed by Jung or in the ancient Chinese science of harmony between Yin and Yang). Hence Lacan’s emphasis on “I am the one who am” allowing him to reveal the nucleus of this absolute otherness in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and thus, also the nucleus of the cogito, of the subject of science (and of psychoanalysis).  S3: 65.  For example, Aristotle (2018) writes in Metaphysics [XII: VII], “It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude but is without parts and indivisible […] But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change of place”. 35  S3: 65. 36  Ibid. 33 34

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What stands out here is Lacan’s attempt to present Western culture, which is first of all Judeo-Christian, as having a radical position in relation to the other. For him, this culture has “gone bad” to some extent in the wake of the Aristotelian-Greek metaphysics as reflected in medieval Christian scholasticism. Therefore, in assuming that Christianity itself is an amalgamation of Jewish and Greek cultures, perhaps Lacan’s ethical plea entails returning to the unconscious roots of Judaism? Of recognizing the enigmatic, split, and speaking Other? The Other as subject rather than an abstract and static entity (in the Aristotelian sense)? Does Lacan seek precisely to identify with the same Christianity clean of non-Judaic remnants (Judaism in the biblical sense): pantheism and Greco-­ Aristotelianism? Perhaps he also wishes to cleanse the cogito, Cartesian science, from its Aristotelian remnants and return to the biblical foundation of recognizing the otherness of language and its traumatic dimension? In this sense, Lacan is here participating in an intra-Christian debate as to the nature of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

8.5 ‘I am who I am’37 As noted, Lacan identifies himself with the anti-metaphysical tradition stemming from a scriptural-Jewish position. This position sought to present God not as an abstract entity, as has been the case since Aristotle, but as a body that has a story (in the Greek sense of myth) that escapes concrete history: the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. This body, for Lacan, means that the Other and father are dipped in jouissance (as the subject perceives it), even if they do not exist (as they are either signifiers or a signifying system). Several times Lacan lingers in his seminar on God’s response to the inquiry of Moses from the Pentateuch, whereby God reveals his name as: “I am who I am”; Lacan views these words of God as exemplary for  This quote in the French translation of the bible reads, “Je suis celui qui suis”, literally “I am the one who am”. However, the English Bible reads “I am who I am”. This analysis will follow the English scripture, while bearing in mind the differences in translations to the sentence in Hebrew “Eheye Asher Eheye”. 37

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illustrating the essence of the big Other in the Western tradition, and thus, also, in psychoanalysis. Owing to its importance for this discussion, let us follow the pertinent verses (Exodus 3:1–15): And Moses said unto God: ‘Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them: The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me: What is His name? What shall I say unto them?’ And God said unto Moses: ‘I AM WHO I AM’; and He said: ‘Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: I AM hath sent me unto you.’ And God said moreover unto Moses: ‘Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath sent me unto you; this is My name for ever, and this is My memorial unto all generations.’38

Lacan cannot help but noticing already from a first reading that God does not simply give his name nor actually answer Moses. Instead, he provides a name from which two exegetical directions arise: (a) the metaphysical direction of Being (être; as Lacan claims in Seminar VII or in On the Names-of-the-Father, following the anti-metaphysical Jewish and Christian theologians, the author of the Bible would have been unable to recognize this meaning); (b) the non-metaphysical direction—as in “I will be with you” in the sense of God’s providential presence and salvation of this certain people. Within the close relationship of God and the people Lacan notes that God furnished the definition of being the God of their forefathers (this is the first self-presentation of God, the ‘business card’ he offers to Moses: “I am the God of your forefathers; the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob”); This is a manifestation of the patriarchal context, the order of the father, which fascinates Lacan so much. Lacan was astonished by this speaking God, whose name is interconnected in speech, who pronounces his name: “I am who I am”, even if the meaning of this phrase is enigmatic.39 In this sense, Lacan offers no  JPS.  Lacan stresses his emphasis by using the Hebrew name for the God of Israel: “HaShem”, which means literally “The Name”. See Lacan (1963).

38 39

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interpretation of the expression, but rather stays with the linguistic rupture, with the enigma of God’s speech. As he does not read Hebrew, he brings the conventional translation of the French term (quoted here in full, in accordance with the accepted classical translation to French by Segond): Dieu dit à Moïse: je suis celui qui suis. Et il ajouta: C’est ainsi que répondras aux enfants d’Israël: Celui qui s’appelle “Je suis” m’a envoyé vers vous. [God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’“].40

“Je suis celui qui suis”—Lacan states that the biblical God uses the pronoun Je (‫)אני‬. He sees in this use a model for the conception of the big Other that is not metaphysical as the one of Aristotle (for whom, God is unable to express himself in the first person, according to Lacan). In this way, Lacan associates himself with the anti-metaphysical trend of Judeo-Christianity. It is important to clarify that Lacan’s interpretation of “I am who I am” goes against mainstream Christological hermeneutics. Rather than a metaphysical connotation, Lacan seeks to endow meaning of non-­ meaning, an enigmatic meaning of the very presence of the big Other in the subject’s life. In fact, Lacan interprets the biblical text in accord with the big Other as inspired by the Christian motif of logos, of speech that is embodied in the flesh. This way, by suggesting an alternative interpretation of the Judaic and Christological traditions, he situates himself within the anti-metaphysical Judeo-Christian trend.41 The history of the Jewish exegesis of “I am who I am” is beyond the scope of the present discussion. I will, however, highlight some motifs of  Segond (1910: 65) [my emphasis].  Note that one Seminar later, in Seminar VII, Lacan expresses his frustration of his inability to read Hebrew. This is not only a boundary to his understanding of the language, but a barrier for grasping the true nature of the Hebrew deity, whose essence is its name. In Seminar VII, in the lesson “On the moral law”, Lacan claims that it is imperative to learn the commandments of the Decalogue in their original Hebrew, which is why he does not even allow himself to penetrate the difficult issue of the nature of the Hebrew deity. Instead, he presents the Hidden God as inaccessible, as opposed to what he calls “Christian Gnosis”, which perceives of God as an entity (S7: 73–74) See also his discussion in On the Names-of-the-Father on the different ways of translating “‫“ ”אהיה אשר אהיה‬Eheye Asher Eheye”: Lacan (1963). 40 41

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the discussion: a close reading of the text indicates that the phrase “I am who I am” is closely associated, in its Hebrew form, with the biblical name of God, “Yahweh”, a God who is particular and active, a God that is present, “The Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” (NKJV, Exodus: 3:15). This is a jealous God, a God of memory, but also of future action: “Eheye” means literally “I will be”, promising he will be there to accompany Moses in the Exodus from Egypt. For example, Rashi’ emphasizes God’s promise to accompany Moses. While Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed emphasizes the unseen God, the God who is a name; ‘I will be’, comes from the wording ‘was’ = here = reality. Hence the connection between God and being, a connection that brings Maimonides to the metaphysical debate over the existence of God. In the Guide, the question also arises as to whether God’s answer (“I am who I am”) is elusive.42 The tradition of Christian interpretation is complicated and loaded as well, stemming from the difficulties of translating the phrase from the Septuagint to the Latin Vulgate, to renditions throughout all European languages including French. For example, the Septuagint translates: ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν, while the vulgate translation moved from the future to the present tense: “Ego sum qui sum”; and so too in English “I am who I am” and in French “Je suis celui qui”, i.e., “I am the one who am”. Hence these translations miss the aspect of the promise in turning to a metaphysical nature of interpretation, according to Lacan.43 It seems that the source of this differentiation between the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the God of the philosophers, is located in the book The Kuzari by Yehuda Halevi, whose thought was later popularized by the French thinker, Blaise Pascal. Lacan duly cites Pascal in On the Names-of-the-Father as the confirmation to his conception of the big Other/God as the Judeo-Christian God.44 We can add to that the persistent anti-metaphysical tendency of Kierkegaard’s existential thought and  See the entry for “Yahweh” “‫ ”יהוה‬in, Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Botterweck and Ringer, Durham, 1974: 500–521) and the review of academic research and the bibliography of Durham (1987, 34–41). 43  On the Christian Interpretation, see McCarthy (1978). 44  Lacan (1963). 42

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even Rudolph Otto’s perception of the encounter with God as an enormous shock for the subject.45 In The Kuzari, in the dialogue between the friend and the king that takes place in the fourth essay, the friend says that the way in which philosophers perceive God should be distinguished from the God of the Bible as revealed to the prophets and the people of Israel. The distinction is evident already in the name Elohim (God) as opposed to the first names of the biblical God, especially Yahweh, a name that has a close linguistic resonance with “Eheye Asher Eheye.”46 The aforementioned distinction between the Aristotelian and biblical deity is central to Lacan’s discussion of the name (Hashem) as pertaining to “I am who I am”. The discussion of this name can be found in different places in Lacan’s early seminars. We shall read the most elaborate one in Seminar III.

8.6 ‘I am who I am’ in Seminar III During his class on the deceiving and non-deceiving God mentioned above, Lacan demonstrates the relationship between Greek tradition and the Judeo-Christian one. However, in the later lesson “The highway and the signifier ‘being a father’” (lesson XXIII), towards the end of the Seminar, Lacan further highlights his portrayal of the biblical God through the expression, “I am who I am”, in order to finally engage, in his last lessons of the seminar, with the role of the critical master-signifier “Name-of-the-Father”, in the structure and functioning of the subject. As mentioned previously, Lacan emphasizes that the use of the word “I” (Je) in front of the Other clearly demonstrates the Judeo-Christian tradition. Lacan “returns” to the biblical source of “Eheye Asher Eheye”, but reads it in French first, and referring to it the je suis that corresponds to the theoretical argument he presents on the speaking subject (thereby, the principle presented in this book, of Lacan using “processing  This is especially the case in his book on The Holy (Otto 1958).  Yehuda Halevi (article IV, C).

45 46

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discourses”, of which he defines and articulates according to his needs and compares them to other theoretical formulations to prove his theory, is again being demonstrated). The mental infrastructure of the subject’s approach to himself as je suis is the Judeo-Christian tradition— “our” tradition in Lacan’s words—and thus the subject is divided. The same is applicable to the image of God in this tradition when God refers to himself as subject, when he reveals to Moses at the burning bush through speech act. All of this in the sense of Lacan’s speaking subject, in which the Je (in contrast to the moi, which carries the sense of the ego) is split between the aspect of the statement (énonce, the meaning according to the rules of syntax, and not in accord with the special circumstances under which the phrase appears) and the aspect of the annunciation (enunciation, the linguistic output in accord with time, place and circumstances under which the speaker pronounces the annunciation). This split presents the locus of the speaking subject: a subject who is split within himself, just as the cogito is split within himself, between doubt and certainty. For Lacan these are two sides of the “I”: the conscious and the unconscious, and he emphasizes this to clarify that the ego is not the master of its discourse, and its discourse is the result of the Other, of the language extimate to the subject.47 Because the Hebrew God says I/je/ ‫אני‬, then he, too, is a subject of language, and he himself already is a religious source of the split modern cogito, according to Lacan. God is a subject of desire, and thus, the implied subjective split precludes God’s omnipotence.48 During the reading, it becomes increasingly clear against which cultural stratum Lacan writes this: against the rational-philosophical stratum that began with Aristotle, developed in the work of the Christian scholastics, and eventually found its place in Deism; this stratum assumed the existence of the perfect infinite divinity on top of all the variety of local deities.

 On the split subject between statement and enunciation see in particular Lacan (S3: 271–284). See also how this theoretical tension is later elaborated in E: 423–431, 677–678. 48  S3: 287. 47

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When Lacan says of the Greek deity that it is unable to say “I”, he effectively turns to the Aristotelian conception of the infinite abstract-­ divinity, and not to Greek mythology where gods express themselves through the use of “I”. Lacan’s goal is not to talk about Greek culture as such, but rather to present it as metaphysical in contrast to “our” Judeo-­Christian culture, the core of which is not metaphysics but anxiety. Lacan again indicates that it would be futile to attempt encountering the Aristotelian deity, which is foreign to “us”, sons of the Judeo-Christian Western culture. Following the philosophy of Hegel, he also seeks to clarify that the Aristotelian position is not atheistic; on the contrary, it is the Judeo-Christian position that is atheistic, insofar as it originally proffers the possibility of a split, unsustainable God.49 Lacan’s recognition of the Biblical-Hebrew divinity is actually a Christian recognition, as it is reveled via speech, the word/verb, λόγος (as in John). As presented in Chap. 4 on Lacan’s return to the Logos, even though early Christian roots regarding the revelation via the word or speech were already present in scriptural Judaism (the creation of the world through the speech act in Genesis: ‘let there be light’), the special emphasis here is Christian: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God” (NKJV, John 1:1). As already noted, the motif of the Logos is central to the teaching of Lacan, particularly as concerns his return to Freud, and the Christian conception of the logos allows Lacan to express his psychoanalytic stance regarding the materialization of the signifier in the jouissant body and also to explain the exitmate (both external and intimate) relationship of the subject and big Other/the unconscious. Returning to Seminar III, Lacan further advances his notion of the psychology of Judeo-Christian culture which was one of the conditions for the development of Freudian psychoanalysis; that is, the neurotic anxiety of man, son of Judeo-Christian culture.50

 S3: 288.  Ibid.

49 50

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Lacan shows that the religious experience of fear and anxiety shaped the psychology of the western man in a way that man cannot even imagine psychological experience of a different culture. He adds that in our culture, neurotic anxiety is based on the relation I-other. Moreover, the modern position of atheism in the West is not a continuation of the Aristotelian idea of the celestial God, but a continuation of the relation to the Other, who has an enigmatic status in Judeo-Christian culture of a hidden, beyond God,51 What fascinates Lacan is that the biblical God is hidden, in opposition to the visible nature of Aristotle’s God (who is fixed and unchanging, known to man just like one of the heavenly bodies he is watching). The biblical God does not reveal his face, is not part of the visual-imaginary order but is revealed through the word in the Symbolic order. In fact, Lacan comes close here to the Jansenist definition of God, a definition soon to be discussed. It should be noted only that the definition of this god as the Hidden God does not contradict any previous remarks that the big Other of Lacan has a body and that he enjoys, as this enjoyment (jouissance), for Lacan, is associated with the word, not with the image. In this regard, the subject (and the big Other presented as a subject) exists not as an image of a body (like the ego), but as constructed by the signifier; “Where it speaks, it enjoys”.52 Taken as such, Lacan understands our culture as one that clearly distinguishes between small others and the big Other, the latter being enigmatic and defiant, and arousing anxiety when encountering it. All of this is in contrast with the ancient Greeks, who created a hierarchy of others, that are not radical. The way in which Lacan describes our culture may illustrate well the main idea that he developed in those years about the distinction between the imaginary little other and the symbolic big Other. It is possible to show how the theoretical dilemma Lacan faced between the imaginary and symbolic axes (as in schema L) and the big and small other, as well as the theoretical solution to that dilemma, are

51 52

 Ibid.  S20: 115.

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not only the consequence of clinical experience, but also of a certain religious view about the relationship between the believer and their God.53 This is precisely the point at which it can be assumed that Lacan’s strategy of using the biblical text, which speaks of the character of the Hebraic God, is implemented as to indicate the connection between psychoanalysis and its place in Western culture and to position it on the most important element of that culture for Lacan: scriptural Judaism, which has already established our relation to others and the Other. Arguably, Lacan reads the biblical texts in a manner that conveniently fits his view, and this discourse serves him also as a processing discourse in which he places psychoanalysis, but also indirectly criticizes the establishment of the subject within this discourse.

8.7 Following Racine and Jansenism Lacan later relates back to the discussion of lesson 21 (from two weeks earlier) of the “quilting point.” The theory of a quilting point (point de caption) was developed in order to complement Lacan’s theory on Saussure’s Course on General Linguistics regarding the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Saussure graphically presented the arbitrariness of the signifying and signified fields as two parallel waves. Lacan’s concept originated in the field of weaving: the material is sewn from a first quilting point that holds the entire grid of threads; as a result, the fabric cannot move freely. According to Lacan, even though there is a constant sliding of the signified under the signifier, there is also for the “normal” (neurotic) subject some basic points of interaction between the signifier and signified enabling him to function in a reasonable manner within the social order.54 This being the case, in lesson 21, Lacan introduces his theory on the point de capiton, through a demonstration taken from the tragedy of the Jansenist, Jean Racine, Athalie (Racine, 1639–1699). Lacan first explains the importance of the relation between you and I and how Racine, as a  S3: 288.  S3: 258–270.

53 54

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representative of French Catholic culture, ironically demonstrates this cultural/theological principle in raising to the surface the whorishness of this culture.55 How to account for this strange connection between Jansenism and whorishness? Perhaps the god of Jansenism, the big Other, is not metaphysical in the Greek sense, but returns to the status of the biblical God that has a body, in the sense that he speaks and is present, even though his presence is non-presence, as it is structured around the master signifier (whereas the master signifier is the empty point around which the entire linguistic system moves). In turning to Racine, Lacan underscores the profound link between the big Other and divinity as conceived in Jansenism. The comparison of the presentations of the split biblical God as the Jewish origin of the Judeo-Christian tradition, with the split big Other of Lacan, is further clarified when recognizing that Lacan refers to a very certain type of divinity: the obscure God (in Latin: Deus obsconditus), who is also the obscure god of Jansenism. And so, Lacan’s analysis of “I am who I am” discusses the biblical Judaic source of the Western tradition as a source that erases the metaphysical remnants of that same tradition, but at the same time does it through the Catholic-Christian mediation, for example, through the mediation of Racine’s Athalie. Jansenism is a French Catholic movement named after its founder, the seventeenth century Flemish theologian, Cornelius Jansen (Cornelius Jansenius, 1583–1638). Of Jansen’s most important works is his text Augustine. This is where he re-reads the concept of Augustinian divine Grace (in Greek: χάρις) and considers it a model for the Christian idea of predestination. Jansen opposed the scholastic position that emphasized the metaphysical-philosophical contemplation of God over the inner experience of belief. Jansen’s focus was divine grace. In his view, humanity’s postlapsarian condition is being relentlessly controlled by sin, temptation, and lust. Upon committing the original sin, humanity lost the original grace bestowed by God to the first man. But there is a new grace that is bestowed by God to his selected people, as a free spiritual offering, owing to Christ’s 55

 S3: 290.

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atonement for humanity’s sins on the cross. God does so voluntarily, independent of man’s will, intentions and even good deeds. No one can know about this selection and condemning. This is God’s will. This isn’t to say that man must be lax with their good deeds, but that one must abandon the idea of reciprocity, and hope for God’s graciousness, his mercy. Jansenism was active as a movement throughout the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries and until the French Revolution; even after it still maintained considerable pull among the Catholic elite. It stirred spiritual-­ religious turmoil amongst intellectuals in France and created inner tensions within the French Church, even forcing the Church to define the movement as “sacrilegious.” The Jansen’s students gathered their monastery at Port Royal, where they established their radical ideas. The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with their viewpoint because it both countered the “optimistic” Jesuit approach concerning human nature and the ability of the Church to bring upon his salvation, and also because these positions bordered too closely with those of apostate Protestant perspectives, namely those of Calvinism. Both in Calvinism and Jansenism there is recourse to the biblical God, that is, to the angry and capricious Yahweh, who stops Moses in his path (NKJV, Exodus 4:24) to kill him apparently without any rational reason. This capricious decision of granting grace to his elect is left to God, Jansenism and Calvinism claim.56 In this context, Lacan’s Catholic background is noteworthy. As Elisabeth Roudinesco states in her comprehensive biography of Lacan, Emily, Lacan’s mother, was a devout Catholic. She studied at a Catholic school and was educated under the influence of Jansenist thought, even finding interest in Christian mysticism. Lacan himself studied at the Collège Stanislas: a Catholic school, where the upper middle class’s most talented children were sent. During his youth he was also exposed to  See the famous book of Lucien Goldmann (1964) on Jansenism, where he handles the concept of the “Hidden God” [sometimes translated as dark god] in Pascal’s Pensées and Racine’s tragedies. See Doyle (2001) who considers Jansenism as a subversion of authority, which was even the origin of the early French Revolution. For more about the theological context of Racine see Critchley (2002). 56

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Jansenist Catholicism through his mother and her childhood friend, the daughter of Augustin Gazier, who researched the Jansenist movement.57 The effect of Jansenism on Lacan cannot be determined by these biographical details as such, unless they are directly reflected in his theoretical output. Is Lacan’s Big Other the Jansenist God? In several cases, Lacan mentions the “Obscure God” (“Dieu Obscure”) to describe the Other.58 This is the hidden God, through which the Jansenist, within the framework of predestination, is released from his internal struggle between faith and temptation because the assumption is that God is always watching, always there, even if he does not interfere. He is a hidden God, as he exists as non-existence, predicated on the existence of the human gaze. This God looks at man and pities him, but man has no knowledge of this, and his grace is not assured to him. While Catholic thinkers, especially of Jesuit leaning, sought to place the believer in a moral context, fearing that divine predetermination in face of human folly would lead to moral laxity, the Protestant position, especially that of Calvin, as well as the Catholic-Jansenist demanded a more radical conception of grace—man’s nothingness against the absoluteness of God. It is important to emphasize that this is an Absolute God, and not in the eternal, static, Aristotelian, metaphysical sense. It gains traction with Lacan’s idea of the big Other in the Judeo-Christian tradition, which was not originally an abstract entity, but a speaking being, like a subject, even if it is absolute. Slavoj Žižek noted in passing in his essay “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large”, which deals with the rapport between Catholicism and Hitchcock’s films, that there is a proximity between Lacan’s theory of the 50s regarding the big Other and the Jansenist God.59 But Žižek also emphasizes another important aspect in Jansenism, which prevents it from focusing on the admiration of a cruel God and nothing else. According to Žižek, what distinguishes Jansenism is its inter-subjective  Roudinesco (1997: 10–12).  See for example, his discussion in S11: 275. 59  Žižek (1992: 211–216). There, Žižek associates Hitchcock’s films to Jansenism following the groundbreaking book of Rohmer and Chabrol on Hitchcock, which emphasized the films’ Catholic aspects (Rohmer and Chabrol 1957). 57 58

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relationship between the big Other and the subject: the subject projects his personal trauma outwards in such a manner that the big Other looks back at him, making him face the trauma intrinsic to the mere encounter with the Other. For Žižek, Jansenism has a complicated stance regarding the relation between the subject and God; following Pascal and his method about the necessity of taking a leap of faith in God, as the saying “Act like a believer and the belief will come”, one can view the Jansenists as consciously or unconsciously pinning their faith on God’s arbitrary nature. As Žižek says, The starting point of Jansenism is the abyss separating human “virtue” from divine “grace.” By nature, all people are sinful, sin defines their very status. Because salvation cannot be dependent on their virtue, it must come from the outside as divine grace. Thus, grace, radically contingent, bears no relation to the person’s character or deeds: in an inscrutable way, God decides in advance who will be saved and who will be damned. What in our everyday life we perceive as “natural” is thus inverted; we accomplish virtuous deeds because we are in advance saved.60

Žižek demonstrates the Jansenist principle on Racine’s Phaedra. Through the title ‘In His Bold Gaze My Ruin is Writ Large,’ taken from a scene in Racine, Žižek demonstrates the spirit of Jansenism, which in practice recognizes faith or the giving of grace only by this faith alone, as miracle is only shown to believers; in this sense, Phaedra’s plight illustrates Lacan’s take on the dialectical principle of the gaze.61 Žižek’s discussion seems to follow a different reading of Racine: that of Lacan himself as found in Seminar III. As mentioned previously, Racine’s Athalie is one of the best-known tragedies in French culture. It is a biblical tragedy, whose theme is religious piety. The tragedy mirrored to the French audience the principles of Jansenism, the ritual of which revolved around the wrath of the biblical God. Racine sought to emphasize that the spirit of the Bible and Christianity are tied together, and that the Holy Spirit, which drives the plot forward, is the spirit of a vengeful and powerful divinity.  Žižek (1992: 213). My emphasis.  Ibid.

60 61

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Racine, who is one of the greatest French playwrights, was raised in Port Royal, the center of Jansenism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his last days, after years of revelry and disavowal of his strict religious education, he repented, and got closer to the Jansenist post, writing several tragedies in which the effect of the Jansenist spirit can be seen on the characters’ psychology; namely the motif of the power of temptation and the impossibility of being independently released from this temptation to perdition. The play, Athalie, is based on 2 Kings Chap. 11, and Chronicles Chaps. 22 and 23. It is about Athalie, the queen of Judah, who worshiped the God Baal, and after taking hold of the throne, slaughtered all the descendants of the house of David so that no one will threaten her seat. The play takes place in one of the wings of the temple where Jehoiada, the high priest, and his followers, God’s believers, plan a coup against Athalie. The rebels slaughter her and anoint the young Joash, who is thought to be dead, to be the king of Judah. The opening sentence of the play is spoken by the frightened Avner, one of Judah’s princes: Oui, je viens dans son temple odorer l’Éternel.62,

Lacan reads this sentence as diffuse and problematic, without a quilting point, as it opens with a “yes” as if it is in the middle of a conversation. It therefore misses the suture, the quilting point, through which the subject gives meaning to the terrifying chaos around him.63 Lacan further analyzes this situation as the situation of the ‘fear of God’, which is that which allows for the elimination of all other fears: one terrible fear against all other fears, which is reflected in the answer of the high priest Jehoiada to Abner. Jehoiada’s statement saves Abner from sinking into misery and paranoia; thus, the quilting point here is awe and fear of God. Anxiety is that which establishes the covenant between God and his people.64

 Racine (1999: 1017).  S3: 266. 64  Ibid. 62 63

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The quilting point for Lacan in this moment is the fundamental signifier which enables speech within the Symbolic order, the signifier that organizes the order of the big Other, which directs the relations between the signifying chain and the chain of meanings, of signified. Without this signifier, putting it under foreclosure leads to psychosis. According to Lacan, this signifier is primarily the Name-of-the-Father, which is a kind of highway, without which one loses their direction:65 Lacan directly links between the signifiers “fear” and “father”, as signifiers which constitute the quilting-point; his understanding of what is a father and what is the Name-of-the-Father is carved through the Catholic corpus.66 This gives us a new outlook on Lacan’s discussion of the Oedipus complex and its conceptualization through the signifier the Name-of-­ the-Father”, as performed, inter alia, through the theological context of the signifier “Fear of God”, which organizes the locus of the believer within the religious field. In other words, here too, Lacan constructs the relationship between the subject and the big Other through its parallel theological trace. And so, leaving behind the signifier Fear of God will lead to the loss of the believer’s reality, the same way that abandoning the signifier Father would lead to the structure of psychoses, which is a sort of a subjective dissolution.

8.8 God of Speech and Desire Shifting the focus from Lacan’s seminar III to other places in his work, it seems that there also, the relationship between the subject and the big Other is designed through the Judeo-Christian processing discourse, and not only in its Jansenist aspects (Jansenism, in this sense, was an extremity developed within the Catholic Christian tradition). The description of the big Other as a speaking subject can also be portrayed using the religious definition of the dialectical relationship between the believer’s desire and God’s desire. Lacan grasped this dialectic according to the Hegelian theory of the master and slave in Phenomenology of Spirit and  S3: 259–262.  S3: 290.

65 66

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announced that “Man’s desire is the desire of the [(big)] other.”67 This dialectical structure is found in schema L: the relationship between the subject and the big Other is both extimate and intimate, as there is an external desire for both that is also intimate and unconscious for the subject. It is worth adding here that Lacan’s concept of the Big Other is somewhat parallel to the Catholic position on the believer’s relation with the Christian God. When Pope John Paul II speaks of the Christian God, he makes him different from the static and abstract metaphysical God in the philosophic-Aristotelian sense, pushing the Jewish biblical representation of God aside and associating him with the metaphysical (Greek?) position. In this way, the Pope perhaps demonstrates how firmly the root of this concept is grounded, in the return to the divine, as a return to the split deity of biblical Christianity: The position that God suffers as man, that it is not indifferent to human suffering but sympathizes with it, the position of God who is desire—follows the Catholic tradition and is opposed to philosophical concepts of divinity. In fact, the Pope rephrases the conception of the ‘scandal’ of the sacrificed god on the cross, which originated in the Pauline notion, who opposes it to the wisdom of this world (in the context of Hellenistic philosophy): For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.68

67 68

 S3: 244.  NKJV, Corinthians (1: 18–24).

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The contrast of John Paul II between the transcendent God and the Christian God who suffers/involves/loves, is sourced, more familiarly (according to him), in Pascal’s Pensées: as part of his polemic against the anti-Christian, rationalistic Deism of Enlightenment. This same Pascal was essentially Jansenist: The God of Christians is not a God who is simply the author of mathematical truths, or of the order of the elements; that is the view of heathens and Epicureans. He is not merely a God who exercises His providence over the life and fortunes of men, to bestow on those who worship Him a long and happy life. That was the portion of the Jews. But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians, is a God of love and of comfort, a God who fills the soul and heart of those whom He possesses, a God who makes them conscious of their inward wretchedness, and His infinite mercy, who unites Himself to their inmost soul, who fills it with humility and joy, with confidence and love, who renders them incapable of any other end than Himself.69

Lacan, whose thought stems from the same Catholic-theological source, is persistently in line with Freudian thought, however it is through the rhetorical guise of ‘the opponent’, invented by Freud in The Future of an Illusion.70 Following are the words of the ‘opponent’, who is sympathetic to religion (arguably representing an inner voice of Freud): Philosophers stretch the meaning of words until they retain scarcely anything of their original sense. They give the name of ‘God’ to some vague abstraction which they have created for themselves; having done so they can pose before all the world as deists, as believers in God, and they can even boast that they have recognized a higher purer concept of God, notwithstanding that their God is now nothing more than an insubstantial shadow and no longer the mighty personality of religious doctrines.71

 Pascal (2011: 158).  Freud (1927). 71  Freud (1927: 32). 69 70

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The (Catholic?) opponent of Freud resists the philosophically abstract deistic position of divinity, seeking to refer to the reality of God beyond such philosophical abstractions. It is worth noting that Freud himself does the same in Totem and Taboo; he gives a body to God when describing it as the primal god who once walked the face of the earth.

8.9 The Anti-Metaphysical Traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Lacanianism As we have seen, Lacan opposes the prevalent Judeo-Christian view that sees God as infinite, eternal, and almighty. He strives to make a clear distinction between the Aristotelian influence and the biblical source of Judeo-Christianity, as God is completely Other in the latter. This God is characterized as speaking, and thus Lacan defines him as a subject, a split subject (not necessarily in the anthropomorphic, rather in the Lacanian sense that connects speech with a psychic split). From this point of view, Lacanian ethics shares some ethic principles with what he perceives as the anti-metaphysical, Judeo-Christian representation of God, which opposes God’s philosophical representation. Such position favors a definition of a concrete God, who is essentially speaking and responding, but at the same time is also absolutely Other (the combination of his speech with his dimension of otherness constitutes the traumatic aspect in the encounter with him). Lacanian discourse assumes that this religious tendency also entails an emphasis on human existence within language/logos as a human experience that is at once interior and exterior, as well as the emphasis on the unconscious dimension. I argue that Lacan’s choice to relate his discourse to the ethical disposition of the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially regarding the subject’s relation to God and its master signifier, allows him to disentangle the theoretical dilemma pursuant to the conceptualization of the Freudian Oedipus. This also allowed him to demonstrate that the big Other and the Name-of-the-Father maintain a significant presence in the subject’s life, even though they “do not exist” and are the formal products of the subject’s locus in language.

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As I have showed, the point of origin for this tradition is found in Yehuda Halevi’s The Kuzari, where he distinguished between the abstract and universal name “Elohim,” and the particularity of “Yahweh.” This Jewish tradition again found traction in modernity as notably evinced in Franz Rosenzweig’s work, which sets a new ethical and philosophical standard that goes against philosophical idealism that detaches man from the existential religious experience. It also finds echo in Hans Jonas’s depositioning of the monotheistic God’s “omnipotence.”72 There are other Christian theologians that are noteworthy here: Paul’s epistles (The Epistle to the Romans in particular) on Grace and the Heresy on the Cross, St. Augustine who develops this conception of predestination, Jansen, Pascal and Racine, and Kierkegaard, who emphasizes the dimension of Angst, anxiety, as evidenced through the story of Isaac’s binding and Abraham’s experience throughout this trial.73 Lacan was familiar with and sympathized with the positions of most of these theologians. It should be noted that some of these theologians would not agree with Lacan’s attempt to define God as something that is not the supreme good, eternal, infinite, and omnipotent, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that their position towards God is that God reacts to man and is revealed to man as speaking. The grounds for this position mostly stem from resistance to philosophical discourse, and a particular reliance on the revelation of God in the biblical text. Considering these characteristics, it seems that Lacan’s hypothesis is that the authors of the biblical texts were not familiar with the metaphysical dilemmas (in the Aristotelian discourse) of God as ‘existence’, but grasped him as absolutely Other to human life, mobile, and intervening. (This hypothesis is not different from that of Lacan’s fellow theologians, and it is common to this day in biblical research) This return to the reading of Lacan and these theologians is suspicious regarding any attempt of reason to understand God, the absolute Other.  See the article of Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God after Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice” (Jonas 1987).  In particular see his book Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard 2006) and Lacan’s discussion in On the Names-of-the-Father on the binding of Isaac and the perceived image of Abraham in Kierkegaard’s wake (Lacan 1963). 72 73

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This, then, is the true essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition for Lacan: The Other is totally other and not eternal and abstract but split. Encountering this absolute otherness causes real, intolerable, and desecrated, anxiety. This split is reflected in the caprice of divine grace, as in the dialectic of the subject’s desire, the subject throws his desire back upon this Other. It is worth noting that even if Lacan often refers to Catholic anti-­ metaphysical attitudes, it is quite possible to find similar positions in the Protestant tradition, which emphasized, in the wake of Luther, the Pauline principle of predestination and anxiety in the face of God. For example, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth emphasizes the absolute otherness of God by defining Him as the “Absolute Other.”74 Barth’s notion of the absolute otherness shows how much Lacan’s discussion of the great divided Other, although presented as related to Jewish motifs, is also the outgrowth of the theological mood in the first decades of the twentieth century in Christian thought, which considered the fragility of the God of Christians. I.e., translates theological concepts from Jewish-­ biblical processing discourses, and conveys them through the Christian prism familiar to him (whether it is Catholic following his initiation and the environment in which he lives or whether it is Protestant following the influence of Protestant thinkers such as Hegel). In this respect, it is worth examining the relationship between demythologization in Lacan’s discourse that has a Protestant “depth” and his Christian insistence on the actual presence of the Other/God. Barth’s definition of “Absolute Otherness” is reminiscent of the conception of religious experience of the Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto, such as articulated in his book The Idea of the Holy.75 Otto’s impression can help clarify the similarity between the relationship of the subject and the Other for Lacan and the relationship of the believer and God, who is understood as the absolute Other. According to Otto, Judaism and Christianity hinge upon the religious experience that he defined as ‘mysterium tremendom’ (terrible mystery); the encounter with God is the most

74 75

 See, for example, Church Dogmatics, Chap. 5, “God in Heaven” (Barth 1956).  Otto (1958).

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traumatic, and there is no rational justification for his actions. This is an arbitrary and totally capricious God, as operating in the Old Testament through the standard of “the wrath of God.” God is completely other (ganz andere).76 For example, in Exodus (4:24), God wishes to kill Moses on his way to the desert lodging, as is also the case in Paul’s Epistle.77 * * * The research of the previous chapters made it clear that Lacan puts both sides of the subject’s unconscious axis in schema L under the status of the subject: the speaking subject and the big Other. The latter is the one who says “I am”, which indicates that it is also a speaking subject. Is Lacan overlooking alternative speaking deities in other cultures? It seems that he refers here is speech not only in terms of the speaking God, but that the word “I” (je) is to be understood as part of his name. Lacan is clearly indicating God’s Hebraic name—despite all his objections to erroneous interpretations of the Hebrew expression—as saying in French “Je suis!” “I am!” Still, it can be argued that the word “‫“( ”אהיה‬I am/ I will”), as it appears in the Bible contains the aspect of “(I) will be” (“‫)”אני אהיה‬. I.e., speech is God in itself; this is the God of speech. If this God is speaking, it thus expresses the absolute otherness of language as conveyed in Western culture. In what sense? In the Jansenist sense, wherein God is the anxiety that converts all other fears, and wherein the act of faith in God is that which allows for the suspension of all other little anxieties coming from all the little others (as is the case in paranoia, for example, when the world is flooded with innumerable small others). This is the Judeo-Christian solution to psychosis, allowing the one fear of God and subjection to the order of the Other and the Symbolic in order to be free of the Imaginary order and psychosis. The Imaginary order is the order in which the psychotic encounters his superego, which becomes an external voice that lurks in the guise of imaginary aggressions and does not allow the subject to face a big Other (therefore in psychosis the big Other comes to be a small other).  Otto (1958: 17–36).  Otto (1958: 83–84, 95–103).

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It therefore appears that Lacan aligns himself with the Judeo-Christian position despite his criticism that it produces the pathology of neurotic anxiety and faith in a savior Other, since this position, which puts in the center of its faith the master signifier or the Name-of-the-Father, allows for the liberation from the yoke of the aggressive big Other. In other words, for Lacan, even if this cultural framework obsessively commands the subject, it is preferable to having no law, where, instead of the void of the disappearing-law, will come a more conscientious and aggressive law (as may be the case for Christianity in nullifying the Jewish law, as will be demonstrated in the following chapter). In psychosis, therefore, the Name-of-the-Father, which allows for the expression of the subject in the Symbolic order, is lacking. In psychosis, the signifier lacks a quilting-point and is therefore rendered static in the absence of a conventional signifier; the psychotic can only then give it one permanent meaning of certainty. In other words, in psychosis there is no faith (which entails the dialectical relation between truth and falsehood), but rather something beyond faith: certainty. The psychotic does not believe, he knows! From a cultural viewpoint, does Lacan prefer that the subject be subjected to the yoke of the Judeo-Christian God? Would he lament the disappearance of the Name-of-the-Father and the big Other, which formerly played a crucial role in bringing order and meaning to life? Is he suggesting that in the postmodern era, we are tangled in a psychotic world, shattered into countless small others? Is this what gives rise to the aggressive superego in modern culture, as opposed to the responsibility of the law of the symbolic father? What is the relation between the superego and the law? In the next chapter, these ethical questions will be discussed. It should be noted that Lacan’s return to the biblical scriptures facilitates a return to Descartes while expressing ambivalence to his thought and scientific position. This return enables psychoanalysis to act from within the scientific trend, and not slide into a pre-Cartesian spiritualism on the one hand (as Lacan would claim in regarding to Jung’s method); but, on the other hand, not be inwardly consumed by the mathematical and statistical analysis of the subject in modern science. For Lacan, Cartesian science is not the consequence of certainty in the face of

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Aristotelian heavens after all, rather it is the consequence of the Judeo-­ Christian belief in the Other, of faith that is dialectally related to doubt. And this applies also to psychoanalysis, which is part of the Cartesian trend, because the subject of the unconscious is also the cogito itself: it is empty, depthless, and subject to doubt.

9 The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Judaism, and Christianity: Reading Seminar VII

Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), is a well-known and important Seminar of Lacan. Its importance lies in highlighting the question of the singularity of the ethical dimension in psychoanalytic discourse and practice. This question also invokes the question of ethics in other discourses, particularly philosophy, science, and religion. As mentioned, Lacan’s ethics is fundamentally a product of discussions within the Judeo-Christian discourse; Lacanian psychoanalysis unfolds in a religious context, particularly in Seminar VII. Truly, Lacanian ethics goes directly against the feelings of guilt in the religious morality—the same as it is opposed to the opposite ideal of unlimited sexual liberation. However, Lacan posits his ethics in a certain discourse, and rails against other discourses. He identifies with the ethics of certain forms of modern science (as a realization of certain ethics within the Judeo-Christian tradition) but opposes the position of the Aristotelian philosophical ethics that represents the ancient-pagan world and/or the pre-Cartesian sciences, such as Jung’s psychology.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_9

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Lacan reads Freud as one who, despite acknowledging the father function, is actually bound in an imaginary position (in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism), presenting the Other/ Father as a historical figure rather than as a cultural function. Due to its imaginary dimension, Lacan interprets the Freudian position as Christian; the murder of the father is actually a form of the murder of god’s messenger, Jesus, as in the New Testament. Consequently, Lacan shows how Freud’s concept of love is also embedded in a Christian imaginary position. Lacan tries to extract Freud from the imaginary Christian position and return to him what he considers the true basis of psychoanalysis: recognizing the father as a symbolic function and recognizing love as an ethical dimension that exceeds the imaginary setting, towards the understanding of the real in it. Lacan’s relation to Freud is embedded in his attempt to link psychoanalysis to a certain Judeo-Christian position of the Other/ God as anti-metaphysical, i.e., as a cultural function that is not an image. The question then arises to what extent Lacan considers it to be a Jewish-­ biblical position, and to what extent such position is presented through the Christian prism. This leads Lacan towards the constitution of a psychoanalytical position in which the will to turn the subject/patient’s attention to his locus within a linguistic Symbolic order—a recognition that has the power to detach him from the illusion of return to the harmonious condition of universal love—leads him to encounter the split and the disharmony within himself, i.e., his unconscious that is completely Other to himself.

9.1 Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Biology Seminar VII constituted a significant turning point in the establishment of the Lacanian discourse. Lacan’s emphasis in 1950s was on the tension between the Symbolic order, the other and the Other. Indeed, even though the division between the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real appeared already in 1953, not enough attention was given throughout that decade to the order of the Real, which had a different meaning in the beginning

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of Lacan’s teaching. As of Seminar VII, the emphasis is on another dualistic tension: between the Symbolic and Real, and between the signifier and that which deviates from it. The conceptual objects that represent this diversion from the Symbolic, which receive central stage in Seminar VII, are ‘jouissance’ and the ‘Thing’ (Das Ding). In this respect, Seminar VII is also a transitional seminar after which, arguably, Lacan also abandons the research of the linguistic aspects of the unconscious, towards an (almost impossible) investigation of the Real. This focus on the Real only grew in the following years. However, the emergence of the discussion in Seminar VII is not so surprising given that throughout the 1950s—despite Lacan’s engagement with the Symbolic order—he sought ethical and theoretical paths towards that which exceeds it, i.e., the Real. It may be argued in retrospect that the religious aspects of the Lacanian theory in the 50s, which pointed at an absence within the Symbolic order and the big Other, actually anticipated the theoretical solution presented in Seminar VII. The question now arises, how the complex religious discourse in Seminar VII persists against this religious background of the solution to Lacan’s theoretical dilemma. Lacan wished to de-biologize the Real following his ethical stand on the gap between the human and animal (according to which the biological discourse reduces man to an animal, living organism). This de-­ biologization, as taking place in Seminar VII, is not a neglect of the subject’s locus within the Symbolic, rather it posits a Real which is not animalistic/biological/natural but created retroactively out of the symbolic world. The concept of jouissance in Lacan’s teaching is in fact a translation of the concept of “excess pleasure” in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. It is a jouissance that is beyond the regulation of the pleasure principle, related to the obsessive return to the trauma and hence to the death drive. In this text, Freud asks why the subject obsessively repeats actions and thoughts that are harmful for him, that oppose the rule (that he himself articulated) of the pleasure principle. According to the pleasure principle, the mental mechanism wishes to obtain pleasure and avoid pain. Freud raises the problems that were uncovered in the clinic; in order to find a solution and cure for them, he turns in particular to biological discourse. In fact, a significant part of his text is a discussion of the

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analogy between his own investigation and the findings of the biological discourse in his time.1 Freud distinguishes between the life and death drives. He finds the analogy to this dichotomy, as mentioned, in the biological discourse, in the relation between the life drive and its opposing drive, in any living creature, to annul oneself and return to inorganic. Freud also states, in an extreme, pessimistic manner (as he admits, under Schopenhauer’s influence) that the ultimate purpose of life itself is death: If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones.’2

This pessimism of the late Freud was also expressed in the loss of the belief in man’s special qualities. According to Freud, there is nothing in the development of man that is different than that of the animal, other than repression. If there is a difference between man and animal, it is not because of the superiority of the human, but because of the element of repression, the repression of the (animalistic) drive.3 It seems that this Freudian pessimism found a sympathetic listener— Lacan. Man, believes Lacan, is not a rational creature who can control himself, but the product of another order. In Freud’s case, it is the animalistic-­biological order. However, the aspect of repression, which presents some kind of difference nonetheless, motivated Lacan to sharpen the distinction between Freud and himself; For Lacan the emphasis is not on the subordination of the human to the biological order, but to the Symbolic order of language and the laws of kinship. At this point Lacan’s stance unites with the main aspect of Freudian thought regarding repression, which, according to Lacan, is the repression of the signifier, which constitutes the subject. This is expressed in Seminar VII, when Lacan articulates his notion of the unconscious that is structured like a language:  Freud (1920).  Freud (1920: 38–39, Emphasis in the original reference). 3  Freud (1920: 41). 1 2

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We only grasp the unconscious finally when it is explicated, in that part of it which is articulated by passing into words. It is for this reason that we have the right—all the more so as the development of Freud’s discovery will demonstrate—to recognize that the unconscious itself has in the end no other structure than the structure of language.4

Note that until now, Lacan focused on the argument that the repression that creates the unconscious is a repression of signifiers, and from now on, he will investigate what exceeds the field of signifiers and the Symbolic, that is, discuss what lies beyond the unconscious itself.

9.2 The Real, Jouissance, and the Thing Lacan opens Seminar VII with several lessons dedicated to a forgotten and enigmatic Freudian text, Project for Scientific Psychology (1950) (Entwurf einer Psychologie [1895]),5 which Freud did not publish during his lifetime. The Project was first published together with Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, who was Freud’s initial partner in this new method of treatment called psychoanalysis. At this early stage, Freud sought to base psychoanalysis on purely scientific grounds, and construct a meta-psychological knowledge that will also draw from his knowledge in neurology. For Lacan, this text is important as it reveals Freud’s ethical motivation since his theory is nothing but a product of the ethical experience within the framework of the clinical experience.6 Lacan wishes to extract the text’s internal logic, and therefore attaches its reading to his reading of “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920). In this latter text Freud criticizes the pleasure principle that articulated at the time of the Project another aspect in the psyche, which in fact wishes to disrupt the mental balance between pleasure and pain and achieve the pleasure that lies beyond it. Through it, Lacan wishes to show that already in the

 S7: 32.  GW Nachtragsband – Text aus den Jahren 1885–1938: 375–477. 6  S7: 35. 4 5

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Project, the relation between pleasure and reality principles is found in an ethical distinction and is related to what Lacan calls the Real (réel).7 He notes that the reality principle in Freud is a direct continuation of the pleasure principle, and that the transition to the pleasure principle is connected to the death drive, which pushes the subject to the Real, to the traumatic reality (which cannot achieve a lingual representation, not even in the level of the unconscious, that is, it is not repressed).8 At the end of a long and winding discussion of Freud’s Project, Lacan points to the real object around which all representations move—das Ding, the traumatic, unreachable thing, the lost Thing which will never return. The Thing is imagined as the higher good, although it may turn into complete disaster. A surprise awaits the reader here: anyone who got used to reading Lacan’s seminars about the notion of the “Other” as an agent of the Symbolic order, realizes that Lacan now uses it to designate the real Thing: […] das Ding has to be posited as exterior, as the prehistoric Other that it is impossible to forget—the Other whose primacy of position Freud affirms in the form of something entfremdet, something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me, something that on the level of the unconscious only a representation can represent.9

The identity of the Lacanian concepts “the Thing” and the “Other” follows Freud’s words about the encounter of man with his neighbor-­ stranger (which is for him the Thing) as an encounter with his most intimate jouissance. Lacan reviews a paragraph in the Project that includes the word Nebenmensch (fellow man) and studies it and the relation between this word and das Ding, which also appears in the Project, though

 Ibid.  Ibid. 9  S7: 71. 7 8

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not often.10 Lacan takes these side aspects of Freud’s text and puts them in the center, as his main tools of work in this seminar.11 The Thing is an extimate concept: it is the strangest to the subject and the most intimate at the same time. So is the Real: it is the Real that is strangest to the subject but also the most internal and most intimate. It seems that Lacan displaces the logic of the lingual unconscious (and the symbolic Other) in the beginning of the 1950s towards the understanding of the Real and the Thing in their relation to the subject; throughout the 1950s, the Imaginary was presented in contrast to the Symbolic, and now the extimate contrast is presented between the Symbolic and the Real. Such discussion of the dialectic relation between the Symbolic and the Real is meant to serve Lacan in his de-mythologizing project: the signifier is that which creates jouissance from the start, thus the Real is born out of the Symbolic, and not the other way around. For Lacan, the Real is the hole in the symbolic system; it is not an ontological presence beyond human reality, but it is also not an animalistic-biological essence beyond the human. While describing the relation between the Symbolic and Real, Lacan adds that we constantly want to restrain and tame this inconceivable Thing-Other.12 The representations of language, the Vorstellung, the signifiers, move around in circles around the Thing. This is the pleasure principle, and the Symbolic order in which the symbolic law functions.13 In this sense, the symbolic law is in direct relation to the Real, as a supporter of the Thing, which is traumatic in its essence. For this reason, it is impossible to define the law as supporting only the supreme good, since the supreme good is also the supreme bad. For Lacan, following Freud, the Thing exists above all (paradoxically) as absence, and certain objects function as their substitutes, particularly as substituting the lost mother. Indeed, this Thing presents itself as the supreme good, but it has an underside—just like the mother is the supreme good for the subject, 10  Following is the quote from the Project in the German source that Lacan is based on: “Und so sondert sich der Komplex des Nebenmenschen in zwei Bestandteile, von dened der eine durch konstantes Gefüge imponiert, als Ding beisammenbleibt […]” (GW Nachtragsband: 426). 11  S7. 12  S7: 57. 13  S7.

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but at the same time also the supreme bad, according to Lacan. The Thing is nothing other than the mother, the forbidden object, according to Lacan.14 As mentioned, the concept of “das Ding” is originally Freudian and relates to the lost object that gives pleasure, to which the subject aspires to return. Reading Freud, Lacan distinguishes between die Sache, the representation in the symbolic level, and das Ding, the (non)representation of something that is impossible to represent in the Symbolic, located in the Real. We can also identify here an echo of the Kantian concept Ding-­ an-­sich (the thing in itself ) and the Heideggerian philosophy’s position towards reality. Lacan’s new discussion of the Real integrates into his elaborate conception of the order of the symbolic law, following Claude Lévi-Strauss. In his view, the symbolic Law (la Loi) includes all the rules of exchange of the human communication system—that is, of the language built as a chain of signifiers. According to Lacan, the Law, as a human order, is that which enables the subjective desire (désir). In Seminar VII, the concept of desire relates to the ethical question in psychoanalysis, and to the unconscious: since the unconscious is a part of the work of the symbolic signifying system, desire is first of all a result of the location of man within the Symbolic order. Due to the dialectic relations between the Symbolic and the Real, desire also has a dialectic relation to real objects. Therefore, following the Thing (das Ding)—which belongs to the Real—desire pushes one signifier that moves the chain of signifiers around the Thing, like a domino effect; desire always moves around the real Thing. The Law prevents desire from breaking the chain of signifiers towards the Thing, while jouissance breaks out towards the Thing. The jouissance is what the subject experiences in his attachment to the forbidden or lost object (the Thing, the Mother, the maternal breast), before he was “born” (before the Oedipal crisis, but not in the biological-chronological sense, but in the structural synchronic sense of the state of the subject at any time). The pre-Oedipal, pre-cultural jouissance threatens the stability of the subject and its functioning; it causes suffering, pain, and death, since  Ibid.

14

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it is the exaggerated pleasure that undermines the Symbolic order of the Law. The Law guards the human from being hurled into a pre-human condition by preventing the satisfaction of the desire, the touching of the Thing. The Law distinguishes between man and other animals; without being subordinated to the signifier, man turns psychotic. In articulating the Law, Lacan was inspired by Lévi-Strauss, who raised the idea of the “world of laws” and the “symbolic signifying system”, to which we are born and to which we adapt.15 Therefore, the Lacanian Law does not relate to any specific law, but to a basic principle that constitutes the array of social relations. The Law contains a network of universal principles that enable social existence, structures that control every form of social exchange: the giving of gifts, the exchange of women between families for the purpose of marriage (as a result of the taboo on incest), etc. The basic structure of exchange is communication itself, and therefore the Law is a linguistic entity—it is the Law of the signifier, of language.16 This legal-linguistic structure is the infrastructure of the Symbolic order, represented in the Other, which produces the unconscious and the subject, while constituting it as the-subject-of-language (bound to language). The agent of the Symbolic order—the Father (le Père)—enforces, in the Oedipal stage, the symbolic Law on the subject through the Name of the Father (Nom-du-Père) in the name of the prohibition, that is, the No of the Father (‘Non’-du-Père), forbidding the desire for the Mother.17 In the relationship between the infant and the mother, the mother takes the place of the Thing. The Father does not have to be identified with the biological parent in the family; he is a party in a linguistic, ahistorical, structural struggle. The Father represents the introduction of the symbolic, of language, to the symbiotic system of Mother-infant, the introduction of the child to the symbolic array through the signifier phallus. The commanding Father who forbids also enjoys pronouncing the “no”. Lacan concluded that it is impossible to separate the Law, the command of the parent, from the loud expression “do!”, and from the cruel  Lévi-Strauss (1949).  S7. 17  S7: 65. 15 16

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tone of the Father who commands and derives pleasure from it. Therefore, the moral law cannot be conceived (as Kant conceives it) as based on abstract universal principles but it derives from the emotions and desires of the Other, as the superego derives enjoyment from criticizing the ego and reminding him his failure by disobeying the Law. That is, the Law is not only a reservoir of commandments, rather, it is also a reservoir of jouissance of the agents of the law, the parents who command and take pleasure in it.18 Lacan emphasizes here—the extent to which the functions of the Other and the Name-of-the-Father are not objective but are involved in jouissance. That is, it is impossible to conceive the Law—that prevents us from suffering, pain, or death—as helpful and harmless, as completely opposed to the jouissance that causes suffering and death. Thus, in the Lacanian reading of Totem and Taboo, the emphasis is put on the characterization of the Father as one who experienced jouissance outside the limits of the Symbolic order. This mythical father—who precedes the murder and the constitution of law and culture—is unconstrained by Law. The constitutor of the Law himself is not included in the Law, because he is the Law. Hence, there are no opposing sides—the Law against the deviant jouissance, since the Father himself, who embodies the Law, is the (only) one who is permitted to experience the forbidden jouissance. In presenting the Father and the Other in the later Lacanian discourse as enjoying, the regulation that was already necessary in the beginning of the 1950s, following the conceptualization of the Freudian motif of the Oedipal father, takes place. I pointed at this need for regulation in the previous chapters, when it was revealed that the religious tendency in the Lacanian discourse enabled, already then, a religious-like solution in which the Father/Other is presented as a concept and as speaking-­ enjoying at the same time.

 S7.

18

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9.3 The Theological Origins of Lacanian Ethics The tensions between ethics in Judaism, Christianity, and psychoanalysis, as perceived by Lacan, are related to Lacan’s discursive strategy of revising psychoanalysis. Lacanian ethics corresponds with what Lacan perceives as the Judeo-Christian ethics, which is a combination of certain Jewish conceptions and a Catholic, anti-metaphysical position that wishes to return to the biblical origin of Western culture. Do Paul’s words about preferring the weak and suffering against the presence of the know-all Greek philosopher accord with the Lacanian ethical position? Does Lacan’s position that the Other is split like the subject and that he is not indifferent to human desires actually continue a certain Catholic tradition of opposing the philosophical conception of divinity? The source of this Catholic position lies in the Pauline faith that relates to the “scandal” of sacrificing God on the cross, in contrast to the wisdom of this world. In this context, we should mention Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.19 Weber is interested in religion as a cultural phenomenon, especially in the tension between Catholic culture and Protestant/Calvinist culture as cultural positions that collide on the ethical level. The Protestant culture, which is the basis of the ethics of the modern capitalist world, is presented as individualistic, conscientious and demanding that wishes, according to the Puritan model, to get rid of the remnants of enjoyment. Conversely, Catholicism is presented as based on an ethics that acknowledges the flesh and the sin of man and does not deny it (even though it wishes to battle with sin). Is this also the contradiction that Lacan presents between the moralistic-sadistic ethics of the superego, born with Paul and embodied in the Kantian morality in the form of the categorical order of universal love, and the Catholic ethics (also born with Paul) of the other that is real and traumatic—or is this “Catholic” position Jewish in essence?

19

 Weber (1930).

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The question of the superego as it relates to ethics is extremely urgent for Lacan. Already in the first lesson, he asks, what is the sin that always leads the moral discourse? This question is related to the way Freud articulated the birth of the moral law in Totem and Taboo.20 Lacan asks, what does analysis enable us to articulate regarding the origin of ethics? Is it possible to find another articulation that is not mythological, like Totem and Taboo? Is everything reducible to the concept of “superego” through Freud’s mythological representation?21 As I have shown in previous chapters, Lacan’s main purpose is to disconnect the Freudian discourse from the psychobiological and psycho-historical remains (which Lacan views as imaginary) towards working with the signifier and its relationship with the body of jouissance. For this purpose, Lacan is helped particularly by Civilization and its Discontents, where Freud’s ethical discussion is accompanied by a discussion of the death drive. For Lacan, Freud was first of all a pessimist rather than a man of progress, and this has influenced his ethics: on the one hand, psychoanalysis is not libertarian nor is it moralistic. On the other hand, it does not have a naturalistic or normative position as ego-psychology. It is an ethics related to desire, according to the instructive question relevant to any subject: “Have you acted in conformity with the desire that resides in you?”22. This is the question that directs the ethics of Lacanian psychoanalysis. By comparison, traditional ethics since Aristotle and Kant revolved around the notion of “good”, as it directs the human being towards the position of the “supreme good”. According to Lacan, psychoanalytic ethics sees in the “Good” an obstacle in the way of desire, that is, we do not wish to lead the patient to healing, to the “good”, nor to hedonism.23 In the introduction to this book, I alluded to Lacan’s ambivalence regarding everything that is related to Catholic culture. As already argued there, an explanation for that may be found in the possible response of the audience in his seminars (the majority of whom was atheist and even  S7.  Ibid. 22  S7: 314. 23  S7: 219. 20 21

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Marxist) to intellectually unfashionable theological aspects. On the one hand, Lacan uses Paul’s words to demonstrate his arguments of the dialectic relations between the law/the Symbolic and the sin/the Real; on the other, he relates to his visit in the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, i.e., a crowd that might be suspicious of Lacan’s ideas.24 Lacan confronts a Catholic audience and does not yield; he repeats the Freudian message to them: the father God is dead. This is Lacan’s point of departure: the death of Nietzsche’s God, and the death of Christianity’s God, as well as the loss of power of the modern father sprouted the modern mental pathologies, thus leading to the constitution of Freudian psychoanalysis. From this respect, God’s death is also the Catholic Church’s loss of power, since it reconstituted the position of the son towards his position as Father by emphasizing the importance of the patriarchal order. Subsequently, it may be asked, how does Lacan persist with the patriarchal-Catholic position of attempting to restore the position of the Father, the dead Father? According to Lacan, patriarchy in this instance does not stand for the oppression of the subject, but the opposite: the Name-of-the-Father or the Father as function is the condition to the constitution of the subject’s desire, and his liberation from clinging to the Thing, the primordial Mother, who is the absolute good and bad. This means that there is a tight connection between three major Lacanian themes: the Father, ethics, and (unconscious) desire. In the discussion of “Eheye Asher Eheye”, I concluded that Lacan’s ethical position is related to (though not identical to) what he views as the Judeo-Christian (patriarchal) ethics. Consequently, it may be asked, how does this ethic agree with the Freudian ethic, as we know well that Lacan demands the “return to Freud”? Furthermore, out of the connection between Aristotelian and Freudian ethics, it may be asked, how does the ethics of Lacanian desire differ from philosophical ethics, beginning with Aristotle? At this point, it should be noted that Lacan’s resistance to

 S7: 170. Recently, Lacan’s lectures from the period in the Catholic University in Brussels (March 1960) were published under the title The Triumph of Religion: preceded by Discourse to Catholics (Lacan 1960). 24

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the Aristotelian ethical position is also related to his resistance to Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian theology influenced by Aristotle. Lacan’s main purpose is to establish an ethic of desire, the desire that surrounds the Real, the traumatic. What is desire? What is the Real? In what way does the definition of the Real and of desire relate to the religious articulations of the Judeo-Christian discourse? Furthermore, if Lacan’s ethics of desire confront the ethics of the superego and the supreme good, to what extent can an ethics be performed without that supreme good?25 To what extent is it possible to escape the superego and the Kantian categorical imperative? To what extent is it possible to escape universal ethics which refer to all subjects as one? In what way is it possible to establish an ethics that is connected to desire, and at the same time avoids demanding an encounter with the Real, with the traumatic? In this aspect, Lacan seeks to point out a trivial truth that is also a paradox: the superego and the ethical imperative are structured by the Symbolic order, but they have a paradoxical relationship with the real, the forbidden, the traumatic. All this goes against the fantasy of harmony with nature (nature as a basis for ethics) or with happiness or enjoyment, while the ethical law supposedly drives man away from the violation of the law and from the real-traumatic horror. In this regard, Lacan, who reminds us how anti-progress Freud was, expresses a seemingly conservative position against the hopes of modern science and modern ethics, of relieving man quickly from suffering, from the split, from his own corporeality, etc., towards some utopian fantasy of absolute good and universal love. For Lacan, this absolute good is soon revealed as the absolute bad, as Sade teaches us in his “Kantian” lessons and as Lacan himself implies regarding East-European communism. This is Lacan’s ambivalent relation to modernism and modern science and its special perception of the concept “cogito”. The question of the ethics of psychoanalysis is tightly related to the question of cogito and the relation between Kant and Sade; Kant represents the modern position of mathematical ethics, since his Categorical  See Juranville (1998).

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Imperative is structured according to the language of science.26 Lacan notes that the term “Categorical Imperative”27 is closely related to ethics: the object that may not be achieved as the Thing in Lacanian psychoanalysis takes the place of the supreme good, the good to which the Kantian ethics aspires.28 Lacan stresses that this supreme good is at the same time the supreme bad. It is thus deduced that Kantian ethics is sadistic in its core. As Freud argues at the opening of Totem and Taboo, all that we have remaining is the negative identification with the taboo, which is in itself the sadistic “Categorical Imperative”. Lacan continues to develop this point by showing how in Sade—when the liberation is total—everybody becomes objective and loses their rights, in a reversal of the Categorical Imperative. Kantian ethics, then, encounters its failure.29 According to Lacan, psychoanalysis is one of the consequences of modernity and therefore, it cannot regress to premodernity (like Jung proclaims). However, at the same time, it strives against the modern-­ optimistic aspiration to present the subject as autonomous and liberated, and as such, one that could be articulated in a finite way using the scientific articulation (and thus controlled, despite the modern subject’s illusion of freedom). Is there any affinity between the Lacanian position and the pessimist position of the Judeo-Christian tradition that points at the impossibility of the total liberation of man (that is, in earthly reality, and not in the afterworld or in redemption) through the fantasy of clinging to the supreme good?

9.4 The Law and the Thing in the Bible and in Paul Lacan returns to Paul’s writings and extracts from them a psychoanalytical position. Paul’s words brought hereinafter are part of his criticism of the Jewish Law of the Father, out of his attempt to establish the law of  S7.  S7: 189. 28  S7. 29  S7. 26 27

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love. Lacan’s thin irony is expressed in his identification with Paul’s words rather than with Paul himself. Paul’s words enable him to reread Freud and extract from him what is true for psychoanalysis. This irony grows as it becomes clear that the position, which Lacan derives from Paul, is used to neutralize Christian aspects in Freud’s theory, which according to Lacan failed Freud from recognizing the full meaning of the symbolic register. In order to extract the real ethical position of Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan reads Freud from a Pauline view; he liberates Freud from the Aristotelian position, which connects ethics to the supreme good. According to Lacan, in Freud’s ethics, there is an Aristotelian element, as it connects the ethical position with the question of the subject’s happiness and enjoyment.30 Freud and Aristotle are bound, Lacan presumes, in the altruistic conception of ethics, which is still trapped in the Imaginary-­ Narcissist condition (since care for the other is actually a fruit of self-love and self-praise for doing good). In Freud—following the ethical tradition since Plato and Aristotle and until the Christian theology of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas—the pleasure principle is always related to an aspiration to the supreme good. The turn to Paul was made as part of Lacan’s tendency to introduce to his audience religious authors, from whom he learned a lot. Paul, according to Lacan,—argues that the relation between ethics and the supreme good is parallel to the relation between ethics and the supreme bad. By using this recognition, he is thus able to neutralize the Aristotelian aspect of Freud.31 In order to present Paul’s concept of the law, Lacan turns directly to the meaning of the law in the Bible. In a lecture “On the Moral Law” in Seminar VII,32 he analyzes the Ten Commandments as representing the tendency of the biblical text to forbid the most basic desire (as Freud presented it)—to have sex with the mother. According to Lacan, Freud’s psychological position regarding the law is a direct continuation of the Ten Commandments, since the rules of the Torah and the law according to Freud are primordial laws, laws against incest, that distinguish between  S7.  Ibid. 32  S7: 71. 30 31

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nature and culture, just as Lévi-Strauss argued in his contemporary research. In this aspect, the Ten Commandments prevent contact with the Thing, and are the basis of human civilization. Lacan is careful not to slide into a moralistic-conservative position, but also not to a perverse one, and argues that humanity is nothing but the game between the law and its violation, and no society, including the most revolutionary one, has given up on this law. Lacan examines the special status of the Ten Commandments regarding the nature of the Law, and particularly, following Paul, focuses on the Tenth command: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” (NKJV; Exodus 20: 17). This commandment concisely expresses the essence of the Law—its attempt to guard the system of exchange (communication) in society— and hence connects to the relations between desire, the Law, and the Thing. The Commandment/Law puts a taboo on the Thing, the Thing of the other, and in the moment the prohibition is given, the chain of signifiers is set in motion, and desire is born.33 Lacan’s reliance on Paul in explicating the Thing and its relation to the law indicates an incredible correlation between Lacan’s arguments about law and enjoyment and the Christian argument of a dialectic relation between religious law and sin. Lacan makes this clear later when he proclaims that “[…] Without a transgression there is no access to jouissance, and, to return to Saint Paul, that is precisely the function of the Law.34” According to Lacan and Paul, there is a dialectic relation between the Law and desire: the Law limits desire, but at the same time recreates it by creating a prohibition, since desire is first of all the desire to transgress the Law, therefore desire requires the law. In other words, there is no primary desire; it is created through a process of limitation/organization/forbidding jouissance by the primary Law of symbolic castration. Lacan here uses both Paul’s conception of the law in general, and his perception of the law as constituting sin in particular, as mentioned 33 34

 S7.  S7: 177.

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explicitly in Romans 7 (as well as following what is said to God in Romans 1, that constitutes the sins of those who do not even know him). In this late, complicated letter, as well as in others, Paul uses the Greek term ὁ νόμος, which means “the law”, to speak about the aspect of the law in the Torah. Thus was the custom in the Hellenistic Jewish tradition which Paul probably belonged to—a tradition that saw the Torah as a particular Jewish constitution from the Greek-Hellenistic aspect. The laws of the Torah are presented in Paul’s scriptures as a Jewish constitution that subordinates the Jews and prevents them from following the real path to God. The law that was given to Moses in Mount Sinai is indeed holy, but the act of giving it to man only worsened the fall of humanity since the first sin. The Sin is an autonomous essence that came to the world following man’s violation of the divine command, joined with death, as Paul could learn from the biblical story of paradise: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”; “And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (NKJV; Genesis 2: 16; 3: 22). From the moment the law was given, the status of the sin received validation since it was acknowledged as a violation of the law. However, from the moment Christ was crucified and resurrected, the law became irrelevant. For his believers, Christian life are supposed to replace life under the law, just as the New Testament replaces the Old. Paul gives the example of the splitting of man between the law and sin, which need one another, using the Tenth Commandment: “Though shall not covet”.35 He does not quote the entire commandment in order to disconnect the imperative from its concrete contexts and emphasize its fundamental aspect. Furthermore, Paul uses the Greek word ἐπιθυμία, which means, other than covetousness, also desire, and connects this specific commandment to the nature of any law whatsoever. The tenth commandment thus becomes the prototype of any law, a law that is indirectly to blame for death, since it contains the possibility of transgression. In this aspect, the law is a “curse” (Galatians 3: 10-13)—it is impossible to  NKJV; Romans (7: 7–13).

35

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realize it in full, since the law is very demanding and facing it is the finite and limited man; unknowingly the law leads to the “bad” act. According to Paul, only love will release the believer from the dialectics of the law and the sin. This love is based on the biblical law: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Lacan stresses this transformation from the law of the father to the law of love in Christian culture and in Paul’s scriptures. He is asking whether the law of love operates only within the framework of the imaginary-narcissist relations or as a “progressive” adaptation of the paternal law, does it also contain the encounter with the Real—with the Real of the neighbor.

9.5 “Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself”36 and Freud’s Theory of Narcissism Following Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology, Lacan connects the Thing, the real object, to the neighbor, the Nebenmensch, which expresses the foreignness inside the subject. This object is experienced by the subject as alienated (fremde). This aspect is developed by Freud in his late work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930).37 Freud mentions the imperative “Thou shalt Love thy neighbor as thyself ”, perceiving it primarily in its Christian context (without mentioning the Jewish context). He pretends to have come across this cultural idealistic imperative for the first time, pondering over whether the self should even execute it. The first objection Freud raises against the imperative is that love is personal, and one might not be ready to share it with the other. The condition to sharing this love is that the loved one is so similar to oneself that ‘the love you give is the love you receive’. However, says Freud, it seems that the other, neighbor, is first a stranger, and love of oneself can never give itself to a stranger. Freud’s second objection is that the stranger is usually someone who we are more prone to hate.38  NKJV; Matthew (22:39).  S7: 64–65. 38  Freud (1930: 109). 36 37

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The whole purpose of the stranger is to instigate aggression and violence on the subject and harm him. In this context, there is a “Christian” imperative that is even stranger to Freud: “Love thy enemy” (Matthew 5: 44; NKJV). However, Freud comes to realize that the two imperatives are actually the same: the neighbor is the evil one. Freud says this from the point of view of the ordinary man, not necessarily from his own. Freud conceives man as a hating being more than a loving one. The other is the one who awakens the aggression in the self that is then turned back towards the self. Homo homini lupus [“Man is Wolf to Man”];39 Freud brings the sad history of humanity in order to prove that this is the truth since the days of the Huns, through the Crusaders to the events of World War I. If this is the nature of man, argues Freud, and love is not our first tendency, then culture tries with all its might to force love on man—this is the origin of the imperative “Love thy neighbor as thyself ”. However, here the paradox is born, as culture itself uses force to prevent force. This is the aggression of the imperative of love whose consequences are cultivated violence and subordination. Freud mentions in this context the communist project (Stalin then ruled the Soviet Union), which is driven, as Freud views it, by the illusion that man is naturally good and all there is to do is to eliminate private property. However, even after the elimination of private property, if at all possible, there will not be any change in the psychological structure of man as an aggressive creature. In the context of aggression, Freud mentions the internal affection of the members of the same community that creates aggression to members of another community, as he calls it: “the narcissism of minor differences”.40 In this respect, narcissism—love of the “self ”—will always be accompanied by aggression against whoever is not the same “self ” or does not belong to the same community of the “self ”. Freud even mentions Pauline love as an example for a narcissist love for the members of the community.41  Freud (1930: 110); Plautus, Asinaria II, iv, 88.  Freud (1930: 114). 41  Ibid. 39 40

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Lacan, who follows Freud, notes that the moral imperative of love thy neighbor is not necessarily a “good” thing, as is perceived by Aristotle’s hypothetical man who seeks happiness. Lacan reminds us that doing “good” means that “we miss the opening on to jouissance”.42 The imperative of love raises the question of the basic evil in the neighbor and because it exists in man himself; if man touches it, the aggression from which he flees will work against him in the form of the hidden Law, which is meant to protect him from the dangerous Thing. Lacan wishes to clarify these aspects of the relation between the imperative and jouissance, found in Civilization and its Discontents, since for him, Freud did not articulate them clearly enough. Ethical Law collaborates with jouissance, the one that is beyond the pleasure principle.43 Psychoanalysis, then, points to the fact that aggression, which comes from the superego, is the same as jouissance that has now relocated from the Real to the Symbolic. From the moment one walks into this path of the superego, there is no way back: as much as the ego aspires to fulfill the obsessive impositions of the superego, so does the superego demand their fulfillment more and more aggressively; the moral imperative in itself contains the bad enjoyment. Consequently, the fulfillment of the imperative “Love thy neighbor as thyself ” leads, inter alia, to the blasting of jouissance through the commandment, when one confronts the Other’s jouissance.44 In the beginning of this chapter, I pointed at Lacan’s transition in Seminar VII from focusing on the distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic to the distinction between the Symbolic and the Real. From this aspect, one can understand how Lacan exchanges the discussion of aggressivity within the imaginary for another, in which aggressivity is placed within the Real order of enjoyment. As we shall see, it also has certain consequences regarding Lacan’s position towards the evil: as long as it is an imaginary evil, Lacan treats it negatively, but from the moment it is positioned within the Real, it seems that Lacan tends to change the tone and present it as an opening to understanding the subject. This is  S7: 186.  Ibid. 44  Ibid. 42 43

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because the real evil is in a dialectic relation with the subject of the Symbolic order, the subject of analysis, while the imaginary evil is part of the ego that Lacan wishes to evade in the analytic experience.

9.6 The Law of Love and the Death of the God-Father in Paul and Lacan Out of this discussion, Lacan turns to the Pauline perception of love and tries to present a more complex picture than that presented by Freud, who positions love and the imperative of love only in the imaginary field. For Lacan, love is made both of the symbolic law and the jouissance that is attached to it. Lacan’s purpose is to point at the essence of the law after the “Death of God”; the law that is followed despite its annulment. He emphasizes that the law is consistent even after the “Death of God”, as Freud argued about the superego, which is constituted after the death of the Father in the myth of Totem and Taboo. Therefrom stems Lacan’s conclusion that Christianity is the one that specifically and paradoxically preserves the Law, even though the law itself goes against the Father, who constituted it.45 As I have already mentioned, the early Lacan distinguished between the symbolic law (positive identification) and the law of the aggressive superego (negative identification). This superego operates under what Lacan articulated as the Imaginary order. The superego acts as an identification that contains an imaginary dimension, in the sense that there is a certain threatening figure in man’s psyche that forces its conscientious imperatives. This threat is realized for the neurotic in the image of the internal conscience, whilst for the psychotic, it is the factor that is externalized and sends the subject on various missions. The law of the superego and of negative identification is related to the threatening image of the father, as positioned by Freud at the birth of humanity according to Totem and Taboo. For Lacan, this is the basis for the distinction between the Jewish ethics of the signifier and the Christian ethics of imaginary love. As mentioned  Ibid.

45

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in the chapter about family complexes, the modern, Christian superego is the result of the death of modern God. And indeed, Lacan presents the myth of the murdered father of Totem and Taboo as a modern myth that belongs to the atheistic period in which God is dead. However, Lacan adds that this myth is “real” to a great extent, since God has always been dead, as a ghost that was the basis of the law of civilization.46 Lacan’s argument—as he himself proclaims—follows Hegel: Christianity contained an atheist message even before the death of God in modernity. God’s death, according to Christianity, seemingly enabled him to be constantly resurrected—in the Christian sense of the resurrection of Jesus—out of the emptiness he left behind. In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud emphasizes that the Pauline Christian commandment “Love thy neighbor as thyself ” is non-human, inhumane, and senseless, since it is too general and is contrary to man’s basic will to experience pleasure. In Freud’s opinion, the neighbor is unworthy of love, and he probably thinks so himself. Lacan shows how much this ethical imperative, as a Christian Aufhebung of the rest of the biblical imperatives, actually cancels the law, but at the same time preserves and elevates it. From Lacan’s point of view—again following Hegel—Christianity, as a religion that stressed the death of God, is that which created an obsessive radicalization of the law, since historically—the death of God and the imperative of love came to the world at the same time. By this, Christianity granted the symbolic Jewish law the figure of Jesus and the internal conscience element of the superego. In this context, it is possible to present Paul as the constitutor of Christianity and at the same time as the constitutor of the superego in its full sense. Lacan describes the superego portrayed in Freud’s writing as a perverse-aggressive mechanism that once you satisfy its demand, it paradoxically becomes more demanding. This mechanism grows stronger as an attempt to remove symbolic law (of the positive identification), which wins the guarantee of the Father/God as the signifier “Name-of-the-Father”. From Lacan’s point of view, the removal of the guarantee of God, the God that made a treaty with the people, leads to the creation of the 46

 Ibid.

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aggressive law of love, which maintains the aggressiveness of the law but on a higher level. It is the process of consolidation of the superego as an internalization of the paternal principle as conscience. Is it possible to identify in Lacan’s teaching a distinction between love as an ethical law that confronts man with the Thing of the neighbor as the law that represents the Jewish tradition and between the superego, which demands love in the sense of imaginary aggression, as in Christianity? In Lacan’s lecture “Courtly Love as Anamorphosis”, Lacan distinguishes, following Freud, between pagan and Christian love. The difference is between an imaginary love object and a real one. This is in fact a historical fracture in Eros: Pagans turn to the sexual drive while in courtly love there is an imaginary sublimation of the real object. Lacan understands it as a modern crisis in relation to the lost object, which gives birth to the imaginary phantasy of heavenly love.47 In courtly love, the lady is raised to the level of the Thing, but the infatuation with her is completely on the narcissistic level, like the anamorphic image in which the man in love projects his narcissist fantasy on his beloved. Lacan connects it immediately to his theory of the mirror stage and the aggressive competition included in imaginary identification.48 From this perspective, we can say that when Freud speaks about the ethics of “Love thy neighbor as thyself ”, he is still rooted in the conception of ethics as altruism in the imaginary sense (this position also existed in the earlier Lacan, who argued in his article on the mirror stage that the altruism in which the ego that acts in relation to the suffering of the other is a mirror reflection of his own image.) However, beyond this aspect of identification, the mirror of the anamorphosis also contains a limit, beyond which is the unreachable real object. It is the same in the sublimation that uplifts the object to the level of the Thing, instigating a gravity that finally leads to death and destruction of the subject. In this way, Lacan’s discussion integrates his early origins, the imaginary ­jouissance/

 S7: 139–155.  Ibid.

47 48

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aggressiveness of the mirror stage with the discussion of the Real, deviating jouissance that transgresses the Symbolic and Imaginary order. If we return to the gap between Aristotelian ethics and Judeo-Christian ethics, according to Aristotle, the aspiration to the sovereign Good evolves from the nonexistence of another Other of the biblical type—a speaking Other, that commands the ethics, the ethos. Instead, there is an absolute sovereign Good that does not acknowledge its other, opposite, enigmatic side. From the other side, in biblical Judaism and Pauline scriptures there is the recognition in this dialectical relation between the law and the Real, due to the presence of the capricious and enigmatic big Other—Yahweh— that presents himself as “Eheye Asher Eheye”. Only that Paul’s theology has also evolved from a metaphysical Hellenistic influence. Therefore, it may have sought to release Jewish law from jouissance, thanks to the crucifixion of Jesus, when the external law became the internal superego, the conscience that aspires to achieve the absolute good while eliminating sin. The question that remains, inter alia, is how does the Lacanian ethics place itself with relation to the Jewish and the Christian ones?

9.7 The Two Faces of Freud’s Moses In Seminar VII, Lacan offers two important characteristics of the monotheistic God, in particular of the way Freud depicts him in Moses and Monotheism: 1. The name of God: “Eheye Asher Eheye”;49 2. God’s characterization as creator ex-nihilo. According to Lacan, this is also the mental core of Judeo-Christian tradition, which is actually the biblical core. Lacan positions himself as a revisionary reader of Freud, not necessarily as his critic. According to Lacan, Freud cannot but fail in the way he presents his thoughts about the origins of human morality, since he ties morality to the figure of Moses the person. Furthermore, Freud cannot avoid revealing the relation of the No/Name-of-the-Father; he turns formally to the structural position of paternal power that is sublimation, only to immediately articulate this insight as a certain moment in human 49

 S7: 67.

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history. According to Lacan, there is a contradiction in the way Freud describes the birth of sublimation through the murder of the father and the relating of the Thing to the structural context of fatherhood. In this manner, Freud establishes a myth that aligns with the spiritual reality of our times, the death of God. According to Lacan, Freud created a new myth in the modern age. As already argued, Lacan analyzes here the myth of Totem and Taboo, following Lévi-Strauss and his studies of the myth, as a system of signifiers that supports irresoluble internal contrasts (i.e., the myth does not only contain an imaginary story, but also a structural element that is more fundamental.50 According to Lacan, the different faces of the father/God—as real, imaginary, and symbolic (as a name)—are realized in the two conceptions of divinity presented by the two characters of the Freudian Moses: 1. The first Moses: the Egyptian, rational Moses, who comes from royalty. In his perception of divinity “there is only one God, he is the sole God, omnipotent, unapproachable51. The Egyptian Moses is the ‘grand man’, the lawmaker, the politician, the rationalist, whose traces Freud finds in the monotheism of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BC.  It is a religion of a single principle (Unitarianism) revolving around one God, represented by the sun. It is a first attempt to present a rational description of reality. This attempt fails repeatedly, as displayed in the chaotic return of the multiple gods. Only a single man chose the rational path when he found the Hebrew nation and led them in the desert—Moses. Lacan argues that Moses wanted to create a socialist movement from one nation.52 2. The second Moses: Moses the Midianite, the obscurantist who meets the “hidden God”, who is a jealous, inaccessible God. This Hebrew God, the God of Moses the Midianite, is hidden and jealous. Lacan emphasizes the fact that this god is hidden, concealed, in a  S7: 143.  Freud (1939: 17). 52  S7. 50 51

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way that is reminiscent of the Jansenist God. It is the God that gives the Ten Commandments that focus on creating a distance between the subject and the big Other. These are the basic rules of speech, emphasizes Lacan, speech that is the basis of the clinical practice of psychoanalysis and its ethics. Since we do not have any way of understanding the phrase “Eheye Asher Eheye”, we have but to make do and say that what Moses encountered in the burning bush is non-other than the Thing. Indeed, Freud distinguishes between the rational Moses and the inspirational Moses, Moses the obscurantist, but he nearly does not refer to the latter. In this sense, the God of Moses the Midianite, the god that is reveled to him in the burning bush, is the Thing around which the law of the Torah revolves. According to Lacan, the divinity in Moses and Monotheism is two-faced: abstract and rational on the one hand and hidden and real on the other; the Janus face of the Other or the ancient father. These two faces of God are presented by Lacan as two types of divinity: the Greek Aristotelian divinity, which is a single, eternal, and omnipotent God versus the speaking, split God. Lacan develops this discussion saying that the God of the Egyptian, rational Moses is the God Freud identifies with, the God of the love to the logos, “amor intellectualis dei”,53 of Spinoza and of modern science that operates under the principle of “The real is rational and the rational is real”54 (following Hegel). However, the God of Spinoza and Freud is not the God of believers, nor the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, argues Lacan. Lacan emphasizes that these philosophical-believers, Freud and Spinoza, actually evade the question of the existence of God towards the dialectic solution, in which there is a mix of the God of rationalism and the God of belief. The God of Akhenaten and of Egyptian Moses was wrongly identified with the Midianite Moses’s God that is the Thing. This God of the Thing is not the one God, but the special God, next to whom, all other Gods pale in significance. It is a question of belief in this God, but not in the sense that He alone exists. What matters for our purposes, adds Lacan, is that “..this Totem-God, is worthy of our pondering the claim to turn him into a myth… because he was the vehicle of the  S7: 180.  Ibid.

53 54

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God of truth”.55 Truth is the Word, the logos that the Holy Scriptures have delivered.56 This distinction Lacan makes between the two types of Gods serves him as he distinguishes between the imaginary metaphysical position of Christianity and the position that acknowledges the splitting of the subject that lives inside the order of the symbolic Other, as articulated in both Judaism and psychoanalysis. At the core of his distinction, lies his suspicion of the world of images into which man pushes himself. Lacan presents the Real as an opposition to the monotheist tradition and its divinity—Yahweh in reference to the command: “Thou shalt not make a carved image of me,” which is followed by “Thou shalt not make any image at all”.57 The abhorrence of the image, according to Lacan, is also expressed in the structure of the Jewish Temple, whose architecture stood in the outburst of the imaginary.58 For Lacan, against this imaginary of the non-­ monotheistic religions there is an alternative principle: the symbolic principle of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This principle is expressed in the unique perception in the tradition of the creation of the world and the character of God the creator: the mere fact that it creates ex-nihilo. Lacan turns to his audience and says: the idea of creation is a solid fact that is common to us all, and it is impossible not to think through this idea. However, what you deem as evolutionary is nothing but protection against religious ideas. Consequently, you are prevented from understanding the reality that surrounds you; for instance, the fact that you live in a world that moves around the Thing and around the idea of creation ex-nihilo.59 These things, notes Lacan, are not found in Aristotle, who speaks of eternity and does not understand the emptiness, the absence from which all was created. That emptiness that is so present in the biblical culture and is expressed in the Sabbath, for instance. Consequently, us, the  S7: 181.  Ibid. 57  S7: 175. 58  S7. 59  Ibid. 55 56

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children of Western culture, have difficulty truly understanding Aristotle (Lacan emphasizes the contrast between “us” and the other, non-Western, ancient cultures).60 However, Aristotle is also responsible, because of his influence on Christianity, for distancing the Jewish elements towards a metaphysical conception of both God and the Other, in the ethical context. For Lacan, this has implications for the articulation of Western culture until this day, as containing the imaginary element of the return to the lost Eden of the supreme good. It may be argued, then, that Lacan’s Imaginary is connected to Christian tradition, which expresses its messages in the myth of the God who was murdered. This Imaginary is also related to the Aristotelian ethics that pervaded Christianity, as well as Freud. It is a narcissist ethics of doing good, but for self-glory. Behind this ethics lies the Aristotelian God, transcendent and abstract, and this created a far too great a distance between Christianity and the symbolic dimension in Judaism. Henceforth, for Lacan, the Aristotelian God is understood in the context of our imaginary meaning of the world: despite its abstractness, this God can be interpreted as part of the Imaginary, since He is part of a metaphysics of the close relation between micro- and macro cosmos, a relation which is a narcissist projection by man of the meaning of his life upon the meaning of the world (and vice versa). For Lacan, Freudian psychoanalysis, in its elementary level (which exceeds the Imaginary), cannot go back to this pre-Cartesian state of imaginary correlation between the subject and the world; however, it must acknowledge the position of man in the Other Symbolic order, as acknowledged by Judaism (particularly the biblical one). For Lacan, the Imaginary, both on the level of artistic temptation and on the level of narcissist love (following the Aristotelian ethics) is at the center of Christian experience. And indeed, in Seminar VII, Lacan criticizes Freud as having a Christian position in his articulation of the myth of the murder of the father. In light of what has been said above, it may be argued that Lacan seeks to return psychoanalysis to its Jewish position

60

 S7.

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of placing the signifier in the center, in the Talmudic sense.61 This Talmudic approach is contrary to the narcissist-Christian imaginary: preferring the Jewish-symbolic law to the aggressive-imaginary-Christian law of the superego, i.e., preferring the Jewish ethics of the signifier and desire to the Christian ethics of narcissist love. Henceforth, it may be argued that Lacan’s identification with Freud is very much an attempt to “return” Freud to Judaism and disinherit psychoanalysis of its Christian remnants of the narcissistic love of the other, and the preference of the visual Imaginary. However, it may also be argued that this “Judaism”, in which Lacan wishes to place psychoanalysis, is nothing but a representation of the Judeo-Christian “origin”, according to a certain tendency in Christian tradition that I defined as anti-metaphysical. * * * In Seminar VII, we find indeed that Lacan continues to refer to the “Judeo Christian tradition”, but at the same time begins to differentiate between the Jewish and Christian traditions. This understanding serves him in the framework of his articulation of the ethics of psychoanalysis. In his earlier seminars, Lacan takes the Jewish position from an internal Christian prism, and in Seminar VII, he tries to extract an articulation that is not dependent on the Catholic Christian position; it seems that he now articulates the “true” Catholic position through the Jewish prism. The examination of this distinction between Judaism and Christianity brings us back to one of the central questions of this book: What is the place of the Lacanian discourse in relation to the religious discourse? When Lacan constitutes his discourse, he seeks to counter Freud’s myth of Totem and Taboo, and conceptualize the father figure more abstractly. He is careful not to constitute a metaphysical articulation of the father figure as a spiritual transcendental essence, or as an internal essence in the romantic Jungian sense. His solution is to present the

 Ibid.

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father as a cultural dimension, which cannot be reduced to a concrete father figure or to a biological essence. This is the Name-of-the-Father, and it seems that in order to articulate the gap between the Name-of-the-­ Father and the superego, which is the embodiment of the threatening father image, Lacan needs, in Seminar VII, the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. In other words, in this seminar it becomes clear that the Freudian myth was imaginary-Christian in its basis, and that Lacan attempts to bring back the Freudian father to his Jewish origin: the father is first of all a signifier. This signifier, the Name-of-the-Father, is similar to the pivotal signifier of Judaism—Yahweh.

10 The Pleasures of Baroque: An Epilogue on Late Lacan

We must prefer real hell over a virtual heaven. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

In the decades that passed since Freud based his theory and practice, psychoanalysis broke up into different sections (ego psychology, Jungianism, object-relations theory, and more), which lost, according to Lacan, the original Freudian radicalism. The early Lacan, with which this book has dealt, offered a revision of Freudian theory, so that it would give a new face to psychoanalysis and enable a new theory to emerge, while at the same time remaining loyal to the Freudian discourse. In a certain sense, it is an attempt to re-examine the father figure—be it the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, as well as the Oedipal father of Freud’s writings (particularly Totem and Taboo). This is the “Return to Freud” in which Lacan rereads the writings of Freud and situates at the center of his psychoanalytical theory the close connection between the Freudian un-­ conscious and the structure of language, as well as the role of the father in the constitution of the subject of language. An important move in the revision was the distinction between the symbolic father (the Name-of-the-Father) and the father as a concrete and real figure. It was an abstraction that created a gap within Lacanian theory, between the clinical experience with the concrete father, and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_10

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abstraction of that father towards a cultural-symbolic principle. This distinction risked sliding towards an abstract discourse detached from the concrete reality of therapy, informed by a metaphysical, mystical, or even scientific conceptualization. Lacan aspired to regulate this abstraction by presenting the concepts of the Father and the big Other as themes that have something in common with the Judeo-Christian tradition, particularly with its biblical position, as Lacan conceived it. Lacanian psychoanalysis posits itself within a certain therapeutic ethics that includes several interconnected elements: objection to a generalist and/or metaphysical perspective on the world, man and reality; anti-­ harmony and emphasis on the split subject; a preference of the paternal principle of subordination to the symbolic law over the total maternal principle; refusal to give up on the unconscious desire that resides within the individual and within his fellow man; and an insistence on the unconscious dimension of language as the total otherness of man. The Judeo-­ Christian ethics has a strong connection with these aspects of psychoanalysis. In this book I focused on texts written and seminars given from the 1930s until the early 1960s, and particularly in the 1950s, a time in which Lacan consolidated his discourse as independent and original, while presenting it as loyal to the Freudian core principle. It seems that in the 1970s, in his “final teaching”, Lacan was liberated from the structuralist imposition of preferring the signifier and the centrality of the father’s status, and focused even more on the Real, on what exceeds both the Imaginary and Symbolic order. This was most apparent in Seminar XX, Encore (1972–1973), which has significant theological contexts, and which examines the excessive feminine enjoyment and connects it to the mystical experience and the Other. The close connection in Lacan between psychoanalytical ethics and Judeo-Christian ethics is the cultural basis that enables the later Lacan to dwell on the unbearable presence of the Real. And thus, the later Lacan (supposedly liberated from the Freudian paternal imposition) adapts the medieval Catholic discourse of feminine mysticism (without the mediation of the biblical-Jewish discourse as in the 50s). This may be an ironic closing of the circle: in the discussion of Family Complexes, I showed how Lacan in his early stages cunningly extricated from Bergson a pro-Jewish

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patriarchical saying, though, in reality, Bergson elevated the Christian feminine mysticism as the climax of human spirituality. The later Lacan, however, connects to the Catholic-Baroque culture. In a lesson on the Baroque in Seminar XX, Lacan declared: “[I] locate myself better in the side of the Baroque”.1 This is after he had actually positioned himself and his writings in the previous lesson on the side of femininity. It seems that this late seminar revolves around these two axes: the baroque and the religious-cultural tradition from which he originated on the one hand, and feminine enjoyment on the other. In an earlier Seminar (Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis) Lacan relates to the baroque architecture in relation to the ethics around which he seeks to consolidate psychoanalysis. Baroque was a tendency in architecture, art and literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, later interpreted as a coherent movement located in the larger cultural context of Catholic counter-reformation It was an anti-rationalist and suspicious reaction towards the image, while taking advantage of it (rather than puritanically denying it) and its own ability, and that of language more broadly, to represent the Real/divine. It was a reaction against Protestantism, that was conceived as joining the Enlightenment towards releasing man of his divine otherness towards a universal and autonomous ego that reconstitutes its faith. In the beginning, the name “Baroque” was a derogatory title applied to works that were conceived as a heap of images and words, and attested to a bad taste in art that did not align with the principles of Classicism. Baroque architecture preferred to deal with space and its center, while using decorativeness and playing with folds which create a sense of unification and fullness, as well as infinite exaltation out of movement in space. This exaltation was not conceived as clean and rational, but as exceptional, festive and excessive. This excessiveness countered the reduction and self-sufficiency of the Classicist artistic ideology (though it developed as its perverse sub-movement). This playfulness of the image was also manifest in the multiplicity of optical illusions, the most

 S 20: 132 (my emphasis).

1

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outstanding of which was anamorphosis, in order to increase the illusion around the image and its representational pretenses. The Baroque paradoxical relation to the image was also a reaction to the Protestant suspicion of it, which led to iconoclasm. Catholicism, which is the theological context for Baroque as an art form, preferred to deal with death, with pleasure, and with sin, instead of denying them. It emphasized image and illusion, undermining the rational conception of the image and the protestant claim about the inability to represent. Parallel to the Baroque style in architecture and art, a similar tendency occurred in literature and music. Here we enter the field of rhetoric, and it seems that presenting the Baroque in literature, in the entry “Baroque” in the Hebrew Encyclopedia, is reminiscent of a certain rhetoric: “The Baroque poets wished to attain this purpose [to make the listeners wonder] in two ways: on the one hand, by over-developing the rhetorical decoration, and on the other, by games of thought “.2 Two schools held these principles: The school of rhetorical decoration, called “Culteranismo”, and the school of idea games, called “Conceptism”. Culteranismo characterized mostly poetry: It cultivated vast and elaborate images, irregular grammar, a rhythmic correspondence of sentence parts, a merging of descriptions of the various senses, of natural sciences and technique […], scholarly, rare or renewed words, combinations of synonyms, surprising paraphrases, and in particular—daring language pictures […]. Conceptism heaped up thought games […] and nurtured correct and expressive articulation, paradoxes and particularly antitheses.3

Could this also be the definition of the form of speech Lacan used in his seminars, particularly the later ones, and in the Ecrits? Lacan’s speech, as often evident in the seminars or lessons, was designed to train psychoanalysts. Lacan asked his students to open their ears to language, to his enigmatic/baroque/strange language, as part of their

 Hebrew Encyclopedia, Vol. 9, p. 571.  Ibid.: 571–572.

2 3

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training as analysts. It meant that they had to give meaning to his speech, to construct their own Lacan. In Seminar XX, Lacan mentions that this seminar is actually an elaboration of several motifs that were raised already in Seminar VII. In Seminar VII, Lacan relates to the structure of the Baroque church as capturing the realvoid. Like the vase that creates space ex-nihilo, says Lacan following Heidegger, such is the Baroque structure, that in its many embellishments and anamorphoses, attempts to grasp what primitive architecture managed to encapsulate in the creation of the nothing (according to Lacan, this is the main characteristic of Judeo-Christian culture, that acknowledges creation ex-nihilo, in contradiction to Aristotle and evolutionism). Painting wished to mimic these spatial games of architecture, particularly in the modern phase of the invention of perspective. Lacan adds that the purpose of art is not mimesis (Plato), but dealing with the Thing, the void. He stresses that this is all metaphorical for him, since his purpose is to deal with the relation between the subject and language and between the signifier and the Real, that is, between the imaginary and symbolic illusion surrounding the Real (this matter will be further developed in Seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964). The abominable Real is the Thing that French Catholic culture contends with, contrary to Anglo-Saxon culture, as Lacan notes in Seminar III, The Psychoses.4 However, this Catholic culture is also connected to its Jewish core, as the Jewish architecture of the Temple places at its center, though not in a Baroque manner, the Real-void, in contrary to the obsession of the image.5 The contempt towards the image, according to Lacan, was manifest in the structure of the Jewish Temple, whose architecture resisted the outbreak of the Imaginary.6 This is not to say that Catholic Baroque fell into the trap of the Imaginary. On the contrary—it was its great opportunity to dismantle the image by excessive work on it. It seems that the Protestant architecture of the cross could erect the image of the cross, that is, the imaginary meaning at its center.  S3: 326.  S7: 206. 6  S7: 206. 4 5

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Accordingly, we may wonder whether there is any fundamental difference in the way the Baroque is presented between the early Seminar VII and the late Seminar XX. In the early one, Lacan wishes to return psychoanalysis to its Jewish position of placing the signifier in the center, in the Talmudic sense, against the narcissist-Christian-Imaginary; therefore, it is about preferring the symbolic-Jewish law to the aggressive-imaginary-­ Christian law of the superego, preferring the “Jewish” ethics of the signifier and the desire to the Christian ethics of narcissist love. Lacan’s discussion in Seminar VII about the Temple is closely related to his discussion of architecture as an actualization of pain, and as building around the void, and to his discussion of the structure of the vase as representing Judeo-Christian culture. Due to its suspicion of the image, this culture uncovers what exceeds the image, the signifier, and its dialectic relations with the real violation. Lacan argues, following Heidegger, that if the void is the external signifier of the symbolic chain of signifiers, then the vase represents for the first time in history a fullness against the void and creates the void, in the sense of ex-nihilo, out of the nothing—creates the Real. And perhaps, if in Seminar VII Lacan offers his ethics more explicitly as a reaction to Judaism surrounding the signifier, the neighbor and the Thing, then in Seminar XX his ethics evolves more as a direct response to the ethics of Catholic Christian mysticism.7 As mentioned, in Seminar VII, Lacan tries to understand architecture as an attempt to avoid the pain that surrounds the encounter with the Real. However, the paradox is that this Real was built at the same time out of the creation of space around it, as Lacan conveys through the proverb on the vase and the space it creates. In this respect, the Real of language is built retroactively by language, created ex-nihilo, that is, from the nothing that is not really present there in itself, but awaits us behind language. In this context of avoiding pain, Lacan turns to Daphne’s story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Apollo contends with Eros. Eros punishes Apollo for his boasting with an arrow that makes him fall obsessively in love with the nymph Daphne. Daphne escapes out of great distress:  Lacan notes that his analysis follows Heidegger’s “Das Ding” (S:7 144–145). It is a lecture that Heidegger had given as part of a series of four lectures in 1949 in the city of Bremen. 7

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He almost catches her, and puts his teeth into her flesh, In his nose he will drink her heel—will hunt her in a second Already she thinks that she has no escape—from despair and fear Suddenly she leaps forth and runs—but to no avail he polishes his teeth. So do the God and the nymph: he runs on the shoulders of hope, She—will be carried away by fear, quick and faster than her he is. Say the god is to his right—he glides, will not give her rest: He is already breathing at her neck, in the edges of her curls.8

In this poem we can find two paradigms of encounter between the big Other and the woman. In the first, which seems to evolve from Seminar VII, The encounter between the woman, and the Other brings about her disintegration and silence. Our gaze as readers focuses on the discourse of the Other in the life of the subject, as part of Lacan’s grappling with the question of fatherhood and the Name-of-the-Father as signifier. Courtly love turns into woman into a still, silent and un-enjoying object. The enjoyment is on the side of gazing and on the side of the contact with the lost object. However, in the other paradigm the emphasis is on the woman and her encounter with the big Other, which is one of enjoyment. This is the case in Bernini’s Theresa, which the angel-cupid-Yahweh shoots his arrow at. But we, as theater viewers in the mystical play, also encounter Theresa’s enjoyment, one that is beyond the control of the angel. Entitled Encore, Seminar XX was given in 1972–1973. It opens the stage called “the last instruction”, and deals with the excessive enjoyment, the feminine one, around the phrase “there is no sexual relation”. The following lines are perhaps the seminar’s most famous ones: Saint Theresa—you should only come to Rome and look at the statue of Bernini to immediately understand that she is enjoying, there is no doubt about it. And what is she enjoying from? It is clear that the main testimonies of the mystics are indeed to say that they experience it but know nothing about it. The mystical elevations are not idle chat or jabber. After all, they are among the better things that could be read—and in a footnote, add to them the writings of Jacques Lacan, because they are from the same order. Thanks to that, of course, you will all be convinced that I believe in  Ovid (1965, Volume 1, lines 535–542, p. 55).

8

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God. I believe in the enjoyment of the woman as it will be an abundance, in the condition that you put a screen in front of abundance, before I explain it properly.9

This poetry defines itself as feminine, as Baroque, as mystical. It comes somewhat as a surprise to whoever was used to the writings of Lacan from the 1950s and 1960s and to his demand to position in the center of the psychoanalytic investigation the concept “Name-of-Father”. From now on, the name of the woman will fill its (empty) space. Instead of the father as a missing signifier in the early Lacan, in the late Lacan the signifier woman will be placed as something that in its absence will sensitize us to the absence of the Other. The typical example to excessive feminine enjoyment (which is beyond phallic-masculine-copulating enjoyment) is Bernini’s “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa”. This is the statue that upset Luce Irigaray so much, in her book This Sex Which Is Not One: Lacan sends us so far, as a man, to speak about femininity, as he places himself in the feminine side. Few, by the way, noticed the angel in this statue, an angel that signifies the coming into enjoyment and mystical experience not only in the lightning that he sends, in the arrow, but also in the cultural morbidity, which is not a dialectic duality of contrasts, but two levels unified and merged to the point of perversion: as Cupid Love-Eros + angel biblical Yahweh, as if he represented for the Western culture the Jewish and Greek origins of love—as an Eros of copulating with the other sex as a mystical ecstasy in the connection with the divine other. The statues of the Cornaro family face the light-washed altar from one of the balconies, as if praying with the audience. In this sense, we are part of an audience that views a mystical experience mediated by the gazes of the statues that gaze at the woman. The entire essence of the woman, even in her most personal experience, is mediated by the gazes of the gazes. The Catholic-Baroque position relates to the enjoyment in the sense of jouissance, that is, in a completely different sense from the Protestant Puritan Anglo-Saxon culture, that is embodied in a psychological position that does not acknowledge the unconscious in its linguistic and sexual contexts, but seeks a non-dialectic banishment of the abominable  S-20: 94–95.

9

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sexuality (the neurotic repression is a dialectic mechanism that places an exclamation mark inside existence, as the psychotic does not even believe, he knows). In Seminar XX, Lacan returns to the Baroque both in his speech, that increasingly mimics the multilayered and convoluted speech of that art, and in putting his theory back into the Catholic world of feminine mystics in its contact with the Other, and of the divergence from the discourse of copulating under the ethics of “there is no sexual relation”. This is the ethics of the Judeo-Christian tradition from its biblical origins all the way to modern science (the encounter with the divine other who cannot be reduced to another, an encounter that points at the impossibility of realizing the fantasy of harmony between the masculine and feminine, even at the level of man-microcosm as well as the level of the universe-­ microcosm, an encounter that completely opposes the New Age-­ harmonist-­Jungian fantasy): From all that is taken from the effects of Christianity, and particularly in art—and in this matter I join the Baroque I took on my shoulder—everything is the exposure of a body that suggests enjoyment—imagine the words of the one who returned from a church orgy in Italy. Except of copulating. It is not worthless that it is not present. It is outside the field as it is in human reality, to which it supplies after all the fantasies from which it is built. Nowhere in the cultural field this distancing became known in a more cunning manner. I will even go further and tell you—and do not think that I do not consider my words carefully—that in Christianity more than in any other place, the work of art to itself looks clearly as what is always and everywhere an abomination.10

As said, Lacan places his writings both on the side of the feminine and on the side of the Baroque. These two sides meet in Catholic tradition, which by establishing the father also establishes the place that diverges from the discourse of the father through the mystical enjoyment of the woman. 10

 S-20: 140.

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For years, Bernini’s status suffered many criticisms, which saw it as an abomination, but also a symbol of Catholic mysticism.11 It expressed, then, spiritual and profane ecstasy at the same time. Could it be that, as Lacan suggests, this is Catholicism par excellence? In light of the above arises the question whether the relation between the Lacanian and Catholic discourse is an extimate one. This way, it may be possible to understand more deeply the loathing of Lacan and his discourse towards various aspects of modern scientific culture—the reduction of the subject to an object that may be presented under a scientific equation and under a statistical explanation, without considering his enjoyment, as if he may be directed and documented. It must be emphasized that out of this criticism, Lacan does not seek to return to pre-­ Cartesianism, but to grapple with it through clinical cultural work inside the Judeo-Christian tradition, which gave birth to modern science, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis. All this explains Lacan’s even more hostile relation towards Anglo-­ American ego-psychology. One cannot ignore the fact that Lacanian psychoanalysis found fertile ground in Catholic countries: France, Italy, Spain, South America, and less in Protestant countries in which it is at best closed off inside academia in the framework of cultural studies. Furthermore, the question is whether beyond Freud’s Talmudic-Jewish relation towards the signifier, as expressed in his engagement with the Witz and with the psychopathology of everyday signifiers, he also ran into, —the Protestantism of Enlightenment and belief in progress on the one hand, and on the other—the Catholic culture in which he lived and which haunted him and reminded him of the uncomfortable enjoyment, which he indeed tried to organize under the signifier of the father and the signifier of the theory. Is it that Lacan is that ghost that comes from the Gallic country to freshen the Anglo-American Protestant reduction of psychoanalysis into a psychology of the thinking and functioning self? Is it that ghost that does not leave those Israelis who read Lacan and prefer to clean out those remnants of his Catholic enjoyment, which are also the remnants of the enjoyment of Freud, the Freud that wished to detach psychoanalysis of any religious aspect?  See Hayes (1999).

11

Works Cited

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Additional Literature Alemán, Jorge. 1997. Lacan: The End. Notes on the End of Metaphysics and Psychoanalysis. Lacanian Ink 11. http://www.plexus.org/lacink/lacink11/aleman.html. Altizer, Thomas J.J. 1985. History as Apocalypse. Albany: State University of New York Press. Augustine, Saint. 1953. Confessions, Catholic University of America Press. ProQuest Ebook Central. Accessed November 2, 2021. https://ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/tau/detail.action?docID=3134878. Aristotle, Metaphysics, translated by W.D ROSS, published by Global Grey ebooks on the 9th September 2018, and updated on the 13th March 2021. Accessed November 2, 2021. https://www.globalgreyebooks.com/metaphysicsebook.html. Barth, K., T.F. Torrance, and G.W. Bromiley. 1956. Church Dogmatics. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Barzilai, Shuli. 1999. Lacan and the Matter of Origins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Benyamini, Itzhak. 2012. Narcissist Universalism – A Psychoanalytic Reading of Paul’s Epistles. London: Continuum Press. Bergson, Henri. 1932. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Translated by R. Ashley and Cloudesley Brereton. New York: H. Holt, 1935. Boothby, Richard. 1991. Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan’s Return to Freud. New York and London: Routledge. ———. 2001. Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan. New York and London: Routledge.

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Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. 1982. The Freudian Subject. Translated by C. Porter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. ———. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Translated by D. Brick. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994a. The Oedipus Problem in Freud and Lacan. Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter): 267–282. ———. 1994b. The Alibi of the Subject: Lacan and Philosophy. In Speculations After Freud: Psychoanalysis, Philosophy and Culture, ed. Sonu Shamdasani and Michael Münchow. London and New York: Routledge. Botterweck, G. Johannes, and Helmer Ringgner (eds.). 1974. Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. Vol. V. Translated by David E. Green. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowie, Malcolm. 1991. Lacan. London: Fontana Press. Brunner, Jose. 1995. Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Buber, Martin. 1952. Eclipse of God: Studies in the Relation Between Religion and Philosophy. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers. Bultmann, Rudolf. 1958. Jesus Christ and Mythology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Butler, Judit. 2000. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia. Burgoyne, Bernard. 2003. From the Letter to the Matheme: Lacan’s Scientific Methods. In The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, 69–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chemouni, Jacquy. 1997. Psychanalyse et Anthropologie: Lévi-Strauss et Freud. Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan. Clark, Michael. 1988. Jacques Lacan: An Annotated Bibliography. 2 Vols. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Couliano, Ioan P. 1990. The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco. Covino, William A., and David A. Jollife. 1995. Rhetoric: Concepts, Definitions, Boundaries. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Critchley, Simon. 2002. I Want to Die, I Hate My Life – Phaedra’s Malaise. http://www.essex.ac.uk/centres/TheoStud/papers. Descartes, René. 1641. Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by John Cottingham. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. de Certeau, Michel. 1986. Lacan: An Ethics of Speech. In Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Translated by Marie-Rose Logan, 47–66. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Author Index1

A

Alemán, Jorge, 80n11 Althusser, Louis, 114n33 Altizer, Thomas J.J., 159n59 Aristotle, 144, 194, 201, 203n34, 204, 206, 209, 211, 238–240, 242, 247, 251, 254, 255, 263 Augustine, 79, 81, 222, 242 B

Barth, Karl, 223, 223n74 Barzilai, Shuli, 1n1, 45n4 Benamozegh, Elijah, 8n16 Benveniste, Emile, 174n15

Bergson, Henri, 65–68, 67n63, 68n65, 260, 261 Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzi, 265, 266, 268 Blass, Rachel B., 105n8 Bloom, Harold, 4n12 Boothby, Richard, 81n14, 164n3 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 58, 63n51, 80n11 Botterweck, G. Johannes, 207n42 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9n17 Bowie, Malcolm, 164n4 Breuer, Josef, 93 Brunner, Jose, 166n7 Buber, Martin, 155n47, 158 Bultmann, Rudolf, 99, 100

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5

283

284 

Author Index

Burgoyne, Bernard, 194n18 Butler, Judith, 113, 113n31

Evans, Dylan, 14n1 Evans, Martha Noel, 14n1

C

F

Cahen, Ronald, 120, 120n46 Calvin, John, 215 Chabrol, Claude, 215n59 Chemouni, Jacquy, 175n18 Clark, Michael, 10n18 Claudel, Paul, 26, 61n45 Clerambault, Gaetan Gatian de, 135 Couliano, Ioan P., 155n47 Covino, William A., 77n2 Creuzer, Friedrich, 139, 140 Critchley, Simon, 214n56

Febvre, Lucien, 43n3 Feldhay, Rivka, 193n12 Ferenczi, Sandor, 53, 110, 124 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 114 Fink, Bruce, 123n55, 165n5, 195n21 Foucault, Michel, 9n17, 79n7 Fraser, James George, 166, 167n9 Freud, Anna, 94, 122, 123n55 Freud, Sigmund works Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 71, 191, 228–231 Civilization and Its Discontents, 92, 112, 238, 245, 247, 249 The Ego and the Id, 44–46, 50, 59, 71 The Future of an Illusion, 89, 89n37, 220 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 52 History of the Psychoanalytic Movement, 124, 127 The Interpretation of Dreams, 31, 32, 147n31, 148, 148n34 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 50 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 32, 34, 82 Moses and Monotheism, 51, 68, 72, 167n9, 176, 228, 251, 253

D

Darwin, Charles, 49, 49n14, 166, 167n9 de Certeau, Michel, 2, 2n5, 79, 79n7 Derrida, Jacques, 128, 163, 163n1, 163n2 Descartes, René, 192–196, 201, 203, 225 Dor, Joël, 163n1 Doyle, William, 214n56 Dunand, Anne, 170n12 Durham, John I., 207n42 Durkheim, Emile, 56 E

Edler, Frank H.W., 80n11 Eliade, Mircea, 167n9 Erasmus, Desiderius, 88n33 Eribon, Didier, 170n12 Ettinger, Bracha, 10n18

  Author Index 

New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 50, 51 On Narcissism: An introduction, 132, 133, 137 Project for Scientific Psychology, 231 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 32, 146, 147 The Rat Man, 20–22 The Schreber Case, 70 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 46, 116 Totem and Taboo, 26, 47–52, 55, 56, 58, 60, 71, 72, 87, 88, 90–93, 99, 105, 106, 161–163, 166, 166n7, 167, 167n8, 167n9, 170–172, 176–181, 183, 187, 190, 221, 228, 238, 248, 249, 252, 256, 259 Wolfman, 47 Fryer, David Ross, 156n49 G

Gallop, Jane, 138n20 Gay, Peter, 49n14, 105n7, 121n49 Gazier, Augustin, 215 Geertz, Clifford, 170n13 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24–26, 24n24, 28, 87, 88, 88n32 Green, André, 89n37 Grosz, Elisabeth, 45n4 H

Haddad, Gérard, 8n16 Haeckel, Ernst, 49n13

285

Halevi, Judah, 158, 207, 222 Harasym, Sarah, 156n49 Hartmann, Eduard von, 148 Hauke, Christopher, 130n69 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 4, 4n11, 8, 19, 27, 42, 63, 63n51, 190, 194, 210, 223, 249, 253 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 27, 76, 79–81, 80n10, 80n11, 155n47, 263, 264, 264n7 Heraclitus, 76–79, 80n11 Hieronymus, 88n33 Hitchcock, Alfred, 215, 215n59 Hyppolite, Jean, 174n15 J

Jameson, Fredric, 109 Janet, Pierre, 53n24 Jansen, Cornelius, 213, 214, 222 Jesus, 4, 67, 68, 94, 96, 97, 152, 168, 228, 249, 251 John Paul II (pope), 219, 220 Jollife, David A., 77n2 Jonas, Hans, 155n47, 222 Jones, Ernest, 167n9 Jones, W.T., 77n1, 124 Jung, Carl Gustav, 4, 5, 7, 8, 52–54, 53n24, 72, 94, 101–159, 161, 171, 172, 174–176, 175n18, 178–182, 180n33, 185–187, 189, 196, 203, 225, 227, 241 works Memories, Dreams, Thoughts, 103 The Psychology of the Unconscious, 118

286 

Author Index

Jung, Carl Gustav (cont.) Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 157 The Transformation of the Libido, 52, 136 Juranville, Alain, 240n25 K

Kant, Emmanuel, 48, 199, 236, 238, 240 Kierkegaard, Søren, 207, 222, 222n73 Klein, Melanie, 61, 62, 62n48, 71, 122n51 Koehler, Françoise, 62n48 Kojève, Alexandre, 4, 4n11, 19, 42, 194, 194n18 Koyré, Alexandre, 174n15, 193, 194, 194n18, 202 Kroeber, A.L., 167n9 Kugler, Paul, 130n69 Küng, Hans, 167n9 L

Lacan, Emily, 214 Lacan, Jacques works Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, 60, 70 Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual, 11, 41–73, 99, 113, 154, 170, 260 The Freudian Thing, 121, 176 The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, 13, 29–39,

41, 75, 87, 88n36, 93n46, 94, 95, 120, 122 The Instance of the Letter, 82 The Neurotic’s Individual Myth, 13–29 On a Question Prior to Any Possibility of Treatment of Psychosis, 140, 187, 188 On the Names of the Father, 205, 207, 222n73 Seminar II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 172 Seminar III: The Psychoses, 11, 70, 135, 140, 186, 187, 197, 263 Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 3, 11, 143, 156, 227–257, 261 Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 147, 154n46, 263 Seminar XIII: The Object of Psychoanalysis, 154, 196 Seminar XX: Encore, 260, 265 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 163, 163n2 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 48, 49n13, 49n14, 171 Laplace, Pierre, 199 Layton, Bentley, 152n40 Leader, Darian, 163n1, 170n12 Lemaire, Anika, 125 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 4 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 7, 8, 14, 15, 17, 19, 23, 27, 28, 30, 36, 37, 90, 99, 101, 132, 137, 147, 154n46, 161–184, 234, 235, 243, 252

  Author Index 

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 175n18 Lewy, Hans, 78n4 Libbrecht, Katrien, 93n46 Luther, Martin, 88, 143, 145, 223 M

Macey, David, 1 Mach, Michael F., 78n4 Maimonides, 207 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 65, 66 Margolin, Ron, 155n47 Marini, Marcelle, 10n18 Marx, Karl, 4, 9n17, 114, 114n33 Mauss, Marcel, 36, 175n18 McCarthy, Dennis J., 207n43 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4n11, 174n15 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 1, 10n18, 14, 14n1, 43n3, 61n46, 81, 93n46, 122n52, 128, 128n66, 129, 130n69, 163n1, 187 Miller, Judith, 87n30 Milner, Jean Claude, 194n18 Muller, John P., 80n11, 121n48, 163n2

287

P

Palmer, Michael, 105n5, 180n33 Parmenides, 77 Pascal, Blaise, 158, 207, 216, 220, 222 Paul, Saint, 3, 4, 89, 96n49, 157–159, 157n51, 222, 224, 237, 239, 241–245, 248–251 Philo of Alexandria, 77 Plato, 242, 263 R

Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 123n45, 155n47 Racine, Jean, 212–218, 222 Rank, Otto, 62 Richardson, William J., 80n11, 121n48, 163n2 Ricoeur, Paul, 149, 149n37, 154n46 Roazen, Paul, 149n37, 152n39 Robertson Smith, William, 167n9 Robinson, James M., 152n40 Rohmer, Eric, 215n59 Roudinesco, Élisabeth, 43n3, 120, 120n46, 163n2, 214 Rudolph, Kurt, 152n40

N

Nagy, Marilyn, 180n33 Nancy, Jean Luc, 163, 163n2 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 114, 239 Nobus, Dani, 112n28 Noll, Richard, 155, 155n48 O

Otto, Rudolf, 208, 223 Ovid, 264

S

Saal, Frida, 163n2 Saint Theresa, 265 Samuels, Andrew, 129, 130, 130n69 Santner, Eric, 156, 156n49, 156n50, 157 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 4n11, 123n55, 194n17 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 7, 30, 32, 99, 169, 175, 212

288 

Author Index

Schopenhauer, Artur, 230 Schreber, Daniel, Paul, 136, 197–200, 199n26 Segal, Robert A., 158n57 Segond, Louis, 206, 206n40 Shepherdson, Charles, 164n3 Simon, Bennet, 105n8, 259 Spinoza, Baruch, 253 Steiner, George, 79, 175n18 Storr, Anthony, 53n24, 157n55, 180, 180n34 Sulloway, Frank, 49n14

van Haute, Philippe, 92, 92n45, 123n53 Virgil, 148n34 W

Wahl, Jean, 16 Wallon, Henri, 41, 43n3 Weber, Max, 237 Weil, Simone, 259 Wiener, Norbert, 174 Wilden, Anthony, 80n11, 176, 178 Winston, David, 78n5 Wolff, Françoise, 6n14

T

Thomas Aquinas, 242 Tort, Michel, 8n16 V

Valente, Joe, 114n33

Z

Žižek, Slavoj, 2–4, 63n51, 113, 114n33, 144n27, 153n44, 163n1, 165, 215, 215n59, 216

Subject Index1

A

B

Alienation, 42 Anamorphosis, 250, 262 Anti-metaphysical, 10, 11, 72, 150, 151, 159, 161, 164, 166, 173, 183, 184, 202, 204, 206, 207, 221–226, 228, 237 Anxiety, 50, 59, 82, 103, 114, 164–166, 192, 199, 203, 210, 211, 217, 222–225 Archetype, 109, 110, 115, 118, 120, 121, 128, 132, 140, 145, 148, 178–180, 182 Atheism, 211

Baroque, 126, 259–268 Bible, 37, 77, 88, 196, 204n37, 205, 216, 224, 241–245 Big Other, 32, 85, 141, 162, 163, 165, 166, 166n6, 168, 169, 171–173, 176, 177, 182–184, 186, 188, 191, 198, 200–202, 205–207, 210, 211, 213, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 224, 225, 229, 251, 253, 260, 265 Biologism, 59, 71, 72, 97 Body, 144, 199, 203, 211

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 I. Benyamini, Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis, The Palgrave Lacan Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5

289

290 

Subject Index

C

Calvinism, 214 Castration, 23, 27, 49, 50, 53, 59, 89, 92, 152, 153, 243 Catholicism, 2, 2n6, 8n16, 67n63, 68n65, 127, 153, 158, 215, 237, 262, 268 Cogito, 123n55, 154, 154n46, 186, 192–197, 203, 204, 209, 226, 240 Collective unconscious, 7, 52, 105, 108, 109, 115, 116, 118, 119, 139, 144, 155, 158, 161–186, 188, 190 Complex, 4, 6, 13, 17–19, 24, 26, 32, 41–73, 79, 90, 93, 94, 101–103, 105, 127, 129, 130, 133, 143, 150, 151, 167, 170, 181, 182, 186, 218, 229, 248, 249 D

Demythologization, 17, 91, 93, 99–100, 223 Dualism, 39, 75–100, 102, 118, 132, 151, 159, 185

Ego psychology, 5, 14, 31, 32, 42, 85, 94, 111, 122, 123, 123n55, 142, 194n17, 238, 259 Ex nihilo, 1, 251, 254, 263, 264 Extimacy, 75–100, 185 F

Father function, 22, 24, 172, 228 Faust (Goethe), 87, 88 Floating signifier, 37 Foreclosure, 188, 189, 200, 218 Fort/da, 191 G

Genesis, 77, 88n36, 94, 95, 210 Gestalt, 138 Gnosticism, 103, 105, 155n47, 156, 157, 185 Gospel, 94, 96–98, 138n20 H

Hysteric, 126n60, 133 I

E

Ego, 5, 6, 15, 23, 32, 41, 42, 46, 50, 59, 70, 83–86, 108, 109, 112, 118, 122, 123, 123n55, 133, 134, 138, 139, 141, 150, 151, 167, 168, 171, 189, 194n17, 198, 200, 209, 211, 224, 225, 236, 247, 248, 250, 261 Ego ideal, 46, 50, 51, 58–60, 64, 65, 69–72

Id, 46, 50, 83, 84, 123, 165, 169 Identification, 23, 38, 41, 42, 46, 47, 54, 57–61, 65, 67–70, 72, 73, 111–113, 122, 132, 134, 138, 142, 145, 189, 198, 241, 242, 248–250 Imaginary, 7, 9–11, 13, 14, 18–24, 26–28, 37, 38, 41, 42, 58, 70, 73, 85–87, 89, 92–94, 93n46, 97, 99, 112, 113, 121, 128, 130–142, 141n25, 148, 151,

  Subject Index 

162, 165, 175, 182, 183, 189, 192, 196–198, 200, 201, 203, 211, 224, 228, 233, 238, 247, 248, 250–252, 254–256, 260, 263 Imago, 6, 52–55, 53n25, 58, 60–65, 69–73, 101, 105, 128, 129, 162, 181, 182, 189 Incarnation, 11, 39, 47, 76, 78, 85, 90, 143, 150, 159 International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), 5, 14, 29, 31, 41, 42, 95, 122, 122n52 J

Jansenism, 186, 212–218 Jouissance, 6, 7, 7n15, 9, 45, 82, 89, 92, 93n46, 151, 157, 165, 167, 168, 183, 187, 194, 195, 204, 211, 229, 231–236, 238, 243, 247, 248, 250, 251, 266 L

Language, 3, 5, 6, 6n14, 8n16, 9, 10, 15, 23, 28–39, 43n3, 68n65, 69, 72, 79, 80, 82, 84–95, 88n33, 93n46, 97, 100, 102, 113, 115, 116, 126, 128, 130n69, 131, 135, 139, 140, 142–145, 147, 150, 153, 154, 162, 163n1, 164–166, 169, 171–177, 181, 185, 187, 188, 191, 197, 199, 202, 204, 206n41, 207, 209, 221, 224, 230, 231, 233–235, 241, 259–264 Law of kinship, 37

291

Libido, 53, 103, 116–120, 122, 128, 132–137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 169, 179, 180, 182, 183 Logos, 11, 37–39, 75–101, 142, 143, 150, 206, 210, 221, 253, 254 M

Marxism, 51 Master-signifier, 33, 140, 208 Metaphysics, 20, 72, 80, 80n11, 163–166, 170n13, 171, 173, 181, 182, 193, 204, 210, 240, 255 Mirror stage, 9, 13, 15, 23, 27, 41, 43, 92, 123n55, 134, 137, 138, 138n20, 141, 141n25, 194n17, 250, 251 Monotheism, 2, 156, 252 Mysterium tremendum, 223 Myth, 1, 14, 15, 17–24, 26–30, 37, 38, 52, 53, 58, 60, 67, 68, 75, 76, 87, 90–93, 99, 100, 105, 106, 109, 116, 152, 161, 166, 172, 175, 177, 178, 204, 248, 249, 252, 253, 255–257 Mythology, 30, 53, 89, 92, 115, 179, 210 N

Name of the Father, 10, 13, 14, 25, 26, 33, 37–39, 58, 59, 71–73, 99, 138, 153, 162, 165, 181–183, 185–226, 235, 239, 249, 257, 259, 265 Narcissism, 15, 27, 42, 86, 132–134, 136, 137, 198, 245–248

292 

Subject Index

Neurotic, 20–22, 24, 46, 50, 85, 90, 110, 131, 133–137, 192, 198, 199, 202, 210–212, 225, 248, 267 New Testament, 25, 87, 88, 100, 228, 244 O

Objet petit a, 9 Obsessive, 112, 133, 168, 229, 247, 249 Occultism, 102–104, 107, 116, 147, 181 Oedipus, 4, 6, 43, 45–47, 53, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–68, 71, 72, 90, 92, 93, 99, 103, 105, 113, 127, 170, 171, 182, 218 Other, 2, 7, 9–11, 13, 16, 33–36, 41, 63, 80n11, 81–87, 94, 98, 102, 106, 111–114, 131, 135, 136, 140–142, 141n25, 148–150, 153, 156, 162, 163, 165, 166, 166n6, 167n9, 168, 169, 171–173, 176, 177, 181–226, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235–237, 247, 251, 253–255, 260, 265–267 P

Paranoid, 41, 42, 133, 200 Phallocentrism, 45n4, 168 Phallus, 92, 93n46, 143, 144, 150, 235 Psychosis, 41, 59, 133, 136, 137, 139, 146, 187–192, 198, 200, 218, 224, 225

Q

Quilting point, 140, 188, 212, 217, 218, 225 R

Real, 9, 10, 13, 24, 26, 31, 47, 48, 50, 56, 60, 65, 69, 70, 73, 86–88, 96, 106, 114, 120, 123, 128, 130, 135, 144, 151–153, 152n39, 153n44, 159, 161, 162, 163n2, 166, 170n13, 178, 179, 182, 183, 189, 191, 197, 198, 200, 201, 203, 223, 228, 229, 231–237, 239, 240, 242, 244, 245, 247–254, 259–261, 263, 264 Return to Freud, 3–5, 8, 9n17, 10, 11, 28, 30, 31, 41–73, 80, 89, 91, 94, 98, 99, 101, 127, 138n20, 151, 162, 163n1, 164, 210, 239, 259 S

Schema L, 200, 211, 219, 224 Schizophrenia, 53n24, 121n49 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 189, 197–200, 199n26 Self, 82, 84, 109, 110, 116, 118, 132–134, 150, 153n44, 158, 173, 193, 194n17, 245, 246, 268 Shadow, 65, 104, 109, 118, 119, 119n43, 220 Signifier, 5, 6, 30, 34–38, 59, 69–71, 75, 81, 84, 86–88, 90–93, 93n46, 101, 102, 120, 121, 123, 126, 128, 129, 132, 140,

  Subject Index 

293

147, 148, 150, 153, 159, 162, 163n2, 165, 169, 170n13, 175–177, 182, 186–191, 188n3, 194, 197, 203, 204, 208, 210–213, 218, 221, 225, 229–231, 233–235, 238, 243, 248, 249, 252, 256, 257, 260, 263–266, 268 Split subject, 85, 197, 221, 260 Structuralism, 7, 19, 101, 147–149, 154n46, 170n13, 174 Subject supposed to know, 86, 200 Superego, 5, 6, 46, 47, 50, 51, 58–62, 65, 67, 69–72, 84, 167–169, 167n8, 189, 190, 224, 225, 264 Symbolic, 7, 9–11, 13–39, 44, 55, 58, 69–71, 73, 75, 84–89, 92, 93n46, 94, 98, 99, 101, 112, 113, 121, 128, 130–141, 145, 150, 151, 153, 162, 163, 165, 169, 171–173, 175–177, 175n18, 181–184, 187–189, 191, 192, 197, 198, 201, 203, 211, 218, 224, 225, 228–236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 247–249, 251, 252, 254, 255, 259, 260, 263, 264

68n65, 71–73, 83, 85, 125, 126, 132, 136, 152, 154, 156, 158, 164, 167n8, 206, 212, 213, 222, 229, 231, 233, 242, 260 The Thing/Das Ding, 81, 82, 95, 229, 232–235, 239, 241, 243, 245, 250, 252–254, 263, 264, 264n7 Transcendental, 34–36, 157, 165, 166, 173, 256 Transference, 23, 111

T

W

Telepathy, 33, 34, 36 Text, 2n6, 3, 5, 11, 13, 14, 14n1, 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 38, 42, 43, 43n3, 45n4, 46, 49n14, 57, 60, 61n46, 62,

Weltanschauung, 91, 106–115

U

Unconscious, 5, 7, 9, 10, 15, 23, 29, 30, 32–38, 42, 52, 53n24, 55, 62, 81, 82, 84–86, 89, 91–94, 98, 100, 102, 103, 105, 108–110, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 119n43, 122, 128, 131, 139–142, 144, 147–150, 154–158, 161–191, 163n1, 175n18, 194–196, 200, 202–204, 209, 210, 219, 221, 224, 226, 228–235, 239, 260, 266 Unheimlich, 81n14, 82

Z

Zero symbol, 37, 38