Notes on Lacan and Freud

and their relation to metaphysics

The point of this essay is to defend some of Lacan’s ideas as the authentic development of Freud’s insights and to show how such ideas can be further developed to fit into other truthful systems of thought.

Lacan

Lacan famously taught that the unconscious was structured like a language.

At first, this conception almost seems like the opposite of the characterization of the unconscious which we find in Lacan’s predecessor and greatest influence, Freud.

Freud’s tends to describe the unconscious as a seething cauldron of irrationality, evil, concupiscence. It is literally brutal (in the old sense of “animalistic”), resolutely picturing the soul as a purely biological thing. In a sense, the Freudian unconscious is the opposite of the traditional image of the soul, which prior to Freud had been conceived of and defined as pure spirit (although, quite boldly, Freud would eventually come to affirm that it was the other way around: that the conscious mind is the negative image of the unconscious, which he took to be experientially and motivationally primary).

The Lacanian unconscious, by contrast, is not identified with animality, earth, mud, thoughtless irrational impulses¹—if anything it is too abstract, too obedient. In Lacan, the unconscious is the strangely automatic influence which language and other systems of symbolic meaning have on us—even, ultimately, the abstractions of formal logic and mathematics (or whatever inflexible psychic realities these things serve, so Lacan claims, to represent). In a word, consciousness is conditioned, not by matter, but by structure.

In other words—and here you’ll forgive me for resorting to pseudo-Hegelian jargon—in Freud, the revolutionary “dialectical movement” is that the psyche is posited (put forth) as unfree (it is analyzed to the degree which it is unfree). Freud takes "unfree" to mean unspiritual, anti-spiritual (material). Thus the unconscious is the seething storehouse of everything animalistic, biological, earthly—in other words, everything which modern bourgeois, “positivist” society negates about the soul. Even to this day, in CBT for example, the prevailing view of the soul is that it normally seeks its own well-being in a straightforward way, without hypocrisy, ambiguity, or ambivalence. There are only spontaneous mistakes, defects in knowledge which are essentially innocent.

Lacan does not contradict Freud’s primary psychoanalytic idea (that the unconscious is unfree) so much as he draws the original insight out to its dialectical conclusion: In Lacan, the soul is again analyzed or posited as unfree—not in the sense of biological/material, but in the ultimate sense of structured.²

To again speak of things in Hegelian terms: Freud analyzes the soul as “not-spiritual,” in Lacan, this negation takes on positive substance: “structured.”

I propose that the future dialectical movement of psychoanalysis will be to creatively negate (“sublate”) this substance: to develop “structured” into the notion of “subject to necessity,” and then to further develop necessity into absolute necessity—which, as it turns out, is absolute freedom. That is, the future development of psychoanalysis will end up showing, again, (this time “after” psychoanalysis) how spiritual things are essentially free.

But wasn’t this move already achieved in Jung? Doesn’t he provide the corrective to Freud’s excessive psychological biologism by shifting the emphasis back to spirituality?

(A short Critique of) Jung

One must exhaust the content of the concept that “the soul is not free” before one can again take flight and return to its freedom. Quite simply, before this point, a spiritual psychoanalysis remains a contradiction in terms.

I propose that, dialectically speaking (that is, as pertains to the back-and-forth development of ideas in history), Jung effects a kind of betrayal of Freud’s initial insight, a pseudo-spiritual reversal which is unfaithful both to psychoanalysis and traditional religion (while purporting to embrace and surpass both).

Why? In Jung, soul is “put forth” not as animal/biological/material (as in Freud), but as spirit. But this move is fundamentally “mistaken,” dialectically, because psyche had already been put forth as entirely spirit (on the traditional, pre-Freudian picture). The pre-Freudian moral tradition basically tended to view the person as a wholly autonomous, morally-responsible, closed-off, and self-directed agent. In other words, moral freedom and subjective self-transparency were both over-emphasized. Human beings are ultimately responsible and can attain to some measure of self-knowledge, but our irresponsibility and the limits of our self-knowledge had been neglected in the pre-Freudian tradition.

Freud’s whole insight is that he illuminates and illustrates all the ways in which the soul is not wholly spiritual; how subjectivity itself is somewhat conditioned by matter.³ In Jung’s attempt to reverse this insight (to naively return to the pre-Freudian concept of spirituality after Freud's move from psyche-as-spiritual into psyche-as-material), spirit is ultimately collapsed into matter (and thus the invariable result is a reversion into pantheism and/or animism). The contradictory dialectical nature of Jung’s project means that, generally speaking, Jungian ideas are neither authentically spiritual nor truly scientific.

Comparing Jung with Lacan

Take, as an example of this dialectical deficiency, Jung’s collective unconscious vs. Lacan’s signifying chain.

Both concepts purport to illuminate or develop the Freudian notion of the unconscious in its relation to humanity's collective existence.⁴ In Jung, the thesis is nakedly unscientific and “mystical” (in the sense of vague and false): The collective unconscious is a mysterious over-soul which governs the lives of the individuals, who are themselves no more than its ephemeral emanation.

To expand on this criticism: if the unconscious is collective at its deepest point, then it must be a kind of over-soul (under-soul?) shared by all humanity. And this is more or less the definition of pantheism—that at our deepest level, we are all identical, we are all one, that we are all God. But even if the “collective unconscious” is only unconscious in name alone—that is, even if the term merely designates a collective store of knowledge, a reservoir of platonic narrative idea(l)s which the soul draws from without the mediation of human culture (as Jung himself implied when he pointed out that he often observed resemblances between patient pathology and ancient myths where there was no discernible causal cultural connection), then there is some form of telepathy occurring.⁵

It is not that this position is prima facie absurd—why not be open-minded?—Rather, the problem with Jung’s idea is that it is not scientifically parsimonious.

Lacan accounts for the data of culture & the psychoanalytic clinic with a theory which explains the same or more data with fewer assumptions.

His “signifiying chain” basically designates human culture, i.e: language in its unconscious totality, considered as an intersubjective series of signifiers (which, n.b., are the sensible but meaningless parts of language) which has no extra-subjective existence.⁶

Lacan’s improvement over Jung in this case is that he does not reify humanity’s collective existence. Each individual subject is caused by language to a great degree, but this language is fundamentally inter-subjective, not some impersonal entity “out-there” which overdetermines our fates (which illusory psychological entity, in its various forms, Lacan designates as “the big Other”).⁷

Here is another example of what would seem to be an example of a recurrent Jungian “archetype” (Lacanian “symbolic formation”) and how both theories would attempt to account for it:

In Charles Bukowski’s novel, Women, one of the characters relates a dream to the protagonist:

"I had a dream about you. I opened your chest like a cabinet, it had doors, and when I opened the doors I saw all kinds of soft things inside you--teddy bears, tiny fuzzy animals, all these soft, cuddly things…”

This moment bears a striking resemblance to the enamored Alcibiades’ description of Socrates in Plato’s Symposium:

“I say that Socrates is exactly like those Silenuses sitting in the statuary shops, the kind the craftsmen manufacture, with flutes or pipes, but when opened in the middle, they prove to have agalmata [idols] of the gods inside them.”

How would both theoretical systems account for this resemblance?⁸ Jung, we could imagine, would say that there exists an archetype in the collective unconscious (the ugly old drunkard-poet, Silenus—the father of Dionysius, the God of wine) which is obliged to recur within human persons across time. Driven to express itself, the Silenus archetype possessed or even produced Bukowski, which led to a recrudescence in late 20th century America of the archetype earlier incident in classical Athens, along with the consequent admiration, latria, which all such archetypes inevitably attract.

A Lacanian theoretical structure, by contrast, could be used to explain things in a more scientific way. Lacan took the episode of Socrates and Alcibiades as uniquely illustrative of something in the structure of desire and infatuation—namely, that love involves this psychological interpolation (insertion or projection) of an agalma, an idol, into the beloved—and that what is seen in or imputed to the other, in this process, is something inexplicable, their desire. Dreams would express this through similar images in both cases because the underlying structure is the same. Desire, which makes us who we are,⁹ tends to idolize the image of its own desire when perceived with particularly intensity or “fittingness” in another person. Socrates truly desired to know the truth; unlike the rest of the Athenians, he was not complacent in his supposed knowledge—perhaps it was this genuine desire in the comparatively philosophically-complacent world of the Greeks (compared to Socrates, I mean) which Alcibiades could only express in the imagery of a collection of idols.

Again: the Lacanian explanation explains more with less—not only is there some insight shed on the link between Socrates, Bukowski, and their respective votaries, but on the underlying dynamic of the phenomenon of idolatry and desire as such.

Yet what about the other striking similarities between Socrates and Bukowski? Again, setting aside the details, the structural problem in Jungian interpretations is that they essentially reduce interpretation of similarity to similarity itself. Bukowski is like Socrates, and both are like the archetypal Silenus—ergo, both are reducible to Silenus.

Surely we can say something more interesting about the shared similarity at play here. The Greeks, those worshippers of beauty (for whom beauty truly was truth, and vice versa), were not naturally inclined to see in the pug-nosed Socrates any external signs of truth or wisdom. Along similar lines, a working class, homely, ox-like, womanizing pollack¹⁰ drunkard postal worker like Bukowski seems an unlikely candidate to be a sentimental romantic poet.

Yet why not say that both are connected to the truth by the same underlying ideal structure? That is, the idiomatic expression “the ugly truth,” seems to signify that truth is often unpleasant (this is the meaning of Freud’s concept of “the reality principle”). Those who are rejected from a society (those most subject, by common compact, to receive the greatest quantum of displeasure from it) are often best suited to interpret it.¹¹ And indeed, this principle is formalized in the psychoanalytic concept of hysteria—that is, that there exists a subjective stance which involves a desire which is not accounted for in advance by “the system” (thus a more pure desire)—which stance is the only means by which new truth (either philosophical wisdom or true poetry) enters being.

The above explanation could be totally false, of course. Maybe the similarities between Bukowski and Socrates are attributable to mere coincidence. The point is that, whatever my interpretation, because it is at least an interpretation with reference to structure (i.e: because it’s “dialectically” Lacanian) it has an advantage over the explanations of depth psychology, which explain similarity not by structure, but by similarity itself—which, again, is the same as refusing to explain similarity at all!

Another advantage which Lacanian psychoanalysis has over Jungian theory is its treatment of religion (or to be more modest: the soul’s inborn tendency towards worship), which is, again, less contradictory.

Psychoanalytic Thought with (dis)respect to Religion

Lacan’s position towards religion is complex and somewhat ambiguous. The classical enlightenment-atheist position (perhaps most forcibly expressed in Freud in Civilization & its Discontents) is to assert that God’s existence and all religious truths are comforting fantasies which, because they are ultimately false, ought to be discarded (unless such an abrupt rupture would seriously imperil social stability—in which case, enlightenment should be more gradual, for the sake of expedience).

The slightly subtler (and thus more subversive) atheist position—the Jungian position—is that faith and all its associated rituals are tolerable inasmuch as they serve some purely instrumental purpose, that religion is ultimately a noble lie which must nevertheless be indefinitely maintained for social order or even personal spiritual well-being. Yet as Flannery O’Connor famously said about the Eucharist (against this unbearably patronizing attitude): “If it’s all just a symbol, then to hell with it.”

The “pragmatic” position either betrays a bad conscience, pride or stupidity. It simply doesn’t make sense for you yourself to believe in something you don’t actually believe in,¹² or to promote it as worthy of belief unless you think that your fellow human beings are all too stupid or evil to handle the truth. At least the Freudian/Voltairean position takes the claims of religion seriously (it hears them as they are meant to be heard, and judges them as false). The pragmatic/Jungian view is insultingly patronizing, even ultimately dehumanizing, because it permits and even encourages a break between human beings and the truth—either lying to yourself or others.

In his Triumph of Religion, however, Lacan presents a unique thesis—that because Catholicism is such a potent collection of such well-crafted fantasies, it cannot help but succeed in the long run.¹³ To Lacan, psychoanalysis is a historical accident... an eruption of the real truth about the subject (about the human person) which is doomed to be lost to time, washed under the waves of the more soothing fantasies which, over the march of ages, will utterly erase all trace of the actual facts of our condition. In this Lacan is more intellectually honest than almost any other relativist or any other cynic. In effect he admits that, given that (to him) there is no metaphysical guarantee of any adequation between the mind and truth, the most deeply-satisfying fantasy (and not the factual reality) is likely to be the worldview which, ultimately, is destined to triumph.

His attitude bears some resemblance to that of Dostoevky’s Grand Inquisitor:

They [humanity] will seek us [the Catholic Church] again, hidden underground in the catacombs, for we [Christians] shall be again persecuted and tortured. They will find us and cry to us, "Feed us, for those who have promised us fire from heaven haven't given it!" And then we shall finish building their tower, for he finishes the building who feeds them. And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us.”

For Dostoevsky, the substantial reality of Jesus Christ is in danger of being obscured by false forms of religion, by an institutionalized chauvinistic (and ultimately prideful, i.e: Satanic) certitude which gradually comes to replace the genuine Christian spirit. For Lacan, however, the Catholic Church is a fantasy which obscures, not Jesus Christ, but reality itself.¹⁴ Indeed, to Lacan, there is no authentic religion because there is no extra-psychological truth.¹⁵ In other words, “there is no meta-language.”

Yet the proposition that language cannot attain to the truth (really the redefinition of truth as purely psychological) is self-contradictory. This functions via reductio ad absurdum. If language bears no relation to the truth, then the statement “language bears no relation to the truth” itself bears no relation to the truth.

Even very attenuated versions of this anti-realism can be shown to be absurd or at least vulnerable to the “undermining” which they attempt to effect.

Perhaps Lacan was not a relativist. But he was a pessimist with respect to the truth.

In this way, there is another convergence here with orthodox Catholic teaching. In the final struggle at the end of time, it is only supernatural grace which prevents total apostasy.

Lacan would agree with the traditional Catholic teaching that, in the end, human nature will not remain in the truth by its own strength, by its own power of understanding. The difference is the concept of grace. For Lacan, there is no grace, and man will be lost. The Church rightly teaches that all mankind would be lost—if the days were not shortened for the sake of the elect (for the sake of grace).

Both Lacan and Dostoevsky see the Catholic Church as an institution which covers over reality by its very nature. In Lacan this is complemented by a strangely self-defeating intellectual fatalism. Psychoanalysis and all its truths are doomed to be buried in history, buried (like everything truly real) by jouissance, by “enjoyment.”

Yet paradoxically, despite Lacan’s more evident atheism, his theories are more compatible with traditional Christianity than those of Jung.

In Lacan, it is not (only) that the patient’s subjective distress (the “symptom”) is the result of unconscious forces which are ultimately biological (as is the case in Freud). Nor are symptoms the frustrated expression of truthful archetypes. Rather, the idea is that the unconscious forces themselves are a “symptom” (an effect) of objective distress (a fundamental lack in being itself).¹⁶ Not that there is any lack in the real,¹⁷ but that the symbolic register of human consciousness (and thus the imaginary register, which roughly corresponds to our everyday conscious reality) is predicated on lack.

What is lack? Something really missing at the core of our psyche, our soul (intimately related to our capacity for language—that is, our rational faculties). Lack is nothingness. Not just nothingness, but a nothingness which perpetually recurs, inescapably (at least during our earthly existence). Is this not just a negative way of saying that all our language, everything meaningful points to God and is predicated and founded on God, the same God who is almost always absent from consciousness? Is this not just a very precise subjective reformulation of the doctrine of original sin and the concupiscence which is its consequence?

How far all this is from the ideal of eternal stillness and tranquility underlying everything which we find in Jung—yet how much closer, I think, to our own experience.

Since the birth of psychoanalysis, people with no real knowledge of theology have claimed that psychoanalysis offers a more intellectually satisfying theory to account for the whole field of religious concepts which man no longer finds credible.

My goal is not to re-interpret (really to attempt to scavenge some scraps of truth from) religious doctrines in the light of psychology (basically, the essentially patronizing Jungian error), but to synthesize traditional metaphysics and psychoanalytic insights into truths which go further than either system—or at least to indicate by a handful of brief example some ways this might someday be done.

Some Notes Towards the work of Translation

We could think of this process as “translation” in the liturgical sense, literally carrying some riches from one place to another. Another example is Augustine’s reference to Christian appropriation of pagan philosophy, which he sees as typified in the Hebrews plundering the Egyptians. With these images in mind, I will here provide a few examples of how psychoanalytic concepts can be translated into theological language inasmuch as there is any truth to either of them, for the mutual enrichment of both domains.

Addressing an Objection

Yet before we begin—one might object at the outset that any such translation is impossible, because the two systems of thought are simply too opposed to one another. The great stumbling block is the psychoanalytic emphasis on sexuality, which can in no wise, it would seem, be reconciled with anything authentically religious. In a theological anthropology, it would seem to be blasphemous to say that the ultimate basis of thought and action is sexuality. How can this obvious contradiction be annulled?

I believe that the apparent discrepancy can be explained (or at least some greater synthetic truth can be realized) with reference to methodology:

Psychoanalysis as a science (rather than as a practice) is effectively the result of empirical phenomenology. It involves the observation of mental entities through introspection and even more primarily the inference of their existence and nature through attentive listening to analysands (and, perhaps more controversially, through analysis of human culture).

Theological or traditional philosophical anthropology, on the other hand, typically attempts to formulate truthful descriptions things in their ideal form (rather than as we encounter them in experience).

In simple terms, one is an analysis of becoming, the other an analysis of being. Yet becoming must ultimately be absorbed into being, because becoming itself is a being (while the reverse is not true).

The statement that the basis of all psychic energy is sexual can be translated into a traditional metaphysical means of expression. It is simply to say that our nature as animal in fact always precedes our nature as rational, and that a confused, mixture of an animal nature and a darkened or fallen rational nature does not depart from us until death.

The end of an animal’s life is to perpetuate its physical being, its species. In other words, animals have no higher aim than sexuality.¹⁸ As human beings are rational animals, this facet of our nature struggles with our higher powers. Yet, curiously, reason is generally the weaker power in this struggle. This is because, unlike our animal nature, our rational nature is missing something central.

Yet in spite of this, animal nature can be sublimated, literally made sublime (moved to a greater degree of being, made better), by our rational nature.

This analysis remains valid whether or not there is any reality to spiritual things, i.e: whether or not such sublimations are merely substitute satisfactions, or something more.

The account of their origin (that is, the origin of sublimation) was devised and expanded upon under a matter of factly atheist perspective, but there is nothing contradictory in asserting that such sublimations (elevated psychic constructs which began temporally as animality and remain fallen/animalistic at their core) may in fact ultimately come to embrace some degree of external objective reality—that is, that they may someday again grasp the truth.

In fact, just by positing itself as true (which it does simply by positing itself—like any system of thought, even if not explicitly), psychoanalysis holds that some truth may be attained by human beings.

More Translation.

The “objet petit a” can be said to denote God (as does “the big other”),¹⁹ or at least the places where certain aspects of God were meant to come into contact with the soul.²⁰

As I alluded to before, I think that one “psychoanalytic” way of describing original sin is as the absence of the fully-known presence of God in the soul. I.e: as lack predicated by (non-beatific) intellect and its subsequent subjection to language. Concupiscence and other idolatries contaminate this void (mortal concupiscence is when finite creatures become the objects of infinite desire, the soul’s highest goal) because they are the “next best thing” to a consciousness otherwise almost totally blinded, by its (fallen) nature, to the reality of God.

Also notable is the Lacanian concept of love (as something apart from sentiment and even sexuality, at least as conventionally considered). The Lacanian idea that love is “giving one’s lack” corresponds to the idea that love is treating another as the object which fills the greatest vacuity in the soul, the “God-shaped hole.” Another insight about love is that it is what drives the psychoanalytic cure (the analyst gives the analysand their “lack,” a pure desire as to the analysand’s being, and in so doing revives or revises their lost or flagging desire). Unlike in Jung (and in the Gnosticism which he flirts with), knowledge alone does not suffice.

For jouissance, a very important concept in Lacanian psychoanalysis (roughly equivalent to our vulgar “getting off,” a kind of evil satisfaction), we can substitute the scholastic fruition (incidentally the literal equivalent of the French term), or simply “satisfaction.” People act as if jouissance is some independent evil substance, but to my mind it is merely an intrinsic good (fruition) which has fallen into a rut, into inauthenticity.

The inner drive towards excitation that characterizes all “speaking beings” (rational creatures) is the same as their fulfillment, their telos, their end (perhaps one could even argue that a soul is only itself, it only has being to the degree that it attains to that fruition—a way of making sense of Lacan’s characteristically cryptic comment that jouissance was the only substance treated of in psychoanalysis). Yet this drive can get derailed or lost, stuck in an inauthentic impasse, which repeats itself in a sterile way, without any real satisfaction—or rather, with too much “bad” satisfaction.²¹ Jouissance is so readily associated in our speech with physical intimacy because the more material, animal part of us, not being subject to free will, is normally “infallible,” (indeed, failure only means something in reference to a rational intellect) whereas our rational nature, being fallen (unbeatific), is removed from perception as to its nature and the conditions of fruition (which conditions are idiosyncratic, unique to each person—because each person’s rational being, although literally “generic,” pertaining to our genera as human, is simultaneously “angelic” and thus sui generis inasmuch as our nature is intrinsically connected to the unique degree of elevation of grace for which it was created). That is, the gross fruition which occurs among human beings in their dimension as animals is so readily recognized by everybody (and thus pervades the more emotionally-valenced neighborhoods of our language) because it is so obvious and uniform.

There is also, I think, room for a redefinition of hysteria. Hysteria is seen alternatingly as a disorder, inherently “feminine,” distinguished by mimesis (imitation) and a more authentic stance with respect to subjectivity, marked by a practice of unearthing contradictions. Hysteria is the only stance which is truly able to generate (read: uncover) new truth (everything else can be done by machines or their human equivalents):

[Bruce] Fink compares hysterics with good scientists, who do not take for granted that all solutions will be someday forthcoming. He contends that the truly scientific spirit is “commanded by the real, that is, that which does not work, by that which does not fit” (p. 135). This spirit “does not set out to carefully cover over paradoxes and contradictions, in an attempt to prove that the theory is nowhere lacking—that it works in every instance—but rather to take such paradoxes and contradictions as far as they can go” (Fink 135).

How can we make this intelligible?

I think that we can arrive at a useful definition of hysteria through etymology. Hysteria famously comes from the Greek hystera, womb.

So hysteria as a pathological category is the soul behaving too much like a womb… accepting and gestating whichever word settles in one’s soul, even to the exclusion of the soul’s true substance, its independent substantial existence.

Thus hysteric patients always have to be reoriented to the point that they rediscover what it is they really want, as apart from all empty imaginary identifications and their excessive concern with the other’s desire (which is actually, in the last account, an ethically irresponsible stance).

In hysteria, the symptom is dissolved by putting it (the meaning expressed by their physical symptom) into words, by making something of the unconscious conscious, which “repositions” the subject (“puts them in a better place,” one might say).

But the opposite of the hysterical attitude is also an error, the soul’s refusal to accept or receive any word, any external reality of being (what Lacanians typify as the obsessional stance). The obsessive soul pretends that it is not a living being, that it has no capacity for receptivity. It pretends it is a word, a concept, an idea. But because it is actually a living being, it can only do this by “playing dead” (which stance is inauthentic in a different way). The over-responsibility of the obsessive conceals pride.

Thus psychoanalysts sometimes speak of hysterization as an essential part of treatment in the case of obsessionals.

What does this (hystericization) mean? In secular terms: the obsessive must become free, open to the world, to reality as it is, unmediated by language or assumptions. They must break out of their fixed system of thought, the false contention that it is possible or desirable to explain it all solely on the basis of what is already known. They have to acknowledge that some part of their being is meant to function like a womb.

As far as I can tell, this hysterization of obsession is accomplished through the analyst gently drawing out the contradictions in the obsessive’s speech, to allow them to come to some distance from the dominance of language—really, an irresponsible stance towards language and one’s own mind. After all, language was made for man, not man for language; we are unfaithful to language (and not just reality) if we expect it to describe reality perfectly, if we expect it to stand above us unconditionally; ultimately it’s the map, not the territory itself. Drawing out this un-writable, inherently personal truth (which again, is closely connected to a development of desire) is the essence of hystericization.

Repression can be thought of as the birth of bad faith, the first moment of evil in the soul. The concept of repression should be brought into union with Rosmini’s idea that evil is the negation of known being or the affirmation of known non-being.

The psychoanalytic concept of perversion and its underlying mechanism of disavowal seems linked (but not reducible) to moral or intellectual hypocrisy, in that the concept purports to account for the origin of divergence between thought and action.²²

This is perhaps demonstrated best by Zizek, who takes perversion to be universal at the level of postmodern ideology. Thus a psychoanalytic critique can be used as a part of a robust critique of ideology—including religious ideology (which would purify it).

Last (among these brief sketches), the psychoanalytic account of psychosis can be enriched by religious ideas (or rather, religious ideas can receive a fuller natural basis through psychoanalysis). If paranoia is madness, then being is goodness; the greatest attenuation of psychosis (which Lacan, like Freud, ultimately conceded was a universal condition, only intensified and “asocial” in psychosis properly speaking)—the greatest attenuation of psychosis would be achieved in absolute pronoia, conviction that being is on our side, trust in God’s benevolence.

Another “religious” connection in the psychoanalytic conception of psychosis is the structural necessity of paternity. I have written a little about this, but Lacan himself warned that the ejection of paternity would likely lead to the instantiation of something worse. Here the arch-iconoclastic anti-philosophy does or ought to surprise us by affirming the psychological benefit, indeed even the necessity of paternity, more than any precedent system. St. Thomas wrote that marriage worked for the benefit of the offspring, but in Lacan this benefit is expanded to the point of keeping the subject anchored within being, even within itself as subject.

Chesterton remarked of a certain liberal Christian that he was always fond of saying that Christianity and Buddhism had a great deal in common—especially Buddhism.

I hope I have avoided that tendency here—that is, the tendency to “reinterpret” one intellectual system in light of another in a way that everything truthful in the less-preferred system is lost (an interpretation which would be unfruitful because it did not contain any genuine intellectual openness).

Please be indulgent to me in that these are all brief sketches, topoi where I think there is a convergence between insights such that each brightens the other. Lacan’s ideas are so complex and subtle that it is easy to stumble and miss the mark completely in their expostulation. Nevertheless, I think that the Lacanian system (or anti-system, if you like) admits of further development, and that the richest realm of future development will be attained through a dialogue with traditional metaphysics.

One last thing:

Grace?

Psychoanalysis began by analyzing the soul as unfree—first as determined by biology (in Freud), then as determined by structure (Lacan).

As I touched on above, I think that this movement (from soul as unspiritual to soul as structural) is or will finally be completed by a return to the notion of necessity—that is, to the notion of nature. That is, if its followers choose to progress further, psychoanalysis is bound to return to a theory which elucidates something of the soul’s nature, in the pre-modern sense of the term. I have attempted to sketch some of the first moments of that process here.

It is not that psychoanalysis is bound to be nullified wholesale by a reversion to some earlier tradition (say, some kind of misbegotten Thomist “psychology”). Rather, whatever is truthful in these theories will come to greater fruition because it is brought into union with that which is truthful which has been neglected of the pre-modern tradition. Lacan already continues this ressourcement (really initiated by Freud), with his wide-ranging references to pre-modern philosophy and poetry.

And (to really get ahead of myself) I would go so far as to say that psychoanalysis is bound to progress not only from structure to nature, but from nature to grace!

How can this be? Structure gradually becomes nature, the way things invariably are. Lacanian theory seems more and more preoccupied with inexorable deadlocks (even transposing them, as in Zizek, to the level of being itself). And what is a deadlock? Dissolving the metaphor reveals that the underlying concept is necessity. Yet what happens to necessity, when it is taken to the end, put forth absolutely? Absolute necessity, quite simply, is God. And the manifestation of God within the soul is grace.

And we see hints of this in the work of Elvio Fachinelli (whom Lacan attempted to appoint as his successor in Italy), the psychoanalytic theorist of the gift, of grace, of joy. This is not a glib re-assertion of these things made without taking into account the negativity of psychoanalysis, but a true a sober-reassertion informed by an understanding of psyche as structure, i.e: after psychoanalysis has exhausted the concept of “soul-as-determined.”

Yet in this process (of affirming psyche as grace), would psychoanalysis lose itself beyond its proper domain? I mean, psychoanalysis originated, it should not be forgotten, as science brought to its ultimate endpoint. Surely to address religion as something real would be to drag psychology away from its nature as a science. In brief: “We can speak about the soul, but we can say nothing about God. That is another domain, we must leave that to the theologians.”

The counterargument to that distinction is that such a distinction is purely conceptual, it does not apply within the subject itself. Phenomenologically, subjectively speaking, nature is grace. Not that there is not a real distinction between the two orders of being, but that the soul experiences everything (both nature and grace) without distinction (and only a little later comes to cognize the difference). While they are apart in being, in becoming one is only the intensification of the other. “I have never felt such things before” still presupposes the underlying element of feeling, of experience. Words cannot rise to signify the experience of grace, but nevertheless, empirically speaking, it happens in the soul.

Described from another direction: Life itself and all experience is a gift, God’s perpetual gift of something of his being.

This must sound rather trite. But it is not that nothing would be achieved if some truth were to be gained by plotting an intelligible course to that point which all poets and all inspired people had already arrived at almost by accident in their ecstasy, traveling on the wings of angels. Something will be gained by forging a path overland.

1. Even the Freudian super-ego as conceptualized as an inexplicably cruel and sadistic task-master was really more “Id” than Lacan’s analogous concept of the unconscious, the “cruelty” of which is attributed to some structural necessity.

2. That is, Freud applies biology to the human soul in the most radical sense (he analyzes the soul inasmuch as it is caused by or determined by biology), and Lacan abstracts from biology to pure structure itself. Thus we hear that the speaking being (the person) is an effect, not of biological forces (as in Freud), but of language, of structure.

3. Thus Freud is often criticized as being a crude biological determinist, and the early “dead ends” of Freud’s thought represented various failed attempts by his followers to develop this materialism. Lacan’s insight lies in perceiving and formalizing the structures which were merely implicit in Freud’s work.

By the same token, Lacan’s followers now face the choice of developing what was wrong in his thought (and you see this in some people who choose to adhere to Lacan’s proud cruelty, his obscurantism, or his ridiculous anti-essentialism and other incoherent metaphysical beliefs), or to mine for the insight in Lacan’s groundbreaking notion of psyche as determined by structure. Again, as I will argue later, I think that developing the concept of “structure” will first yield nature (or “necessity”), then grace.

4. Although Freud theorized about a social element to the unconscious—namely in his Totem and Taboo (and Moses and Monotheism)—his speculations were generally no more than the application of his interpretive method to a culture as if it were a single individual. Yet this approach is not invalid, only incomplete. Lacan rectifies their deficiencies through his application of concepts from of structural linguistics.

5. There is also Jung’s (literally) absurd notion of “synchronicity,” a real connection between phenomena which is nevertheless acausal. Besides being unscientific, this concept is basically flatly contradictory. If some phenomena express synchronicity, then it is synchronicity which has caused their relation—even if such causation is atemporal, metaphysical. The connection itself obviously depends on (is caused by) the existence of synchronicity within being. Again, this concept attempts to forge a path between science and religion while, characteristic to Jungian dialectical structure, failing to rise to the level of either.

6. At least, Lacan refers to it with a focus on its subjective psychological existence. The idea that truth does not exist apart from human minds is contradictory, as I hope to show later.

7. There can be mediation between the religious concept of God and the psychoanalytic concept of the big Other: on the traditional religious picture, God does indeed determine our fates, but not to the degree that He negates our human freedom. The Christian “sublation” of the pagan fate/destiny (the counterpart of which unfreedom is the evil freedom of the gods, their absolute cupidity) is that our destiny is freedom. We have the power to enact infinite good or evil, to place ourselves, by our actions, in heaven or hell. Our potential infinity is the shadow of God’s actual infinity, but they eventually meet (and have already met in Christ).

8. Again, assuming that the event in Bukowski’s novel is not consciously derived from the Symposium. Although, even if the resemblance were intentional, we would still need to account for the similarity, at least presuming that the episode in the novel has some affective weight and validity for us, the audience. In other words: if the event from the story and the event from the life of Socrates both “resonate” in the souls who encounter them, then what is the basis for this shared resonance?

9. This apparently controversial claim can be reconciled with the more traditional Thomistic/Aristotelian idea that what we are is what we will (“love is willing the good of the other”) through the Augustinian insight that we will depends on what we desire to will.

10. Ok, so he was actually German—but the point is that you think he’s a pollack until otherwise specified, with all the anti-currency that that carried in his time and place.

11. It may seem strange to describe the war-hero Socrates as a rejected outsider, but remember that for his fidelity to his simple love of truth, he was ultimately put to death by the state. This sentence, the nullification of one’s being, is the hardest which society is capable of laying down (well, maybe apart from damnatio memorae).

12. The position I am criticizing is not the same as that express in, for example, Pascal’s suggestion that the undecided would-be believer should perform the rituals before he or she truly believes. Such behavior in fact represents a budding volition towards faith, which is in fact the essential factor: “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” Moreover this advice pertained to a transitory phase at the beginning of the journey of faith, not to faith as a whole. Pascal offers the advice from the position of realized belief, knowing that transitory, volitional belief is, despite appearances, true belief, albeit merely implicit in intellect.

13. I address this objection, perhaps one of the strongest to Catholicism (ultimately reducible, in my mind, to a criticism of the traditional notion of truth), in this essay.

14. Arguably, these positions are the same, except that Lacan and Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor disagree as to whether or not Christ is, in fact, the ultimate truth.

15. There is the real which science renders up to us, but this is nigh-unintelligible. What keeps science from the status of truth, for Lacan, is its total disconnection from the psyche and its context. In other words: the propositions which science yields are factually accurate, but they are so far removed from our experience that we can do nothing with them. This incomprehensible feature of modern science is expressed in this poem by Richard Wilbur.

16. As Zizek draws out in his Hegelian anti-ontology.

17. Lacan designates all that which exists independent of conscious awareness or forms of symbolic categorization as “the real.” The real is “full,” which is to say that the natural “push” of language or even consciousness does not apply to it. In the real, everything simply is what it is. In the real, there can be no signification, which means that there is no gap between the sign and what it points to. Etc. The real is perhaps most psychologically present in extreme experiences which escape symbolization. Lacanians have typically used extreme trauma as a good example for the real, but I think that the real real would have to be the direct experience of God. Perhaps we could say, conversely, that the greatest trauma is not the encounter with lack, but the primordial encounter with substance which makes all subsequent experiences of lack so disturbing. It is this primal awareness of substance (of goodness of whatever kind, of being itself—I am not proposing ontologism) which underlies and causes the pain of loss. If we could become good Buddhists and really negate any idea of goodness within us, we would be indifferent to torture, death, dissatisfaction, etc.

18. In fact, I think that modern Lacanian psychoanalysis tends to neglect or regard with shame something which it finds to be rather arbitrary, the preponderance of references to the psychological representation of the instrument of animal fecundation throughout Freud and Lacan’s work. It seems arbitrary, contrary to feminism or at least embarrassing (and in fact, it is rather embarrassing, hence my own circumlocution and all our modesty). Yet this instrument would be the most salient from the perspective of an animal (if they could think of things: and indeed, fallen creatures can be likened, in a sense, to animals which to a great extent can only think about that they are animals), because it is the one part which, imbued with special volition, must operate according to its end in order for the species to continue. That it appears in the intellectual psyche out of all due proportion, without any reference to the continuation of the species—this is precisely a consequence of our fallen nature.

19. The case of the big other is perhaps more complicated than this simple identity. It seems to designate the human tendency to treat external beings (humanity as a collective, authority figures, or language and truth as such) as God. But it could also describe a tendency to treat God Himself as an idol, to treat him in a manner different from that which He deserves. Thus even worship of God can be described as imperfect, if we willfully remain at the level of slaves or mercenaries, and refuse to grow into true sons. I mean that some modes of worshipping God may only come about, despite their validity, due to a latent aversion from true closeness with Him.

20. Along the same lines, the “non-all,” the experience in the soul of something limitless—this would seem to correspond to some kind of religious experience. While it seems irresponsible or even disrespectful to identify it with true mysticism tout court, it seems at least tangent to it. The solution here, in my opinion, is a theological anthropology which draws from Lacan’s formulae of sexuation and re-integrates them with a traditional Augustinian account of sex roles and their natural symbology. In brief: the old view was that the soul was feminine in relation to God; conversely, it is not that spirituality is feminine so much as that femininity is spiritual (in the sense of serving to symbolize the human spirit’s relation to the absolute on the material plane).

21. What would make a satisfaction “bad” in this case (what would distinguish it from good fruition) is that it is not conscious. The hidden premise here is that the good satisfaction, the most realized satisfaction, is conscious, i.e: that certain configurations of human nature are more “beingful” than others. One “gamble” of this attempt at reconciliation between psychoanalysis and pre-modern metaphysics is that we should take the risk of acting as if it is true that desire, while disruptive in the short term, is ultimately the only thing that moves individuals and hence society to a more realized state of being and thereby produces the most satisfaction.

Lacan held that desire and satisfaction were absolute contraries, but I wonder if latent in Lacan there is not the idea (as expressed more in practice than in theory) that desire itself, if it is operative, is the most satisfying thing (the end-most thing, the primary goal). In other words: desire is satisfied in desire, just as satisfaction desires satisfaction. Perhaps the two things meet when each is most fully developed.

On the one hand, those who are most fulfilled are often most dissatisfied, precisely because their desire is so alive. What they are full-filled with is, paradoxically, desire. Every great moral reformer, thinker, artist, or saint is possessed by this burning love; that is precisely why (or that) they are so indefatigable, because they are the least satisfied (and yet perhaps simultaneously the least frustrated, the least stuck). Meanwhile the last men say “We have discovered happiness,”—and they blink. They have only achieved satisfaction by laying a stifling blanket over everything, by denying their own nature, the scale of their own desire (which is theirs by virtue of their humanity).

Admittedly jouissance/fruition is the weakest sketch of a translation/transformation of Lacanian concepts in this essay, but it might be that because or through that inaccuracy, more fundamental deficiencies can be pushed forward and transformed.

22. One way to describe perversion is that it is a state in which a person realizes that there is something missing in the other, but they don’t act-ually accept it. Rather than being repressed, denied at the level of intellect, the knowledge of loss is denied at the level of action.