Abstract
Radical theology and psychoanalysis both share the characteristic of speaking indirectly. This chapter characterizes the divergent streams of radical theology along three broad trajectories: (1) the early variants expressing the “religionless Christianity” and the gospel of Christian atheism; (2) the deconstructive mode presenting God as an undeconstructible name for an Event; and (3) the psychoanalytic investigation of theology as a collection of symbols invested with meaning, which exist to curtail anxiety. This chapter covers the theological dimensions of repression, the unconscious, the big Other, and the “Lacanian registers”—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—before concluding with contemporary examples of psychoanalysis in radical theology.
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Notes
- 1.
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. W. Robson-Scott (Mansfield Centre: Martino, 2011), 95.
- 2.
Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book X, ed. J. Miller, and trans. A. Price (Malden: Polity, 2014), 69.
- 3.
This example of the mirror phase and the demand for the Other’s ratification is taken from Lacan (2014), 32.
- 4.
See esp. Freud (2011), ch. 6.
- 5.
Sigmund Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in The Freud Reader, ed. P. Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 429–436.
- 6.
Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime (New York: Fordham UP, 2007), 23.
- 7.
See discussion of these in my own introduction of God Is Unconscious (Eugene, Wipf, 2015).
- 8.
These three registers are not capitalized in Lacan’s work, though secondary literature often capitalizes Real. I capitalize all three only to clearly designate them as Lacan’s registers.
- 9.
Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, trans. A. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959), 3.
- 10.
Though it is often the case that symptoms indicate anxiety, it is not always the case. Freud cautions, “There are plenty of neuroses which exhibit no anxiety whatever. True conversion hysteria is one of these. Even in its most severe symptoms no admixture of anxiety is found. This fact alone ought to warn us against making too close a connection between anxiety and symptom-formation… But no one has as yet been able to say what it is that determines whether any given case shall take the form of a conversion hysteria or a phobia … to establish what determines the generating of anxiety in hysteria ” (Freud [1959], 35).
- 11.
Ibid., 57.
- 12.
See “The Theological Significance of Existentialism and Psychoanalysis,” in Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. R. Kimball (New York: Oxford UP, 1959).
- 13.
See Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, in Main Works/Hauptwerke 5: Writings on Religion/Religiöse Schriften, ed. R. Scharlemann (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988), 113–119.
- 14.
For further reading on his theory of symbolism, see Paul Tillich, “The Meaning and Justification of Religious Symbols” and “The Religious Symbol/Symbol and Knowledge,” in Main Works/Hauptwerke 4: Writings in the Philosophy of Religion/Religionsphilosophische Schriften, ed. J. Clayton (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1987).
- 15.
Freud’s description of cathexis evolves over the course of his career. Religion is usually interpreted as a result of sublimation or repression, but we must be careful in applying these categories too strictly, as my example risks doing. In a later description of cathexis, found in The Ego and the Id (where he developed the structural model of id, ego, and superego), he wrote: “From another point of view it may be said that this transformation of an erotic object-choice into an alteration of the ego is also a method by which the ego can obtain control over the id and deepen its relations with it—at the cost, it is true, of acquiescing to a large extent in the id’s experiences… The transformation of object-libido into narcissistic libido which thus takes place obviously implies an abandonment of sexual aims, a desexualization—a kind of sublimation, therefore. Indeed, the question arises, and deserves careful consideration, whether this is not the universal road to sublimation, whether all sublimation does not take place through the mediation of the ego, which begins by changing sexual object-libido into narcissistic libido and then, perhaps, goes on to give it another aim” (Freud [1989], 639).
- 16.
Freud discusses the fort-da game in several works, but see especially his “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Freud (1989), 594–626.
- 17.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. J. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), 45.
- 18.
“What we were waiting for, when all’s said and done, and which is the true substance of anxiety, is that which deceives not, that which is entirely free of doubt… Don’t let yourselves be taken in by appearances. Just because anxiety’s link to doubt, to hesitation, to the obsessional’s so-called ambivalent game, may strike you as clinically tangible, this doesn’t mean that they are the same thing. Anxiety is not doubt, anxiety is the cause of doubt” (Lacan [2014], 76).
- 19.
Ibid., 6: “It’s not simply, What does the Other want with me? but also a suspended questioning that directly concerns the ego, not How does He want me? but, What does He want concerning this place of the ego?”
- 20.
This example is inspired by Slavoj Žižek in How to Read Lacan (New York: Norton, 2006): “A fundamentalist does not believe, he knows it directly. Both liberal-skeptical cynics and fundamentalists share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe, in the proper sense of the term. What is unthinkable for them is the groundless decision that installs all authentic beliefs, a decision that cannot be based on a chain of reasonings, on positive knowledge” (116).
- 21.
Lacan (1981), 59.
- 22.
Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, ed. J. Miller, trans. S. Tomaselli (New York: Norton, 1991), 128.
- 23.
Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in Freud (1989).
- 24.
Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge: MIT P, 2003), 15.
- 25.
See ibid., 15–16.
- 26.
See ibid., 80–87.
- 27.
Ibid., 169–170: “Contrary to all appearances, this is what happens in psychoanalysis: the treatment is over when the patient accepts the nonexistence of the big Other. The ideal addressee of our speech, the ideal listener, is the psychoanalyst, the very opposite of the Master-figure that guarantees meaning; what happens at the end of the analysis, with the dissolution of transference—that is to say, the fall of the ‘subject supposed to know’—is that the patient accepts the absence of such a guarantee.”
- 28.
Crockett (2007), 11.
- 29.
Citing the case of “Little Hans,” Freud (1959, p. 32) writes, “But the affect of anxiety, which was the essence of the phobia, came, not from the process of repression, not from the libidinal cathexes of the repressed impulses, but from the repressing agency itself. The anxiety belonging to the animal phobias was an untransformed fear of castration. It was therefore a realistic fear, a fear of a danger which was actually impending or was judged to be a real one. It was anxiety which produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.”
- 30.
Crockett (2007), 95.
- 31.
Katharine Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging Christianity (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 1.
- 32.
DeLay (2015), xv.
- 33.
Jacques Lacan, The Triumph of Religion, trans. B. Fink (Malden: Polity, 2013), 64.
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DeLay, T. (2018). Psychoanalysis. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_52
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