Abstract
In this chapter, I will argue that 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 that establish 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 that includes the two following elements:
-
1.
The significance of the status of the Father (the symbolic Father)
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2.
Acknowledging the split condition of the human.
I will henceforth explore the relationship between these two elements, and how they consolidated as a result of the way Lacan located his discourse within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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Notes
- 1.
S1: 3.
- 2.
Borch-Jacobsen (1982: 57).
- 3.
Freud (1914: 74–75).
- 4.
S1: 114.
- 5.
S1: 113–115.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
S1: 116–117.
- 8.
S1: 117.
- 9.
S1: 116.
- 10.
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).
- 14.
S3: 39–43.
- 15.
S1: 117.
- 16.
S1: 107–128.
- 17.
Jung (1952: 151).
- 18.
S1: 115.
- 19.
S1: 113.
- 20.
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).
- 21.
S1: 119.
- 22.
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.
- 23.
Jung (1961: 162).
- 24.
E: 460–461.
- 25.
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.
- 26.
S7: 92–93.
- 27.
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.
- 28.
Jung (1961: 151).
- 29.
S7: 93.
- 30.
Freud (1901: 259).
- 31.
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.
- 34.
Like the motto that opens the Interpretation of Dreams (1900: ix), taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, Part 7.
- 35.
S1: 267.
- 36.
S11: 30.
- 37.
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.
- 39.
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.
- 42.
Lesson given on February 21, 1968 (S15).
- 43.
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.
- 45.
Published separately also in the Écrits.
- 46.
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.
- 47.
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).
- 49.
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.
- 51.
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.
- 55.
Storr (1973).
- 56.
See Jung (1938: 97–99).
- 57.
- 58.
Jung (1972).
- 59.
Altizer (1985: 63–66).
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Benyamini, I. (2023). Lacan and Jung (2): The Difference Between them and the Judeo-Christian Tradition. In: Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39969-5_6
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