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Lacan, Language and the self: A postmodern vision of spirituality Silas M.

Morgan Abstract Tracing the structural function of language in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, in hopes of mining Jacques Lacans description of the Symbolic order as the primary location of religious experience and spiritual practices, I suggest that Lacans articulation of the unconscious as structured like language elucidates the way that language works in the formation and development of the spiritual subjectivity of the self. The desires and drives of the human subject are formed primarily by the unconscious relation of the subject through the Other. Applying this to the spiritual practice of liturgy, I argue for a psychoanalytic reading of liturgy as sublimation, while discussing spirituality as reenactment of fantastic desires for the Real through the Other the unconscious language foreign to the spiritual subject. This vision uses the Lacanian emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father as the intruding outside figure of language that interrupts the relation between the subject and God and dissolves the self-deceiving image of self found in the infantile Imaginary order. The obstacles that the subject experiences in spiritual relations have primarily to do with an imprisonment by a language that is not ours the foreign drives and desires of the unconscious Other. Liturgy as a radical gesture of retrieval seeks to overcome the illusion of fragmentary surfaces and deceiving images in the narcissistic imagination of the spiritual self. Introduction In this paper, I give attention to the way that Jacque Lacans turn to language in psychoanalysis transforms the notion of the spiritual self as operating primarily in a symbolic order. The characterization of the spiritual relation as one that happens inside of, and is construed by, language prompts theologians and psychoanalysts alike to think about the spiritual dimensions of liturgy as a spiritual form of sublimation. What does Lacans interest in structuring the relational dynamics of the self by language mean for a postmodern spirituality that takes liturgy seriously? Examining the interdisciplinary space between psychoanalytic insights in the development of the self and a theological understanding of spirituality as a journey that strives after God/the Sacred, I argue that a postmodern psychoanalytic reading of liturgy binds together the symbolic (linguistic) order and the spiritual life. Lacan emerges as a resource that disturbs the contemporary discourse on religious experience that renders God as the ultimate and absolute other, leading to a theological account of the relation between language and spirituality that captures Christian intuitions about the human desire to know and be known by God. Lacan The dynamic of interdisciplinary relations between psychoanalysis and spirituality doesnt necessarily seem the most promising. S. Freuds attitude regarding spirituality represents the modern resistance against religion as a neurotic repression a defensive opposition to reality in order to maintain an infantile symbiotic dependence on maternal or paternal aspects and principles. Spirituality is then understood, as it is in many forms of the social sciences, as a

repressive defense against sexual and/or other aggressive drives and desires, rather than part and parcel of the selfs subjectivity. Yet, the value of psychoanalysis for spirituality is the formers ability to disorient the latter; psychoanalysis utilizes the belief that an interpretative moment can alter dysfunction and lead to at least partial satisfaction. (Crockett 2004, 11, 21) Classical psychoanalysis is primarily interested in discourse around the unconscious; Lacans unique contribution to psychoanalytic theory centers on his two major, famous axioms on the subject of the unconscious, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other (Lacan 1966, 16) and the unconscious is structured like a language. (Lacan [1955-56] 1993, 167) The unconscious provides the effect of speech in the other, but this speech is foreign it belongs to the Other; this becomes accessible when given words by the subject as the product of psychoanalytic therapy. Why is the unconscious helpful to the relationship between psychoanalytic discourses and spirituality? Lacan attempts to locate Freuds interest in psychic structure inside the language of the analysands unconscious, pointing to the alterity of language to the self. (Lacan [1964] 1978, 131) For Lacan, psychoanalysis is the attempt to identify and interrogate this foreign discourse and its source by making sense of the system of signification going on inside the analysands unconscious, particularly as it takes place in analytic therapy. (Lacan [1964] 1978, 149) Lacan dismisses the idea that God is the foreign source of the unconscious; in true Freudian fashion, he renders God to be a fantasy and spirituality, the result of mythic illusion. (Lacan 1973, 32-22) The figure of God is synonymous with the trace of the Father that not only disrupts, but forms our dramatic knowledge and experience of the world, and becomes linked and formed in the economy of gratification, emptiness, loss and life; God then is dismissed as a product of powerful social myths that construct our own private psychotic desires for the symbolic Father, even as we know it is not actual. (Lacan 1986, 209) At first glance, it appears Lacan is simply repeating Freudian precepts for atheism: God is dead. Rather, Lacan offers instead a different formula for atheism: God is unconscious. (Lacan 1973, 58) The progression of Lacanian logic unfolds: the unconscious is structured like a language. And like language, God escapes us, transverses us through transcendence, but appears dramatically in dreams and desires that form unconscious speech. (Jacobs and Capps 1997, 227) For Lacan, God is not dead, but rather is the disruptive, but primordial signifier who creates the linguistic space that effectively breaks apart the Real into language, which as the system of signification becomes the subjects discourse and the substantive structure of the unconscious. (Lacan [1964] 1978, 188) Following the Freudian concern for infancy, Lacans imaginary order represents an infantile prelinguistic state where the infant perceives itself in complete unity, where the ego and unconscious are merged by the intimate relation between the bodies of infant and the mother. (Wyschogrod and Crownfield 1989, 81) The figure of the mother provides satisfaction, pleasure, fulfillment and well being that eliminates pain and protects against loss. In the moment of selfrepresentation mediated to the infant through the reflection in the mirror, the child becomes irrevocably narcissistic through its self-perception of its (falsely) constructed identity in the mirror image. The baby makes an imaginary and delusional identification with the image of the mirror, resulting in an erred distortion, and a symbolic miscommunication. (Gallop 1985, 46) The mirror images fail to capture the unconscious that houses the drives and desires that work to fragment the childs self. Namely the mirror lies; it provides for the child an illusionary fiction, a fantasy. The subjects ego is formed by this amalgamation of distorted mirror images, resulting in the alienation of subjectivity that leads to the child becoming an other to itself, identifying

instead with the desire felt by the maternal body. (Wyschogrod and Crownfield 1989, 28) Locating the self-image in the Others desire for the child, it succeeds in deepening the deception of unity that only implodes via the alienating fleetingness of signification. (Lacan 1977: 1-7) The advent of symbolic language commences a dynamic of alienation and separation that gives rise to the being of the self and the formation of the subjects relation to the Other. (Fink 1995, 49) Lacan uses the symbolic order as the way to demonstrate how symbolic relations render, order and organize social, political and religious life. Language interrupts the illusionary fiction of imaginary images and surfaces, and complicates the fantasy of completeness and perfection through the display of gaps in signs, and the inexplicable void that exists in language: the lack of the Real. (Lacan [1964] 1978, 25) The work of language is to generate and sustain this imaginary, yet inchoate signifier; while continuing the cynical Freudian concern that the substance of these images are only fantasy, Lacan tries to uncover the figure that exists in between the gaps of the human persons lived experience with God. (Fink 1995, 57) The subjects unconscious is fractured by the lack of consistency and coherence that characterizes the persons lived experience in the world. This results in an imbedded code of fractured signs that serves as a disjunctive force that shape a persons (religious) optics. (Crockett 2007, 57) The subject comes to realize through the process of signification that it is bound to the void created by language, this void being namely the desire of the Other for the subject. (Lacan 1977; 312) Lacans 1955-56 seminar, the Psychoses introduces the Name of the Father, a symbolic function and metaphor that mediates language to the subject. Introducing the subject to the chain of signifiers that is the symbolic order, it negates the imaginary fantasy of the child through the Oedipal prohibition. (Lacan [1955-56] 1993) Lacan switches between le nom du pre, and le non du pre to emphasis the way this moniker as paternal metaphor possesses both legislative and prohibitive function; it gives the subject a name while constituting its desires and positioning inside the Symbolic order. For Lacan, the Name of the Father presents the paternal function; it is the name of symbolic figures that intrude into the child/mother dyad writ large metaphorically. (Lacan 1956-57) It represents the wider social network that inserts the subject into a world obstructed and confused by symbolic meaning; but it also is that primordial signifier upon which all signification depends. And so it interrupts not to occlude, but rather to institute and name the subject. The subject struggles against this intrusion, clinging to the illusionary fantasy of narcissistic self-idealism. (Fink 1995, 12, 57) For Lacan, the subjects religious experience is symbolic (linguistically significant) of a hidden reality that is outside objectification, a veiled truth that is mediated to the subject via the desire of the Other, namely the discourse of the unconscious, which for Lacan, is this Others speech. The unconscious conditions the subjects experience of the Real through the symbolic. The name of the Father is the symbolic force that cancels out the real and neutralizes the Others desire; while language works to protect the child for its own narcissist idealism, the name of the Father activates the incursion of the Others desire, resulting in the split and divided subject. (Crockett 2007, 57) The origin (the real) of the subject is unavailable as it is caught behind the imaginary and symbolic. (Sarup 1992, 104) It is here that spirituality and Lacanian psychoanalysis converge: both try to make sense of the selfs experience of traversing between the imaginary and symbolic. While spirituality, operating

with an awareness of its provisionality and indirection, provides substance to the gaps and fragments of the religious struggle, psychoanalytic science acknowledges that there exists a hidden field and dimension of experiences and happenings that belong to an otherness of reality, a foreign discourse that while related to us, always escapes our knowledge. Lacans radical relocation of fundamental human problems, which are, for him, rooted in an analysis of desire (Wyschogrod and Crownfield 1989, 3), namely the desire of an Other, uttered through the subjects unconscious (which is a foreign discourse) has sincere implications on the subjects relation to God, primarily because Lacan places ethical importance on breaking the narcissistic mirror, in order to reach the symbolic the truth. Spiritual desire to know and love God seeks to discover the truth about God, and yet the impossibility of this identity is hidden behind the systems of deferral and absence. Quoting Lacan: the reality of the unconscious is not an ambiguity of acts, future knowledge that is already known not to be known, but lacuna, cut, rupture inscribed in a certain lack. (Lacan [1964] 1993, 158) This lack is the desire in the other that which the subject self identifies. This lack produces the desire in the subject of the other it is namely a drive to know oneself. Arguably, this is spirituality the desire to know God or the Sacred, but to also know oneself fully and completely. Liturgy The application to a Christian spirituality of liturgy should be clear at this juncture; liturgy is language; it is mediation of a hidden reality represented through symbolic gestures of theological and historical significance. It exists as a coded pattern of rhythmic signs that reflect the grammar of the faith - the story of Christian imagination about creation, redemption and the future. Its reflects back to the gathered Christian community, offering an image of itself before God wrapped in covenantal love that transcends its misdirection and error. The name of the Father interrupts liturgical language, sacramental patterns and doxological codes in order to dismantle the mirrored world of imaginary self-projection. This interrupts the participants veiled and fantastical vision of the selfs imaginary relation to the world and instead offers through its name, a law that helps give speech to what was before ineffable: namely desire. This is no longer a pathologically delusional desire built on psychotic fantasy, but rather the truth - unmasterable, indeterminate and wordless as it may be. This opens up the creative space to think about spiritual desire differently. Desire seeks ultimate satisfaction as the elimination of need as need. Once it is given linguistic structure, desire experiences detours and is undone by vicissitudes that represent deviations from immediate satisfaction (Lacan [1964] 1978, 165). Does language mediate every drive in such a way that prevents speaking of satisfaction, but rather only detours? Christian spirituality speaks of the radical ways contradictory forces on the human person disrupt the spiritual relation to God and thus subterfuge the most sincere of relational intentions. In Lacanian perspective, to understand liturgy (and also, sacramentality and prayer) as linguistic systems is to be left with a clearly limited and fragmented medium with unexplainable gaps and novel innovations that exist in between the inter(textual) space of signifier and signifier. If the spiritual drive is to be considered part of the unconscious desire for an experience of something extra-linguistic that is beyond-thereal, psychoanalytic theory challenges this notion based on the contention that we cant speak about drives that experience satisfaction due to linguistic detours that mediate and restrict fulfillment. Satisfaction of the spiritual drive to know and love God will not be fulfilled, but

rather only frustrated by the disruptive nature of language. Insofar as liturgy is understood be a central vehicle for the humans relation to God or the Sacred, liturgy becomes either problematized as a symbolic system that perpetuates narcissistic fantasy through sublimation or it functions as the paternal metaphor that breaks into the subjects spiritual desire, interrupting the false illusionary images of erred deception. The first option: to think psychoanalytically about spirituality in a Lacanian perspective is to address liturgy as sublimation. Sublimation is a vicissitude; as a defensive mechanism, it accomplishes only partial fulfillment of drives while pointing to the impossibility of complete satisfaction. Understanding the spiritual function of liturgy as a form of sublimation better explains the dynamics of spiritual desire. Spiritual desire takes the form of psychic repetitions that channel complex desires for life, happiness, and peace; it also becomes an avenue in which to express the human desire to transcend oneself. In this way, spirituality is understood as a productive form of repression. It channels the complex ways analysands manage experiences that threaten a subjects well being or health. (Crockett 2007) The indeterminacy of the foreign Other whose discourse is located in the subjects unconscious is unbearable for the worshipper. The rector uses the liturgy to redirect the unconscious to better address the discourse that is foreign to the subject and yet intimately and radical present inside her. Liturgy understood as sublimation serves as a redirecting correction to the primary desire to love and know God. It provides what psychoanalytic theory cannot: a concrete, transformative connection to a narrative matrix that gives meaning to the cacophony of the human persons experience. (Jones 1991) The second option: the obstacles that the subject experiences in spiritual relations have primarily to do with an imprisonment by a language that is not its own the foreign drives and desires of the unconscious Other. Liturgy works as a form of le nom du pre - a radical gesture of retrieval that seeks to overcome the illusion of fragmentary surfaces and deceiving images in the narcissistic imagination of the spiritual self by refusing to ignore the split subject or the fantastic clinging to the Others desire. A psychoanalytic reading of liturgy binds together the symbolic (linguistic) order and the spiritual life in such as way that fantasy gets crossed over or transversed. Lacan disturbs the contemporary discourse on religious experience that renders God as the ultimate and absolute other, instead creating space in which to understand the relation between language and spirituality that captures the spiritual desire to know and be known by God. Namely this relation is an interpersonal struggle; a detoured and frustrated dynamic that tries to escape the proclivity towards narcissistic self idealism. Yet, it is the Name of the Father that interrupts this dynamic, forcing a split between the subject and the objects of her spiritual comfort (Lacan 1955 [1993). The fantastic clinging to the Others desire for us ignores division in favor of a deception that only succeeds in fooling the subject into believing that she is positioned as the others desire the imagined mirror image. It tries to resurrect what was before the symbolic: the Eden-like illusion of wholeness, completeness and well being that only exists the subjects fantasy.

A Psychoanalytic Vision of Postmodern Spirituality

How can psychoanalytic science help inform a postmodern spirituality? The return to Freudian unconscious offered by Lacans linguistic framing of psychoanalytic theory shapes the contours of spirituality that is namely the desire for God. Lacanian psychoanalysis interrogates the unconscious as a language, traversing its repressive gaps, fragmentary surfaces and pathological images in search for a text - a discourse that is the Other. It is my belief that Lacan gives us a glimpse of the language of postmodern spirituality by helping us understand liturgy as an attempt to narrate the subject out of fantasy by retelling a delusional story that has been overtaken by the madness of religion. The adventure of a postmodern spirituality recognizes that any object of religious longing is the Impossible: the real that was before the symbolic. To be spiritual is to be caught in an internal deception of language that promises restlessness while offering only the chance to be on the Way towards the Something that captivates our imagination but disappears in the whispers of our hearts uneven missteps. A Lacanian spirituality pursues the beyond-the-real of transcendence into the reality of the Other that is eternally disrupted by linguistic sublimation. It is this disturbing space that interrupts our fantasies and exposes our spiritual subjectivities to the truth that is eerily haunting our spiritual desires are mediated to us by symbols, namely liturgical language. Lacanian emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father is the intruding outside figure of language that interrupts the relation between the subject and God, dissolving the self-deceiving image of self, found in the infantile Imaginary order. The obstacles that the subject experiences in spiritual relations have primarily to do with an imprisonment by a language that is not ours the foreign drives and desires of the unconscious Other. Liturgy as a radical gesture of retrieval seeks to overcome the illusion of fragmentary surfaces and deceiving images in the narcissistic imagination of the spiritual self, offering instead a chastened hope of truth, trapped somewhere in the whispers of the yet unspoken.

Reference List

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Jacobs, Janet Liebman, and Donald Capps. 1997. Religion, society, and psychoanalysis: readings in contemporary theory. Boulder, Colo: Westview Press. Jones, James William. 1991. Contemporary psychoanalysis and religion: transference and transcendence. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1966. crits. Paris: Seuil Lacan, Jacques, and Anthony Wilden. 1973. The language of the self: the function of language in psychoanalysis. Baltimore [u.a.]: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. 1994. La Relation d'objet: 1956-1957. Champ freudien. Paris: Editions du Seuil Lacan, Jacques, Jacques-Alain Miller, and Russell Grigg. 1993. The psychoses. London: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. crits: a selection. New York: Norton. Lacan, Jacques. 1978. The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis. New York: Norton. Sarup, Madan. 1992. Jacques Lacan. Modern cultural theorists. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wyschogrod, Edith, David Crownfield, and Carl A. Raschke. 1989. Lacan and theological discourse. SUNY series in philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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