The psychoanalytic view of religion in Freud and Lacan: A philosophical analysis

This dissertation is a philosophical analysis of Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalytic views of religion. Freud finds that the belief in God is directly linked to the constitutive role of the father in the formation of the psyche. While religious belief may be based on a delusional inflation of the function of the father, it survives the critiques because it serves useful purposes in the psychic economy. It gratifies the narcissistic wish for ultimate protection, and it functions as mediation for the guilt that is the side-effect of human aggression. Religion is a force that enables civilization, because it promotes the development of intellectuality.;Lacan accepts Freud's atheistic stance, and deepens the analysis. The principle of intellectuality that is expressed in the monotheistic prohibition against making an image of God, leads to the Enlightenment-project of the autonomy of reason, and to the total secularization of religious belief. In the beginning was the word, means, for Lacan, that there is no divine reality behind the signifier. Monotheism represents the discovery of the symbolic order. Lacan explains Freud's insight from Moses and Monotheism, that God is a pure signifier, with an epistemological principle borrowed from structuralism. The signifier determines the signified, and not vice versa. The signifier does not represent the real, but imposes an order. This principle translates into a theory of the subject that splits with the entry into language into a self-conscious ego and the unconscious. The loss of the real, the absence of the Other, or the absence of God, are the results of the introduction of the signifier. Religion emerges as a consequence of the signifier's possibility to signify itself, (as in the I am who I am from Exodus 3:14) and to signify absence as such. Lacan transforms Freud's atheism into the negative-dialectical psycho-theology of the subject that is created by the signifier vis-à-vis a real that is seen as intrinsically lost.