The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

4 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic Orientation of Religious Experience

79 4 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and the Neurotic Orientation of Religious Experience David Metzger H ow is it possible to speak about religious experiences? Descriptions of religious institutions, rites, theological disputes (what we might call “religious culture”) are common enough. But when we try to speak about the experience of a religion , we find that, like many other so-called “experiences,” religion has something particular about it, something beyond our ability to identify differences and similarities within a range of behaviors. As Norman Malcolm (1989)—a former student of Wittgenstein’s—has remarked: If I were to learn what pain is from perceiving my own pain, then I should necessarily have learned that pain is something that exists only when I feel pain. For the pain that serves as 32582 Chap 4 4/18/00, 9:26 AM 79 80 David Metzger my paradigm of pain (i.e. my own) has the property of existing only when I feel it. That property is essential, not accidental; it is nonsense to suppose that the pain I feel could exist when I did not feel it. (p. 63) This suggests, in other words, that speaking about our “experience of some things” (pain, for example) may require that our experiences of these things (which we presume to be fundamentally subjective ) be an essential property of the “things” we are experiencing. However, if the thing experienced does not exist outside of a particular subject’s experience of it, the existence of some sort of pathology is assumed; it is thought that a subject cannot be both right (about the thing) and paranoid or hysteric or obsessive compulsive . Pathology is then assumed to be a summation of error, false starts, slips of the tongue, a way of speaking about someone’s unconscious identifications. But where does such an approach to pathology and epistemology leave us in the consideration of religious experience? As some analysts see it, it leaves us needing to get into analysis and to get out of religion. Simply put, if outside of the clinic, we can equate truth with existence (where were you on the night of the murder?), then there is no reason why we should view religious experience as anything other than error: religion is the curious presumption of a (first) cause or explanation that nobody needs. Other analysts and psychotherapists have argued that the “presumption of a (first) cause or explanation” is precisely what the analytic session constructs (Miller, 1993, p. 32). They see that religion and psychoanalysis provide the same service—at least, psychoanalysis and religion share an interest in the “why?” whereas legalistic and scientific discourses have begun to work more with the “what?” Taking this argument more directly into the sphere of analytic experience, we might equate “the what of science and law” to “civilization” and the “why of analysis and religion” to “its discontents .” From this standpoint, religion and analysis are both techniques—not sciences or social systems—but ways to help people shoulder the burden of their social identities (Friedlander, 1997, p. 152; Fromm, 1960, p. 86). That is, both religion and psychoanalysis work with individuals who presume to know “what” has happened to them (there has been a loss of something) but they are not so certain about why “the what” has happened. At this point, I think we have chased down the logic behind psychoanalytic accounts of religious experiences as pathologies or as “universal neuroses”: 32582 Chap 4 4/18/00, 9:26 AM 80 Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience 81 1. Those who experience “loss” (what has happened to me?) often ask “why?” 2. Both religious practice and neurotic behavior attempt to ask and answer “the why” without the unconscious. So, where does the why come from? And why should it be of such a concern? In “Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxieties,” Freud (1926/1954) relates the why to birth trauma. He suggests that people who are traumatized (and we are all traumatized by birth) continue to respond as one would in the presence of danger even when the danger is no longer present (p. 134). A Lacanian would see that Freud’s statement identifies two facts of human existence: 1. Human beings must learn how to live in a world whose demands cannot be met by eating, defecating, reproducing, hearing, seeing, and making noise; 2. Human beings must learn how to eat, piss, shit, fuck, listen, and...