Religion und Psychoanalyse in der Sichtweise Jacques Lacans: Eine Diskussionsskizze für den „religiösen Diskurs“ heute

Since Freud’s understanding of the unconscious the classical theory of truth as correspondence between thought and reality has undergone several changes. Through his linguistic structuralism Lacan goes a step further, where “psychoanalytical discourse”, contrary to the various forms of the “master’s discourse”, does not presuppose or depend on any prior knowledge for its search for truth. Thus, the subject is freed from life-world processes in which it is “called upon” to fixate desire and jouissance on imaginary objects. Insofar as the reference to radical otherness aims at saying, through the mediation of the symbolic dimension of language, something that escapes everything that can be said, such unreachable locus of truth can also be thought of as the ex-isting “God”. When combined with a critical recourse to the radical phenomenology of life, this approach enables to situate religio prior to individually or socially fantasized images. Furthermore, it allows for the possibility of an originary “religious discourse” contrasting with science and ideology in the contemporary context of (post-)postmodernity.