• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Theology, Psychoanalysis and TraumaMarcus PoundSCM Press (2008)VERITAS Book Series174 + ref & ix pp, $28.75 (paperback)
Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma
is the first in what I hope will be many venturesinto dialogue between Radical Orthodoxy and contemporary psychoanalysis. Pound weavesLacanian theory together with the insights of Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard in an attemptto “perform a Lacanian intervention on Lacan by way of Kierkegaard with a view to teasing outthe hidden presuppositions, the underlying premises, and hence Lacan’s disavowed truth, therebymaking the Lacanian aware through Kierkegaard that Lacanian psychoanalysis is profoundlytheological” (p. 18). To mediate these two giants of philosophy, Pound uses the psychologicalconcept of trauma. He argues that trauma is both the “basis of the psychoanalytic cure” and “a powerful metaphor for what takes place in the Eucharist”. In psychoanalysis, the analyst andanalyzand - through anamnesis, abreaction and symbolization, use trauma in order to be cured;and in the Mass, the priest, acting
in persona Christi
, “invites the absolute other into our everyday proceedings, taking what is most mundane – bread – and raising it to the level of theabsolute… this radical breach or 
caesura
destabilizes the ground of experience” (p. 22). Bylinking these two seemingly disparate events, Pound argues that the Mass should be seen as aform of social-psychoanalysis that completes the original revolutionary Freudian vision.The author graciously spends the beginning of chapters of the book introducing thereader to the Lacanian and Kierkegaardian concepts he will use. These summaries are among the best I have seen on these difficult authors and demonstrate Pound’s academic credentials.Throughout the rest of the book, he tightly weaves the Dane and the Frenchman into whathe calls a “repetition of Lacan through Kierkegaard.” Pound first contends that Kierkegaard
 
anticipates Lacan’s postmodern “linguistic turn” of psychoanalysis in his pseudonymousauthorship, particularly in his incomplete and posthumously published work,
 JohannesClimacus
. However, Kierkegaard supplements the “resignation to anxiety and lack” of  postmodern psychoanalysis with an opportunity for faith and transcendence (p. 26).Pound next overlays the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real withKierkegaard’s “stages along life’s way” – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Through areading of Kierkegaard’s
 Fear and Trembling 
and a treatment of Lacan’s understanding of 
 Antigone
, he explains how Kierkegaard’s religious transformation is both a purgation and aLacanian assumption of desire.Pound’s next argument advances his case by casting the analyst as a participant in “God’screative work” by establishing “a realm of created independence to help the subject engage in thesubjective appropriation of truth” (p. 27). He studies Kierkegaard’s understanding of time andeternity in relation to Lacan’s emphasis on the importance for psychoanalysis of the futureanterior tense – the individual redefines his/her past based on present or future actions, andconcludes that God’s traumatic intervention in history, through the incarnation, is the archetypefor the psychoanalytic intervention. Furthermore, it is only as a result of the “qualitative shift inconsciousness” with regard to time, occasioned by the Incarnation that the analytic endeavor is possible at all (p. 153).This penultimate step in Pound’s argument enables him complete his work by framing theMass as the primary vehicle of God’s intervention in time and therefore as a form of social psychoanalysis. If the incarnation is the paradigmatic analytic intervention and the Eucharist isChrist, the Holy Mass can therefore also be seen as a analytic intervention that invites the participant into an assumption of desire which offers the individual an entirely new perspective
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...