Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Inquiries into Religious Subjectivity

My paper explores how modern philosophy of religion and psychoanalytic theory interact on the question of what I call religious subjectivity. This is a theme that draws from Freud, and remains consistent with his insights and theories, while also seeking to go beyond Freud's work in some key respects by drawing on a variety of post-Freudian theorists from France. Generally, I will use the concept of religious subjectivity as an encompassing rubric to characterize personality transformations involving enhanced capacity for critical self-reflection, ethical awareness, and other-directedness. My use of the term subject, and also the more dynamic designation subjectivity, is derived from Jacques Lacan's revised psychoanalytic topographic model, which has had a broad influence among contemporary theorists in a variety of fields. This model has been appropriated in differing ways by theorists such as Foucault and Kristeva, and also parallels Paul Ricoeur's endeavors to conceptualize a progressive, transformative model of the personality in psychoanalytic terms.

Lacan invoked the concept of le sujet to thematize the overall psycho-dynamics of the Freudian topography in a way that retained the fissured and conflicting, as well as the interactive and inter-personal features of Freud's model. At the same time, Lacan sought to articulate an over-arching reference point for personal transformation and development that is never directly articulated in Freud's work. Lacan's subject expresses an understanding of the person that incorporates the drives or id (Lacan's real), the super-ego as well as the interpersonal, linguistic, and cultural influences constitutive thereof (Lacan's symbolic), as well as the Freudian ego, of which Lacan strongly emphasizes the narcissistic components under the heading of the imaginary, while generally downplaying the reality-testing functions.