AN APPROACH TO THE QUESTION OF GOD IN FREUD AND IN LACAN

BERCOVICH Miriam

This study is an attempt to settle some possible coordinates in reference to the difference outlined in relation to the idea of God which is present in Freud’s and in Lacan’s works. An approach to Freud’s God and to Lacan’s God that do not seem to be the same.

This writing arises from the reading of seminar 22, RSI, dictated by Lacan in the year 74-75. In the class of 12-17-74, Lacan tells us: "... To fix the things that we call ideas and that by no means are ideas, to fix the things there where they deserve to be fixed that is to say, in the logic ..." and he continues "... Freud does not believe in God, because he acts on his line ..."

From this paragraph on we can think about two questions, which are really going to be articulated. The place of the logic on the one hand, as that instance where the things that deserve to be fixed will be fixed, Lacan tells us. The logic as writing which will allow a transmission of what pours off as a nucleus of truth. It is in the logic that the knowledge which will become transmission pours off. The logic as writing which lodges the sediment of a truth, a truth which is discursive, which inhabits in the language and gets alive in the logic, because it is from there that it reproduces itself, the reproduction is one of the necessary conditions of what we define as alive, the reproduction is in our field the transmission. To fix the things in the logic is to ensure its transmission, it is to produce effects of sense, that is to say to touch the real, if we coincide with what Lacan tells us when he asserts that the proper of a sense is that it names something. To give God a place in the logic of psychoanalysis is to propitiate the return of God to its origin, the field of the Real, withdrawing the reference to the father in which the whole religiousness leans. The statement "the gods are of the real", brings forward the expression "God is unconscious", outlined in the Seminar of The Four Concepts. It is in these terms that he will talk about God. Lacan will refer to God in logical terms, not in religious ones. He wants to give God a place in the logic of psychoanalysis. He says about Freud that as he did not believe in God, this is why he finishes acting on his line. Freud considers himself atheistic, he also considers himself Jew. Freud’s atheism does not liberate him from God. Even though Freud’s atheism is a religious position. God exists-God does not exist is the same logical formulation, it leaves us trapped in a binomial without way out. The trap of the last words which pretends to totalize the sense.

For Lacan God ex – sists, this Heideggerian term which refers to the existence, but at the same time it is broken into fragments with a hyphen, a hyphen that we can also think of as a bar, with all the logic that it carries on. The etymology tells us that it comes from the particle ex, which means out of, and sistere, which means to support, support from outside. The concept of ex – sistence will be the organizer of all the logic of the knot. . In this sense the ex – sisting will be that which, staying in the outside, supports, that which for ex – sisting will make it consist of. Something is supported at the cost of a loss, loss that in turn must be able of being registered. The exclusion gives origin to the existence. It is the same logic which goes through Freud’s texts. The fundamental father in relation to the law, Moses to the Jewish people, the light to the shadow. The father of the horde must be excluded, the father of the unlimited jouissance so that the father of the law arrives. The conductor of the people of Israel must be left outside the promised land. Moses the founder of the Jewish people, must belong to the Egyptian people. Always an exclusion will be, as such, the condition of every possible consistence. Consistence which in turn carries in its bosom that loss, due to which it will be a perforated consistence, incomplete, knotted in the borromean logic.

For Lacan God ex – sits, in the sense of being that which remains excluded, an outward appearance that we can name extimacy, referring to the neologism used in the seminar of The Ethics in reference to Das Ding. Thus breaking with the geometry of Freud’s bag, geometry of the bag with its bottom, its exterior and interior which Lacan denounces as a complication in certain possible reading and deviated from the Freud whom he wants to return to. God is unconscious. God is the unconscious. In The Name of the Father resounds a whole religious tradition which refers to God. The Name of the Father, is no name, is mere unmentioned mark. All the Jewish tradition refers to God as the name knowing that it is radically withdrawn from. The name which can not be pronounced, there will be no word to coat the divine nature, nevertheless this function which is eluded when saying will be the genesis of every saying.

In the class of 3-11-75 Lacan says, making reference to the knot, that there is a way of tying together the three strings, what ties the knot is the name of the Father. "The name of the Father that I reduce to its most radical function which is to give a name to the objects, with all the consequences it bears, especially in the jouissance".

To give a name to the objects is to pass from the chaos to the cosmos with a rest not feasible to be eliminated that we write "a" and which lodges in every name considering that there is no signifier which signifies itself, knowing that every signifier refers to another signifier, meanwhile in the origin there is a name which excluded, turns into what is essential to the function of giving a name.

For Lacan God is repression itself, the urverdrangt, the mark of an original withdrawal, the expulsion of pure jouissance, a mark that will give place to every representation.

It is not easy to get rid of God, one can not repudiate God, simply, like that. It is not atheism what liberates us from the submission to God. To give him a place, for Lacan, is to fence his logic, to make writing, the only way of not to act on his line. (Lets remember the quotation at the beginning: Freud does not believe in God, that is why he acts on his line).

It looks as if Lacan thinks that Freud, as he does not believe in God ends up by devoting to Him in the version of the father which he formulates, that is to say as that unavoidable point of restraint of the subject. It is not atheism what liberates from God, at least that we consider with Lacan the proposal "God is unconscious", as the true form of atheism.

For Freud God is father. In the different forms and in the different times of the development of psychoanalysis Freud never abandoned the intimate relation of God with the idea of father. In his article "Moses and the monotheist religion" he displays this issue. Moses founder of the people of Israel brings, personifies, God’s word, he takes the Jewish people and proclaims them his beloved son. With the tremendous consequences that being the father’s beloved son bears, the fratricide hatred on the one hand, and the extreme submission in exchange for such a desired place of privilege. The history of the Jews, which is in part the history of their persecution and extermination, gives testimony of this.

God is father, sometimes an illusion of absolute shelter, others, threatening of absolute punishment. A God who pronounces what he wishes from his son: absolute loyalty to his law. A father who totally expert in what is symbolic, demands such a driving renunciation that it forbids every representation, every sensible idea closer or farther of what is coded in his law. God is also father, a dead father in what Lacan points out as the last myth of mankind. The father of the horde, a fundamental father, in fact, a father who is not even one, a hoarder of every possible jouissance. It will be a murder what makes him become a father, a law, an agreement between brothers and a driving renunciation. That is to say, in word. In Freud, God is father and is Law. He is also nostalgia and hopeless longing.

In Lacan the idea of father itself is full of holes. The Name of the Father will be that place Other, place of the word and meanwhile word, essentially pregnant of a lack. The God of Lacan considers as central, rescues vehemently what Freud underlines, even though without concluding, that it is there where what is essential to the idea of God takes place, that is to say, its impossibility of incarnation. For Lacan the question of God and of its logical formulation is centered in what is impossible to name which in turn must give place to every possible nomination.

In Freud, God it is paternal consistence, a consistence of the father, which has as a consequence in the clinic, Freud’s own question about the end of the analysis. A consistent father is a supposition of knowledge which does not break up. A supposition of knowledge which fights against the intent of breaking up. Supposition of knowledge that is fixed in the love for the father. To locate the knowledge and the love in the same point, transforms the father into a lane without way out for the subject, to whom only veneration or guilt is left.

In this point one must ask oneself: What is a father?, a question a thousand of times posed, whose answers never use it up, a multiplicity of answers which refer to, may be, that the same question carries on the figure of what is not able to be condensed. The question for the real takes us to the paradox, being the paradox the logical formulation which admits as a truth more than one answer, what does this want to mean but, that to touch something of the real admits a meaning which is not used up in any signified, even though it does refer to, a significant which enclosed, with a mark on, will not be, due to the same, anyone.

What is a father? No subject knows it, the originating abandonment in all its aspects, as abandonment of the human pup before survival, the defenselessness before the immersion on the Other of the language, impossibility of withdrawing oneself from the constitutive mark of the Urverdrangt. No subject knows what is a father, it is the own originating defenselessness, what will nourish this eternal reference to the father. Reference which nobody carries out beyond mythology.

Any subject is in the position of the son and yet, analyzed up to the end there is no possibility of being father, only the experience that it is an impossible place. Impossibility meanwhile such, that must be made different in the course of the treatment itself. Logical impossibility that when having access to the writing will already allow the own subject, "not to act on his line".

It may be due to this, perhaps, that the words "Father, don’t you see that I am in a feverish state?" always so shocking, so moving, make reference to this truth: the eternal feverish call to the father. A father who does not listen to, who does not see, who abandoned the place where the child lies dead, who in an adjacent room rests immerse in his own dreams, leaving the child with another one, an old man with white hair who yields to his dreams too. Paternal duplication which comprises two generations, that genealogy that refers to what Freud pointed out as constituent marks of a subject: at least two generations. F. Regnault, in his book "God is unconscious", relates the "Father, don’t you see that I am in a feverish state?" with the "Helí, Helí, lama sabactaní?", the words in Hebrew of the Crucified Christ: Lord, why have you abandoned me?

Lacan intends to make a separation between God and the father, just not "to act on his line", that is to say to introduce something different in the Freudian acting. He then states with a style that refers to Nietzsche’s formula, but not any more, God has died, only God is unconscious. In the separation between God and the father, Lacan intends definitively to return this lost God, who has withdrawn himself from his own origin, to the scope of the real: "the gods are of the real".

God is the unconscious meanwhile he is the mark of a loss, God ex – sists, existence which names the original exclusion, breaking definitively the logic of the internal and of the external, he will say extimacy in relation to Das Ding, where we can perceive intuitively there an advance of this development. He takes exquisitely from Freud’s writing "Moses and the monotheistic religion" a feature of what is impossible to represent, impossible to name and of the writing as possible bow.

"Not to act on his line", is to enclose, to border on, to sift his logic, is to make it writing, figure that without being itself revealed will offer all what is coded. Gap which is offered to all the increase of sense. Ex – sistence that will give place to every consistence.

In RSI Lacan speaks about the woman too, when she is being not totally signified by the phallus, when not answering totally to the law of the phallus, she is in a certain way more apt to relate herself with the unconscious. And he invites us to believe in her, once more as in Freud, it is the woman who indicates him a way out.

He invites to the belief, what does this mean, except that in relation to that which does not allow us to decipher absolutely, only to believe is left. Lacan believes in God in this sense. The relation of belief is outlined as the only possible relation with what opposes to being deciphered. Even though this does not prevent its writing, a writing that is supposed to give it a place in the structure, and with this the possibility of producing to know how to do.

Lacan tells us that Freud does not believe in God, that is why he acts on his line, reintroducing himself in an endless consecration to the father, as fundamental father, dead father, Oedipus’ father, father of the hysteria. Lacan believes in God, and paradoxically it is this same belief the one that liberates him from Him.

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e-mail: mirber@cvtci.com.ar

S. Freud, Moisés y la religión monoteísta.

J. Lacan, Seminario 22 RSI

N. Rabinovich, El Nombre del Padre.

F. Balmes, El nombre, la ley, la voz.

F. Regnault, Dios es inconciente.