Jack Mitchell

4/19/17

REL 490

After the Death of Religion:

the Case for a Psychoanalytic Approach in 21st-Century Religious Studies

When psychoanalysis is invoked in the context of religion or religious studies, what

usually comes to mind are cases wherein a scholar has utilized psychoanalytic principles to

explain a particular religious idea or belief. Famous cases of such a methodology range from

Freuds association of the Christian God with the patriarchal father to Paul Courtwrights

controversial argument that the story of Ganesha is an instance of Oedipal angst and phallic

symbolism.1 These methods of interpretation have been met with harsh criticism by both the

academy and religious practitioners themselves, and perhaps rightfully so; there are numerous

problems with the use of a universal narrative to interpret a culture other than ones own. What

may be the most troubling about this form of interpretation is it does away with perhaps the most

important component of psychoanalysis itself: that being the face-to-face interaction of the

analyst and the analysand. In many ways, it is absurd to attempt to understand an aspect of a

particular culture without situating oneself among participants of said culture, where the

utterances and desires of the individuals, in this case religious, creating these cultural aspects are

laid bare. In this case, I propose that despite its problematic past, there is still a place where

psychoanalysis may be useful, if not essential, in the religious studies discipline: the domain of
1 Shankur Vedantam, Wrath Over a Hindu God, the Washington Post, April 10th, 2004, accessed
4/23/17. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/04/10/wrath-over-a-hindu-
god/17ac5b88-7d9d-4a3e-ad41-144f1b1a2e3b/?utm_term=.05f517d58193
ethnography and fieldwork. I aim to demonstrate this by first summarizing the current view on

the term religion itself, explaining how this state of affairs in religious studies is compatible

with the psychoanalytic concepts of the Symbolic and the signifier, and relating these concepts to

an ethnographic approach based on desire,.

In a certain sense, one could say that the academic study of religion effectively killed the

very thing which it sought to uncover. At its outset, comparative religion, as it was called at the

time, was based upon at least one central notion: there are aspects of the worlds various cultures

which can be uniquely identified as religious, which necessarily implies that there exist essential

or objective traits to certain kinds of behavior or beliefs which are universally present in these

religious aspects across cultures.2 Recent strides in religious studies theory have problematized

this approach, and have rendered the search for the elements of an objective category of

religion at best futile, and at worst an implicitly politicized act. In the very articulation of

religion, as a generic category, a division has occurred between whatever fundamental content

this term sought to describe and the inseparable connection between religion and the historical

context in which religion as a category arose. In his text Studying Religion, McCutcheon aims

to show that, as with any other system of classification, religion has a history tied to a number

of political and economic factors, and, in the era of its inception (which is to say the historical

moment wherein European colonialists came into contact with radically Otherized indigenous

societies), was primarily created as a way to provide colonial forces, as Masuzawa helps

demonstrate, a.. categorical framework by virtue of which they could hope to explain the

characteristic features of a given non-European society.3 The best way for us to understand this

claim is perhaps to look into two of the most popular ways in which scholars have attempted to

2 Russell McCutcheon, Studying Religion (New York: Routledge, 2007), 16.

provide a universal definition of religion, namely the methods of functionalism and of

essentialism, and what insights about religion itself are revealed to us through the critique of

these devices. McCutcheon defines essentialism as [a] definition that maintains that

membership within a class or group is based on possessing a finite list of characteristics or

traits.4 In other words, the essentialist of religion is convinced that, across all instances of

human behavior referred to as religious, there are a concrete set of characteristics which are

omnipresent in all of said behaviors. A simple example of this would be Clifford Geertzs

definition of religion, which asserts that a cultural pattern may be understood as particularly

religious when specific symbols are culturally understood to embody and reinforce a certain

worldview and personal disposition.5 Functionalism, in a sense, reverses the project of

essentialism. For the functionalist, a religion is characterized instead by its external products and

effects, rather than any part of its internal being. As McCutcheon states, functionalism claims

things are defined by what they do and can be studied in terms of the purposes that they serve or

the needs they fulfill.6 A case of functionalism quite relative to our project here would be

Freuds famous notion that [religious] ideas protect humankind in two directions- against the

dangers of nature, and against the injuries originating from within human society itself.7 For

3 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism was Preserved
in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 18.

4 Ibid, 90.

5 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

6 McCutcheon, Studying Religion, 93.

7 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in The Study of Religion: a Reader ed. John Harding and
Hillary Rodrigues (New York: Routledge, 2014), 128.
Freud, religion was a thing which, in all its manifestations, served to protect individuals from

fear via the means of a kind of false consciousness, a prime example of a functionalist approach

to religion. As far as the field of religious studies is concerned, there is a fundamental issue with

both of these methods: in both functionalism and essentialism, the ontological stability of the

religious itself remains unquestioned. As pointed out by Jonathan Z. Smith, where both

essentialism and functionalism failed in religious studies was their refusal to historicize the

category of religion, and insist that the truth of it was to be found outside rather than inside the

culture which created it.8 The current predicament of religious studies, in this case, is perhaps

best articulated by Smith in his statement that [religion] is a category imposed from the outside

on some aspect of native culture.9

One may be asking at this point how a summary of definitional methods is relevant to a

conversation about psychoanalysis and religious studies. My point here is that it is crucial to

recognize that, within religious studies, what we are fundamentally observing is sociocultural

activity which has, most often somewhat arbitrarily, been categorized as religious by an

outside observer. If this position is taken into account alongside the imperative to religious

studies provided to us by Robert Orsi, that being the notion that religious studies is a moral

discipline, in its commitment to examining the variety of human experience and to making

contact across boundaries- cultural, psychological, spiritual, existential,10 then my claim is that

8 Jonathan Z. Smith, Religion, Religions, Religious, in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark
C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269.

9 Ibid.

10 Robert Orsi, Snakes Alive, in Women, Gender, Religion: A Reader, ed. Elizabeth Castelli and
Rosamond Rodman (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 115.
in religious studies pursuit to understand the Other, psychoanalysis is an indispensable tool for

the scholar. This notion is predicated off of one central element which is present in the vast

majority of phenomena traditionally categorized as religious: language. As long as we are

interacting with speaking subjects, psychoanalysis will remain relevant to the study of religion.

Of course, this is not to say that Im providing an essential definition of what religion is or must

have in order to be religious, my proposal here is much more modest: language is present in

nearly all of human social phenomena, religious or otherwise. In this case, it would be useful for

any study of religion to consider the implementation of systems of thought which directly

confront this uniquely human behavior. I claim that psychoanalysis, in this exact sense, has

immense potential in the field of religious studies, specifically, as will we see later, in the realm

of ethnography.

Viewing religion as general cultural activity necessarily causes us to provide a particular

understanding of what is meant by culture. In order to understand the psychoanalytic position

here, we will momentarily need to divert away from religion in order to understand some key

tenants of psychoanalytic theory. In psychoanalysis, culture, as it is commonly understood,

takes on a new title: the Symbolic. The Symbolic is characterized, in short, as the realm of

language and the Law, which is itself a linguistic function.11 A way for us to conceive of this is to

imagine the Symbolic as the rules of the social game12 which the individual is introduced to in

the internalization of their cultures language (most often via their parents). It is essential that the

Symbolic isnt understood as just the customs, taboos, or traditions of a particular culture, devoid

11 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a selection (New York: Norton, 1977), 66.

12 Lenart Kodre, Psychoanalysis for Anthropology: an Introduction to Lacanian Anthropology,

Anthropological Notebooks 17 (2011): 59, accessed 4/10/17.
of the participation of actual, individual subjects. Rather, the individual herself is a product of

the Symbolic. This point is put well by the anthropologist Lenart Kodres statement that the

Lacanian [in reference to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan] Symbolic is fully integrated with the

subject and vice versa; furthermore, the most intimate human states and the very human

subjectivity itself are effects or products of the shift of the subjects position in the inter-

subjective network [of language].13 How this should be interpreted is that for the individual,

their own sense of personality is not something inherent to them which is subjected to the

impersonal customs of their particular culture, but instead their personality, and by extension

their entire conception of self, is something received from the Other (in most cases, specifically

the parental Other) in the form of language. This notion is captured in Edward Sapirs

declaration that [the] individual in isolation from society is a psychological fiction.14

If this idea of the Symbolic is accepted, how does this in any way relate to religion? For

the answer to this question, we must understand another psychoanalytic term: the signifier. A

signifier is, perhaps rather unhelpfully, described by Lacan as that which represents the subject

for another signifier. For a more detailed description, we can refer to linguistics. The idea of a

signifier originates from the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, who claimed that any

linguistic sign is composed of two elements: the signifier, or the sound-image, i.e. the

nonsensical utterance of sounds by a speaker, and the signified, or the meaning or concept which

the sound of the signifier seeks to convey.15 For a simple example, there is the meaningless

13 Ibid, 60.

14 Edward Sapir, The Psychology of Culture: A Course of Lectures (New York: Mouton de Gruyter,
1994).

15 Winfried Nth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 60.
element of the word tree, that being the sounds produced when one says tree, (signifier) and

then the corresponding concept/meaning, that being the real physical object which we call a

tree (signified). Lacan radically breaks from Saussure in asserting that, rather than directly

corresponding to a signified meaning, the relationship between the signifier and signified is

extremely unstable, and that the signifier, diacritical in nature, never exists on its own but

always and only in relation to, and in opposition to, other signifiers.16 What this means is that, in

opposition to Saussures claim, for Lacan what gives a signifier its identity is not its

corresponding meaning, something which is merely a byproduct of the establishment of the

signifier and completely contingent, but rather its uniqueness in comparison to both any and all

other signifiers. This idea is perhaps best captured in the following passage from psychoanalyst

and philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

[An] old-style hospital bed has at its feet, out of the patients sight, a small display board on which different
charts and documents are stuck specifying the patients temperature, blood pressure, etc. This display represents the
subject, but for whom? Not simply and directly for other subjects (say, for the doctors and nurses checking the
chart), but primarily for other signifiers, for the symbolic network of medical knowledge in which the data on the
panel have to be inserted in order to obtain their meaning.17

How this should be read is that a network of signifiers (or, to refer to the previous paragraph, the

Symbolic) exists only for and in relation to each other. What this further implicates is that the

signifier in isolation is, at best, fleeting. For another example, one could imagine looking up a

word (itself a signifier) in the dictionary. Of course, the real, signified, object itself will not be

found on the page, but rather another signifier, which in turn refers to another signifier, and so

on. This never-ending chain of signifiers, in psychoanalysis, is the fundamental makeup of the

16Russell Grigg, Signifier in A Compendium of Lacanian Terms, ed. Hugette Glowinski, Zita Marks,
and Sara Murphy (London: Free Association Books, 2001) 186.

17 Slavoj Zizek, Lacans Four Discourses in Desire of the Analysts, ed. Greg Forter and Paul Allen
Miller (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008) 83-84.
Symbolic and culture could be understood as how the participants of the Symbolic relate to it.18

So, how does this linguistic take on psychoanalysis benefit the scholar of religious studies?

The cornerstone of this argument is the radically anti-essentialist approach offered to us

by the psychoanalytic perspective; for the psychoanalytic observer of the Symbolic, the ability to

isolate one particular signifier as having an ontological status of religious (as opposed to non-

religious) crumbles away in the face of the Lacanian notion of the signifying chain, because,

referring back to the bar separating the signifier and signified, any meaning bestowed on to a

signifier is always secondary, collateral of the signifying act. The Islamic mosque, for example,

can only be understood by contextualizing the institution of the mosque in relation to the other

inhabitants of the discursive field the mosque finds itself in within a particular society, which is

to say locating its position in the chain of signification. Thus, the identification of the mosque as

religious in comparison to non-religious signifiers may only be done retroactively, by imposing

the meaning of religious on an otherwise empty signifier. Is this not the radical conclusion to

Talal Asads argument that religious symbols are intimately linked to social life different

kinds of practice and discourse are intrinsic to the field in which religious representations acquire

their identity and their truthfulness.?19 The psychoanalytic concept of the Symbolic would, then,

appear to be complementary to the modern position of the religious studies discourse in terms of

the inability to isolate any particular features of the religious from a larger context. If this is the

case, what new material does psychoanalysis offer to the discipline, with this particular

18 Owen Hewitson, What Does Lacan Say About the Signifier?, Lacan Online, accessed 4/22/17,
http://www.lacanonline.com/index/2010/06/what-does-lacan-say-about-the-signifier/

19 Talal Asad, Religion as an Anthropological Category, in The Study of Religion: a Reader ed. John
Harding and Hillary Rodrigues (New York: Routledge, 2014), 269.
understanding of culture in mind? My stance is that the answer to this lies within a new approach

to ethnography, and its relation to the problem of desire.

Fundamentally, the project of ethnography or field work cannot be a hard science in the sense

that the information received in ethnography cannot be converted into a form of objective data.

This is for two obvious reasons: the unreliability of both the observer and his or her interlocutors.

Try as they may, the observant remains human, all too human, and is trapped within the

confines of subjectivity and the etic perspective, thus making Malinowskis attempt at

understanding how natives think20 a futile effort. This, I claim, is where psychoanalysis may

offer us further assistance, since the very things which distort the interpretation of the observant

and the information of the interlocutor, namely, desire and fantasy,21are brought to forefront by

the psychoanalytic perspective. With a psychoanalytic understanding of the dynamics of desire,

perhaps the ethnographer may achieve an interpretation which, while no more scientific than

before, may nonetheless be more true.

While it is nothing new to state that in his or her entry to a different culture than his or

her own, the validity of the ethnographers interpretation is suspect, the new perspective

psychoanalysis brings to the table is that, as long as the fact of desire on the part of the

ethnographer remains unacknowledged, the truth of their interactions with their interlocutors is

separated from us by a gap much larger than just cultural differences. Here we should refer back

to Orsi, who I believe keys into a similar idea in his statement that the point is not to make the

20 Kodre, Psychoanalysis for Anthropology: an Introduction to Lacanian Anthropology, 64.

21 For example, is the Tylorian creation of the savage, the 19 th century idea that those from indigenous
societies have a fundamentally different culture from Europe due to their regressive state in human
evolution, not fantasy at its purest, an obvious manifestation of the Symbolic of his age?
other world radically and irrevocably other, but to render ones own world other to oneself as

prelude to a new understanding of the two worlds in relation to each other.22 This should be read

as an examination of desire on the part of the researcher (an interpretation which is supported by

Haberman, the researcher being discussed by Orsi, describing his approach as an erotic

methodology, a position derived from the theory of Lacan himself), done with the intention of

recognizing both the phenomenological effect of desire on the researchers understanding of their

environment, as well as the effect of the researchers desire on their subjects of study, and vice

versa. In short, the issue of desire is an epistemological one. Although there are obvious cultural

gaps in ethnography which are ripe for comparison and interpretation by the observer, such as

language, manners, or gender roles, the psychoanalytic conception of desire may be the most

radical. Referring back to the idea of the Symbolic, we must remember that for psychoanalysis, it

is the discourse of ones cultural context which shapes not only their prescribed behavior but

additionally, their innermost thoughts and self-image. Here, desire is no exception: Desire has

little to do with material sexuality for Lacan; it is caught up, rather, in social structuresin the

fantasy version of reality that forever dominated our lives after our entrance into language

Even our unconscious desires are, in other words, organized by the linguistic system that Lacan

terms the Symbolic our desire is never properly our own, but is created through fantasies that

are caught up in cultural ideologies.23 In other words, it is through our assimilation to the

Symbolic that we not only learn how to articulate or fantasize about our desire, but how we

experience desire itself is organized by language, the Symbolic. This sentiment may be made

more explicit in this quotation from psychoanalyst Bruce Fink: Not only do we want the Other's
22 Orsi, Snakes Alive, 114

23 Dino Felluga, "Modules on Lacan: On Desire." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U.
Accessed 4/18/17. https://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacandesire.html
desire to be directed onto us; we also come to desire like the Otherwe take the Other's desires

as our own.24 Thus, if the ethnographer is truly to be aware of the cultural gaps separating

herself and her interlocutors, the existence of desire in fieldwork must be taken into account as a

symptom of cultural difference.

If we accept that the persistence of desire and fantasy in any human interactions will to

some degree expose cultural differences, a rather technical explanation of what is unique to

desire (as well as fantasy, its accomplice) as a psychoanalytic category will be necessary.

Although any attempt to summarize the Lacanian idea of desire is doomed to over simplify, we

should begin with an obvious foundation relevant to our discussion: in the interactions between

the ethnographer and their informant, we enter, on both sides, the dynamics of the subject and

their Other. For Lacan, this dynamic is constitutive of human interaction in general, grounded in

his work in developmental psychology. What is crucial to understand is that the ability for the

subject to identify themselves as an individuated being is only achieved via a distinguishing

between themselves and an Other25. In other words, the subject becomes aware of itself as a

wholly separate individual via the perception of an irreducible gap between the thoughts or

desires of itself and those of the Other: The subject finds in the other's desire what he/she is as

subject of the unconscious and is actualized through the Other's lack or loss. The subject

apprehends a lack in the Other, something the Other wants.26 How this should be read is, in the

24 Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1997), 55.

25 An interesting parallel could be drawn here between this kind of individuation and Saids thesis on the
role Orientalism played for Western European identity.

26 Leonardo Rodriguez, Alienation and Separation, in A Compendium of Lacanian Terms, ed. Hugette
Glowinski, Zita Marks, and Sara Murphy (London: Free Association Books, 2001), 12
early stages of human development, the infant, via their entry in language, begins to differentiate

itself from the parental Other, as well as recognizes itself as the recipient of this Others desire,

the true nature of which (what exactly do they desire from me? why do they desire me?)

remains ambiguous, due to the newfound irreducible division between itself and the Other(s).

This idea is articulated here by Zizek as: The original question of desire is not directly What

do I want?, but What do others want from me?27 What this creates is a sense of subjectivity

which Lacan claims is one characterized by what he calls lack: borne from our developmental

separation from the Other Lacan asserts that this lack constitutes the human condition of

desire Mans desire is the desire for the Other.28 In other words, psychoanalytic desire is

founded on a kind of double negativity: the subjects desire springs out of an internal lack of

knowledge of the Others desire, which is to say lack in the Other itself. The predicament the

desiring subject finds itself in, in this state of affairs, is thus: their desire can only circle around

its object-reason of desire, never to fully grasp it.29 Because the project of desire is, in reality, to

collapse the symbolic barrier separating the subject and the Other, a wholly impossible mission,

desire is fundamentally unrealizable, doomed to orbit its object. It is in this precise area where

fantasy enters into play.

Fantasy, in psychoanalysis, is our primary mechanism of coping with the impossibility of

fully confronting the desire of the Other. This is best articulated in one of Lacans most infamous

statements: there is no sexual relationship.30 How this should be interpreted is that in the

domain of human activity which is most typically associated with desire, that being sexuality, the
27 Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007), 28.

28 Raleigh Gardiner, Desire and Fantasy (PhD. diss, Washington University, 2014), 2.

29 Kodre, Psychoanalysis for Anthropology: an Introduction to Lacanian Anthropology, 63

psychoanalytic viewpoint is that even here the actualization of desire as such remains

inaccessible. To refer back to Zizeks analysis of fantasy: there is no universal guarantee of a

harmonious sexual relationship with ones partner. Every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or

her own, a private formula for the sexual relationship.31 What is being said here is that even in

the face of an activity which common sense would dictate is an explicit, even physical,

realization of desire, the sexual act remains mediated by the private fantasies and projections of

the parties involved. In other words, in psychoanalysis, the desire staged in fantasy is not the

subjects own, but the others desire, the desire of those around me with whom I interact.32 To

briefly return to our discussion on the Symbolic, this where our culture becomes a constitutive

element of our subjectivity and our experience of desire itself: in our attempt to understand the

desires of those around us, we shroud this lack of knowledge in fantasies created out of what we

suspect the desire of the Other is, based out of what we see out of the behaviors of the Other in

culture. So, for our purposes, the psychoanalytic relationship between desire and fantasy may be

summarized as such: the desire of the subject is to fill their inner sense of lack caused by their

separation from the Other, which is to say the subject seeks to cross the gap between their

subjectivity and that of the Others, an impossible endeavor. As a result of this, the subject

produces fantasies (which are structured by their situation within the symbolic order of their

environment), allowing them to circumvent the impossibility of their desire.

30 Adrian Johnston, "Jacques Lacan", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition),
ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/lacan/.

31 Zizek, How to Read Lacan, 27.

32 Ibid.
 The project of ethnography, I claim, falls into a strikingly similar deadlock. What is the

desire of the ethnographer if not the attempt to negate this very gap between the self and the

Other? Returning to the project of Malinowski, could we not easily rephrase how natives think

as what is the natives desire? Psychoanalysis informs us that if this is the case, ethnography is

an impossible discipline, in the sense that it cannot realize its foundational goal: to dispose of

the gap between the subject and the (cultural) Other. This doesnt mean that ethnography should

be abandoned, but rather for the purposes of a more accurate ethnographic account, a

psychoanalytic theoretical approach begins with how the ethnographer approaches the Other,

which is to say how the ethnographer approaches their own desires as a subject, which inevitably

informs their fantasies which will fill in the gap in between themselves and the Other. To use

anthropologys dark history as an example, the colonial notion of the animistic savage failed in

precisely this sense; the absence of self-examination of the ethnographers own implicit desires

(which were in this case related to imperialism) allowed for the fantasies sustaining this desire to

present themselves as objective ethnographic information. If we suppose that the reality of the

colonial ethnographers desire was to produce an easily exploitable Other for imperial purposes,

their production of the nave savage can be understood psychoanalytically: it was an instance of

a fantastical perception of the Other which sustained the ethnographers desire. It is here where

we see the usefulness of psychoanalysis in religious studies ethnography: by placing desire in the

forefront, it remains the only tool we have to comprehend what forces construct our perception

of the subjects of our study, while additionally allowing us to locate the areas of real cultural

difference, that being those areas where our fantasies emerge in order to mask our lack of real

knowledge of the Other.

 Psychoanalysis manifests in many ways, from clinical practice to film studies, as well as

a powerful hermeneutic. What all proper applications of psychoanalysis have in common,

however, is a fundamental understanding of the subjects constitution in relation to its Symbolic

environment and its position towards the Other. In many ways, such a claim of the structure of

subjectivity makes psychoanalysis a totalizing discipline, if its arguments are accepted. Though

this may be the case, the use of psychoanalysis in any academic study, as with any other system

of thought, is ultimately up to the observer. What I advocate for in this essay is not that

psychoanalytic theory should be integrated into all forms of religious studies discourse, but

rather that what we receive from psychoanalytic theory is a particular way to think about

ourselves as researchers and those we interact with, which could potentially yield fruitful results

in our understanding of those participating in religious activity. The unique question

psychoanalysis poses to the researcher is that of their own desire. What are the constitutive

elements of the ethnographers desire to know the people they study? What is unique orientation

of the individual ethnographer towards their Other? What fantasies on the part of the

ethnographer sustain their idea of the Other? These are the questions only an ethnography

grounded upon psychoanalytic principles can answer. This is precisely where the psychoanalyses

of religion mentioned at the beginning of this essay failed: they attempted to claim knowledge of

the Others desire rather than their own. In this way, psychoanalysis is less of a way of getting at

the real of the subject of ethnography than it is an assertion that there is no accessible real at

all. In other words, psychoanalysis is not a way for us to know the Other, instead it is a tool for

us to understand our relation to the Other. We should understand a psychoanalytic study of

religious activity not as a way we view the structure of the society observed, but rather as
something done before the ethnography itself. The psychoanalytic ethnographers project begins

by confronting the reality of their own desire to engage in their scholarly pursuit.

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