Lacan and the Biblical Ethics of Psychoanalysis

"Benyamini’s excellent book shows us how fundamentally important religious themes are to Lacan’s teaching. While the author rightly insists that there is not a skerrick of the “believer” in Lacan, the achievement of his book is to show that religious themes, far from being superficial borrowings, run very deep indeed. The result is a penetrating, and deeply reflective, analysis of the most important psychoanalyst since Freud." —Russell Grigg, author of Lacan, Language and Philosophy In this fascinating and ground-breaking book, Itzhak Benyamini uses discourse analysis to lay out the way Lacan constructed his own intellectual discourse informed by Judeo-Christianity. Offering an understanding of Lacan’s emergence and intellectual struggles with significant contemporary intellectuals, the author builds a panoramic view of the entire psychoanalytic discourse at the time of the foundational post-Freudian generation. By engaging in closereading of texts and seminars given by Lacan between the 1930s and 50s, Benyamini uncovers the coming-into-being of Lacan's key concepts: The Mirror Stage, the Imaginary, the Real, the Symbolic, the Name-of-the-Father, the Other, jouissance, and das Ding. The author argues that Lacan wished to regulate this process of conceptualization by connecting the concepts of the "Father" and the "Other" with themes from the Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the Biblical one, to create a clinical ethic, that does not reflect a worldview or ideology and is guided solely by the analyzand’s unconscious desire. Itzhak Benyamini teaches at the Tel Aviv University and Bezalel Jerusalem, Israel. He is the editor of Resling publishing house and the author of a number of books, including Narcissist Universalism (Bloomsbury, 2012) and A Critical Theology of Genesis (Palgrave, 2016).