by Adam Schneider | Vol 42 (1) 2024
Summary: Jacques Lacan entered an ongoing dialogue between psychoanalysis and Catholicism when he delivered his Discourse to Catholics (1960) to the Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis. In the 1950s, the Catholic Church under the leadership of Pius XII taught its members to be wary of psychoanalysis due to its focus on desire in the unconscious. Lacan instead argued the essential connection between ethics and desire in Freud’s work and the role of psychoanalysis in facilitating the articulation of desire. Later, in The Triumph of Religion (1974), Lacan argued religion incompletely excretes meaning to conceal problems science discovers, and the world is confronted with the Real. While psychoanalysis directs attention to the Real, “what doesn’t work in the world,” Lacan predicted religion would eventually excrete enough meaning to make psychoanalysis irrelevant. Yet the Church’s position in this dialogue has changed. Joseph Bergoglio attended psychoanalysis in the 1970s and, as Pope Francis, has sought to move the Church away from the moralism of the past, which tied ethics to behavior compliance, and towards nonjudgment which sees ethics enacted through mercy. Rather than continue to sustain concealment of the Real (as the Church has done with clergy sexual abuse), Francis wants to move the Church closer to the Real through his emphasis on people on the margins, evidence of what is not working in the world.
by Andrew Barnaby | Vol 42 (1) 2024
Summary: This essay aims to revisit and reframe the question that Freud saw as the starting point of Moses and Monotheism, a question posed to Arnold Zweig in 1934: “how [have] the Jews … come to be what they are[?]” While diverging from Freud in many ways, the essay ventures a new answer in the context in which he sought his own: not just the enduring mystery of “the origin of monotheism among the Jews” (the ostensible subject of Freud’s study) but more particularly how that origin and the historical path emanating from it can only be grasped through the lens provided by psychoanalytically- informed inquiry. That said, even as the essay’s central argument is premised on reaffirming the notion that a cultural trauma stands at the origin of Jewish monotheism, it rejects Freud’s specific claim that the traumatic event was the murder of Moses. Thus, although it retains Freud’s foundational position that Judaic-monotheistic faith must be understood not simply in terms of a body of doctrines and practices but more fundamentally in terms of powerful unconscious elements, it explicitly shifts away from the idea that made it conceptually possible for Freud to complete and publish Moses and Monotheism – Ernst Sellin’s reconstruction of a biblical tradition that Moses had been murdered sometime during the period of the people’s wandering in the desert after their exodus from Egypt. In so challenging the very premise of Freud’s psychoanalytically- grounded argument about the origins of Jewish monotheism, the essay also attempts to realign his concept of an originary cultural trauma with something other than his historically unsubstantiated reconstructions of the Mosaic-Exodus period. In short, the essay aims to show that the originary trauma has a verifiable time and place in documented Jewish history: the Babylonian Exile. Just as important, this time and place (and their aftermath) are directly related to how monotheism has come to be understood in Judaism and beyond, a tradition that is inextricably linked to the final emergence of Torah sometime in the mid- to late-fifth century BCE.
by Paris Tanzifi | Vol 42 (1) 2024
Summary: Religious honor killing is one of the most severe types of violence that women face in religious fanatic societies. In this way, in countries where religious fanaticism is prevalent, women are at risk of it. It seems that in a religious fanatic society, there are some mechanisms or factors arising from religion that cause these honor killings. In this article, by analyzing the case of Ms. A, we show what mechanisms cause their occurrence. The results of this research showed how religion, by emphasizing the phallus as a symbol of masculinity, creates a fragile phantasm that is defined by the complete control of women and the elimination or denial of their being. Therefore, Ms. A’s friendship with her boyfriend is enough for her family to see their illusional male power lost and kill her to compensate.
Authors: Paris Tanzifi, Narges Sharifzadeh, Hassan Makaremi & Mehdi Khorianian
by Ikbal Gharbi | Vol 42 (1) 2024
Résumé: Les phénomènes du terrorisme de l’extrémisme violent ou de la radicalisation en Tunisie sont généralement associé par l’opinion publique à une jeunesse marginalisée socialement, culturellement, économiquement et essentiellement masculine. La multiplication des actes terroristes commis par des femmes a généré une attention politique accrue autour du rôle des femmes dans la lutte contre l’extrémisme violent et la prévention du terrorisme ainsi que des interrogations sur les stéréotypes de genre pour une meilleure compréhension des constructions sociales de masculinité et de féminité qui influencent le fait terroriste en Tunisie. Dans cette perspective, penser l’extrémisme violent à travers le prisme du genre permettra de comprendre ce phénomène dans la diversité de ses modes d’action et de ses stratégies et d’apporter une meilleure compréhension de l’engagement des femmes dans les mouvances extrémistes. Cela permettra aussi de penser les réponses à l’extrémisme violent, aussi bien théoriques que pratiques en fonction de l’originalité du contexte tunisien et de ses spécificités historiques, politiques et anthropologiques.
by Werner Bohleber | Vol 42 (1) 2024
Abstract: Fundamentalist movements can be called ‘strong religions’ because they are militant and highly focused opponents of secularism. Fundamentalist thinking is characterized by ideal states. On the one hand, there is absolute submission to the idealized object of God; on the other hand, there are idealized ideas of an imaginary community of believers. In particular, the deep structure of the mental world of Islamic fundamentalism will be examined. Religion, purity, and violence are inextricably linked. The connection between narcissistic notions of purity, unity, and equality stirs up massive violence in order to invoke the fantasy of a pre-ambivalent narcissistic ideal state. The Other or the outsider thus becomes the infidel, the intruder, and the troublemaker necessary for both projection and persecution in order to phantasmatically maintain the ideal state. Such ideological notions and fantasies activate a capacity for aggression of enormously destructive potential.
