Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma

Marcus Pound
SCM Press (2008)
VERITAS Book Series
174 + ref & ix pp, $28.75 (paperback)

Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma is the first in what I hope will be many ventures

into dialogue between Radical Orthodoxy and contemporary psychoanalysis. Pound weaves

Lacanian theory together with the insights of Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard in an attempt

to “perform a Lacanian intervention on Lacan by way of Kierkegaard with a view to teasing out

the hidden presuppositions, the underlying premises, and hence Lacan’s disavowed truth, thereby

making the Lacanian aware through Kierkegaard that Lacanian psychoanalysis is profoundly

theological” (p. 18). To mediate these two giants of philosophy, Pound uses the psychological

concept of trauma. He argues that trauma is both the “basis of the psychoanalytic cure” and “a

powerful metaphor for what takes place in the Eucharist”. In psychoanalysis, the analyst and

analyzand - through anamnesis, abreaction and symbolization, use trauma in order to be cured;

and in the Mass, the priest, acting in persona Christi, “invites the absolute other into our

everyday proceedings, taking what is most mundane – bread – and raising it to the level of the

absolute… this radical breach or caesura destabilizes the ground of experience” (p. 22). By

linking these two seemingly disparate events, Pound argues that the Mass should be seen as a

form of social-psychoanalysis that completes the original revolutionary Freudian vision.

The author graciously spends the beginning of chapters of the book introducing the

reader to the Lacanian and Kierkegaardian concepts he will use. These summaries are among the

best I have seen on these difficult authors and demonstrate Pound’s academic credentials.

Throughout the rest of the book, he tightly weaves the Dane and the Frenchman into what

he calls a “repetition of Lacan through Kierkegaard.” Pound first contends that Kierkegaard
anticipates Lacan’s postmodern “linguistic turn” of psychoanalysis in his pseudonymous

authorship, particularly in his incomplete and posthumously published work, Johannes

Climacus. However, Kierkegaard supplements the “resignation to anxiety and lack” of

postmodern psychoanalysis with an opportunity for faith and transcendence (p. 26).

Pound next overlays the Lacanian triad of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real with

Kierkegaard’s “stages along life’s way” – the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. Through a

reading of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and a treatment of Lacan’s understanding of

Antigone, he explains how Kierkegaard’s religious transformation is both a purgation and a

Lacanian assumption of desire.

Pound’s next argument advances his case by casting the analyst as a participant in “God’s

creative work” by establishing “a realm of created independence to help the subject engage in the

subjective appropriation of truth” (p. 27). He studies Kierkegaard’s understanding of time and

eternity in relation to Lacan’s emphasis on the importance for psychoanalysis of the future

anterior tense – the individual redefines his/her past based on present or future actions, and

concludes that God’s traumatic intervention in history, through the incarnation, is the archetype

for the psychoanalytic intervention. Furthermore, it is only as a result of the “qualitative shift in

consciousness” with regard to time, occasioned by the Incarnation that the analytic endeavor is

possible at all (p. 153).

This penultimate step in Pound’s argument enables him complete his work by framing the

Mass as the primary vehicle of God’s intervention in time and therefore as a form of social

psychoanalysis. If the incarnation is the paradigmatic analytic intervention and the Eucharist is

Christ, the Holy Mass can therefore also be seen as a analytic intervention that invites the

participant into an assumption of desire which offers the individual an entirely new perspective
on all the events of his / her life (Lacan’s future anterior tense).

The author’s argument is sophisticated and predicated on an orthodox, sacramental

Christianity, something not often seen in psychoanalytic literature and in my opinion, long

overdue. When psychoanalysis has been integrated with Christianity, what is often overlooked is

richness of the liturgical and sacramental elements of the Christian faith. Pound places these

front and center, giving what is truly central to the Catholic faith its due.

Kevin Vail
Graduate Student in Psychotherapy and Faith