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Alex Brey
PHL 311
Dr. Hassell
14 Nov. 2010
Reiterating "Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma" Verbatim
For Pound, author of "Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma", we cannot have exact synonymy.
Consider this sub-conclusion from the introduction, "Freud already conceived of psychoanalysis as a
secular form of theology" (Pound I). Here is the question: was Freud actually thinking about theology,
or does Freud's conception of psychoanalysis fit Pound's idea of a secular theology? Making things
difficult is the fact that the author believes in retroactive revision. In other words he thinks the non-past
can change the past. Because of that, whatever Freud the man happened to think about theology is
irrelevant. Pound takes primacy from the writer or text and gives it to the reader/interpreter, and
importantly, he capitalizes upon that. By using a limited and overlapping terminology when comparing
Kierkegaard and Lacan, he carefully overlays their respective theories. To this end, he does not
paraphrase his ideas, as you might expect him to do for clarity's sake. In doing this, Pound makes it
really hard for the uninitiated reader to grasp the sort of existences he is positing. In other words, he
makes it hard to translate his ideas into the positivist language which some of us naively anticipate.
Inverting his method, I will try to talk about what he is saying from a positivist perspective, envisioning
the world he describes and attempting to elucidate Pound's theories in a different language. As a part of
my discussion I will point out notions of coherence and correspondence, the Lacanian triad and the
relevance of Pound to social science.
Pound presents independent evidence for his ultimate conclusion in each of four chapters. He
sets up the argument with two introductory chapters, and concludes likewise. For my discussion of his
work, I will first examine the argumentative chapters and conclusion before returning to the intro
wherein Pound offers his own insight into his methods. To orient really quickly, the book is trying to
say that theology preempts psychoanalysis, effects better healing than psychoanalysis and is more
easily applicable in reality. He argues these points by posing Kierkegaard's theology on top of Lacan,
who is taken as representative of current psychoanalysis as a whole. The overarching parallel point he
tries to make is that the Catholic transubstantial eucharist is actually equal to an analytic intervention.
Pound works with specific versions of 'repetition' and 'recollection' in arguing for the first point. He
then works with notions of subjectivity and objectivity, language and time to prove the latter points.
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In his first line of argument the author works with the terms 'repetition' and 'recollection'
originally found in Kierkegaard's thought. My task here is to sort out several usages or levels of
'repetition', which I will do by talking about what Pound does with the term. Most prominently Pound
talks about 'repeating' Lacan, as opposed to reiterating Lacan in synonymous terms: what he might call
recollection. Critically, for the author, repetition involves reenacting something within the context of an
acknowledged difference. So, for example I can passively recollect a childhood memory by
reminiscing. The same memory might be repeated by finding a situation wherein I might have a similar
emotional experience. With repetition, the impossibility of an exact recreation is acknowledged as a
fundamental difference constituting reality. Pound's calling his argument a repetition qualifies the
changes that are a part of injecting Kierkagaard's terminology into Lacan's. By exchanging individual
words, he is automatically changing the doctrine. His subtextual message is that you cannot
synonymously paraphrase someone's ideas without changing them and that it is inevitably more
interesting to utilize the difference you create in revising a text.
The other prominent thing the author does with 'repetition' is to argue that psychoanalysis is
repetition. Not as a metaphor, but that they are the same. Here, a tricky sort of existence is posited. In
the first case, repetition was a reenacting with acknowledged difference. How can it not be a metaphor
to say that psychoanalysis is repetition, but also not be an example of exact synonymy, which he
rejects? The point Pound is trying to make is that he is repeating, and thereby acknowledging that he
creates a difference. This instance exemplifies 'repetition' as an argumentative strategy and brings to
light how it might confuse readers. In other words, the positivist is confused that, for Pound, the
identity relation is redefined within the context of a 'repetitive' argument: identity becomes something
involving innate difference.
Next I want to talk about repetition and positivist language within the context of the Lacanian
triad. Positivist language proposes that it argues any point as 'real'. So, a positivist hearing Pound's
argument is likely to think Pound is saying there is a 'real' link between Lacan and Kierkegaard, when
that is not really his point. We might usefully help such a person get around their confusion by calling
Pound's argument 'imaginary' and 'symbolic'. While the delimitations of those catagories might be
problematic, within the trichotomy such a notion helps to antonymously clarify the thrust of the
author's work. He is not so much trying to develop a theory that corresponds to the sensible world, but
trying to develop a theory which says something about the world. With regard to social theory, we can
see how such a theory is useful because it avoids getting caught up in a status quo that constitutes the
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real of the present day. With repetition, the author presents the real of the world within the context of an
acknowledged difference. The difference undermines the reality of it and in doing so presents the
possibility of a revised future world for our evaluation.
Pound's second argument is that theology affects a better cure than psychoanalysis, which he
works at with a discussion of language. The author says both Kierkegaard and Lacan thought that
issues with language, castration in Lacanese, are the source of distress. Summarizing the problem he
writes, "[language] cancels the immediacy of raw sensation because language is an 'ideality'" (Pound
79). By this he means that having language irrevocably changes the way a person experiences reality.
Language "employs categories which do not necessarily exist" (Pound 79) and thereby changes the
sensible experience by attaching that category. Distress arises because language cannot make sense of
everything, the intricacy of pre-linguistic experience inevitably eludes it. In Pound's work, the stuff that
eludes language is called 'difference', and he says Lacan and Kierkegaard respond differently to it.
Lacan says that healing is affected thru helping a person cope with difference. Kierkegaard says
that "God stands precisely for difference" (Pound 85 emphasis in original), and so healing involves
accepting difference as good. Finally, Pound concludes theology's solution is better because it turns
what was distressing into a beneficient part of God. What was a bad condition to be stuck in becomes a
good condition to be stuck in, so we should insist upon its correctness. For my part, I want to return to
coherence and correspondence. A correspondence theory of truth would surely reject such logic given
that it does not claim to describe reality. Again, Pound's implicit logic is coherentist. When he
concludes "Kierkegaard's God is not invoked as a neurotic defence against difference" (Pound 85) he
begs the question: the conclusion only makes sense within his system which he has not proven to be
more real than Lacan's. This is not to say that Pound's commentary is without insight, but for the
uninitiated reader it might initially appear to be concluding more than is logically proven.
Toward proving that theology preempts psychoanalysis, Pound tries to show that Kierkegaard's
ideas lay the foundation of analytic intervention. To this end he discusses two dichotomies, one from
Kierkegaard and one from Lacan. Lacan's is of full and empty speech, and Kierkegaard's is of objective
and subjective standpoints. Lacan wants you to have full speech, Kierkegaard wants you to have a
subjective standpoint: and Pound says Lacan's full speech is the same as Kierkegaard's subjective
standpoint. The point for me to make is that Pound can only conflate the dichotomies within the context
of repetition, and that this should qualify Pound's ultimate conclusion regarding preemption.
According to Pound, Lacan wanted the analysand to leave behind the sort of empty speech
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which avoids taking responsibility for his or her own desire. For him, people appropriate other's
desires, so taking responsibility for one's own means rejecting the influence of others' desires. Affecting
this change is supposed to be the point of the analytic intervention. Kierkegaard, on the other hand,
suggests that when a person reflects upon truth, he must consider how he plays into the concept of
truth: he calls this the subjective standpoint.
Justifying his conflation, Pound writes, "the objective standpoint...relies on a universally
accepted standard of rationality, so that given the same premise we can all arrive at the same
conclusion, thereby conferring a collective...identity" (Pound 121). What he is trying to say is that the
objective standpoint, much like empty speech, appropriates another's ideas. So, while the parallel is
clear, I want to point out that Pound makes a leap in totally conflating the two. Particularly, the two
dichotomies have very different social implications. While Kierkegaard seems to totally reject any sort
of knowledge that comes from without, Lacan is and might even have to be open to public knowledge,
just so long as it is not passively adopted. Perhaps, from an epistemological perspective Lacan and
Kierkegaard both care more about coherence than correspondence. Yet, as social theories, they
prescribe quite different treatments: Kierkegaard's markedly meditative and Lacan more specifically
only prescribing personal responsibilty.
Pound's third line of argument asserts that, given that theology affects the same healing as
psychoanalysis, theology is more practicable. While the author actually devotes comparatively little
time to this theme, it is most relevant to social theory and therefore worth discussing. His claim here is
that theology performs in public what psychoanalysis can only achieve in private. He here is imagining
the mass as directly analagous to a session with a therapist. This would allow theology to heal more
people at a time than psychoanalysis. Theology does not need to be practiced and private, so it would
seem to be more efficient. Of course, for this to be true we first have to accept that theology can do
exactly what analysis can.
As part of this argument, Pound discusses a distinction between how theology and the secular
view individuality. Theology, he argues, construes the individual as secondary to society, while the
secular views the individual as preceding. This allows him to further the contention that theology
affects healing on a more massive level, yet has social implications. An analogy might be made to
sociological functionalism versus conflict theory. Like the functionalists who also view society as
preceding, Pound's version of theology puts its theory into the context of a benign system which it is
always beneficient to maintain. Pound's version of psychoanalysis puts its theory into the context of an
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innately unresolvable conflict, or in Lacanese, lack. Within the conflict system, as within
psychoanalysis, the individual precedes and is at odds with society.
As my last task I want to return to the Pound's introductory chapters where he talks about his
methodology. Pound's subtextual message, I think, is that we should question positivist assumptions.
He more or less makes that theme explicit in the introduction, "the secular is not of itself a given
reality... [it] was imagined...through...the social sciences which are of themselves already bastardized
forms of theology" (Pound 3). This quote clearly exemplifies his ambivalence towards positivist
language, but I am a little puzzled about his reasons for rejecting it. Based on discussions in class, I
would have thought Pound would have justified his argument by discussing leaps of faith. Scientific
claims are supposed to be more justified than religious ones, perhaps because science amasses such
descriptive and predictive material. The argument would then be that science still has not justified its
claims any more than religion has: it has only described and obfuscated.
Puzzlingly, this is not what Pound argues. What he seems to be saying, not without indignance,
is that theology came first. Thus he uses words like "bastard" (Pound 3) and "parody" (Pound 142) to
describe the secular. As part of my mission to clarify what might seem troubling to the uninitiated
reader, I should clarify that this diction accords with Pound's more implicit methodology. As I
understand it, Pound is a follower of Milbank who contends, as I introduced earlier, that it is more
honest to blatantly interpret a text than to propose you can exactly reiterate it. When Pound uses these
emotionally charged words, I think he is intentionally inserting himself into the text: the real cutting
into the imaginary as it were. Thus, he breaks the illusion that he is in any way being objective, or in
some way speaking to a universal rationality.
In working thru "Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma" the conclusion I have come to is that
the language somebody uses to discuss something determines what she can actually talk about. It
seems, however, that such language is often catagorizable. For me at least, some people talk in a way
that intuitively seems logical to me, and other people seem intuitively confusing. Pound's language is
rooted in a very different epistemological framework. The temptation is to always elevate one's own
language as rational, but of course such temptation should be resisted. Hopefully, my paper presents
evidence that synonymy, even if it is inexact, remains a useful tool.
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Works Cited
Pound, Marcus. Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma. London: SCM Press, 2007. Print.