ABSTRACT
Psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, has been regarded by many as the instrument required for a radical cleansing of religion from dogma, intolerance, prejudice, and bigotry. It is well known that since the eighteenth century, the most optimistic proponents of the Enlightenment and the scientific paradigm had predicted the demise of spirituality and religion. In the materialistic and behaviourist critique of religion, the world of mystery is a way for priests to hold on to social and political control/power. Prior classical psychoanalytic understanding of religion has been restricted to a large extent to theistic forms of spirituality. The chapter argues that when the subject accepts being cancelled and being made a fool by the Real of unconscious knowing, then a new relationship to the Real is established much closer to the sense of the Real in Buddhism. The work of Lacan provides a postmodern interpretation of Sigmund Freud that allows for a more sympathetic understanding of traditional culture.
