ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses Emmanuel Lèvinas's critique of psychoanalysis. It discusses a philosophical critique levelled against a therapeutic theory. For an insightful thinker such as Emmanuel Lèvinas's, it was obvious that the essence of Freud's "religiosity" was all that Freud himself saw as genuine, thus existing, and good. And this is where the discussion between Lèvinas and Freud begin. Since Freud remained, in Lèvinas's opinion, a follower of paganism. The antagonism between Freud and Lèvinas's, therefore, acquires poignancy only in relation to the assessment of the ban which establishes the Law. For Lèvinas's, the act of establishing justice takes the human out of the sphere of any violence whatsoever, which remains immanently bound with the being. Freud believes that the source of violence is precisely human craving for illusion: for instance, the "illusion of moral goodness" which told his father to reconcile himself with the anti-Semitic assault.
