ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan would have a place in cultural history as the premier interpreter of Freud to the French, but he is also an original thinker, famous for having imparted a linguistic spin to the doctrines of his master. Lacan, as already suggested, has a much more complicated view of the relations among science, psychoanalysis, and religion than Freud. French commentators on Lacan have not found this an easy area about which to be definite and have looked for clues outside the texts. The concept of truth employed by Freud is pretty much the commonsense concept according to which one might say that a certain historical claim or scientific theory is true and that another claim or theory is false. There are many remarks on religion, often quite brief, scattered throughout the volumes of seminars. People often picture the unconscious as the repository of the primitive, where what is closest to the animal survives to conspire against people's higher powers.
