ABSTRACT
To a significant extent, psychoanalysis – in both Jungian and Lacanian traditions – is a reactivation and revival of older doctrines and debates. Consequently, approaching both Jung and Lacan from an intellectual-historical perspective helps elucidate their common features as well as highlight their differences.
After surveying several areas of overlap and affinity, including (1) language, (2) the dimension of desire, and (3) a fascination with the problem of quaternity, this chapter turns to what it regards as the chief conceptual – and also clinical? – difference between Jung and Lacan, namely, their attitudes to religion. For it is under the rubric of religion that Jung and Lacan approach the sublime, a category missing from both as a specific terminological reference and yet nevertheless present in Jung in a way that it is not in Lacan. That presence is maintained not so much on a discursive level but – as Jung’s The Red Book shows – through enactment.
In conclusion, this chapter argues for a realignment of the usual significance attributed to Jung and Lacan by noting the major difference in emphasis on the relation between the beautiful and the sublime, between the unconscious-as-language and the unconscious-as-archetype and ultimately between ethics and aesthetics.
