ABSTRACT
Now we explore cultural-spiritual contexts for the development of psychoanalytic conceptions of knowledge, agency and truth. The term `spirituality' ± a potent pre-capitalist conceptual capsule of the subject reactivated today ± here describes holistic and redemptive conceptions of religion, the particular formation of individual subjectivity and yearning for personal and social change provoked and blocked by a political-economic system characterised by alienation. The role of Lacanian psychoanalysis as a response to spiritless conditions is critically reviewed, as is the way this version of psychoanalysis enables us to conceptualise `lack' that spirituality today promises to ®ll. This account of institutional contexts for the development of psychoanalysis is grounded in clinical practice and in implications of theological conceptions of subjectivity. The appeal of a systematic alternative `worldview' for psychoanalytic notions of self and other in contemporary culture is condensed in the popularised notion of the repetition of relationships under the sign of `generalised transference'.
