part0009

Muo… even had a feeling that such cases as Judge Di, or indeed the whole Chinese people, had escaped the notice of his great master Freud … Freud and Judge Di did not share the same world. In fact, ever since Muo had set foot in China, he had been assailed by doubts concerning psychoanalysis. Take Volcano of the Old Moon: was she suffering from the famous Oedipus complex like everyone else?

Anthropology and psychoanalysis both developed as fields of study towards the end of the 19th century. They were products of but also critics of modernity. Anthropology looked to ‘the other beyond’ to show there were alternative ways to live one’s life. Psychoanalysis looked to ‘the other within’ to show that one is not necessarily who one takes oneself to be. Weiner places this concept of ‘alterity’ or ‘otherness’ at the centre of each subject’s concern (1999: 234). However, despite this mutual interest and apart from certain exceptions, the two subject areas have been essentially estranged from one another, anthropologists seeing themselves as concerned with the social and cultural areas of human life, psychoanalysts seeing themselves as concerned with the individual. Heald, Deluz and Jacopin note that changes in ideas of the self and society in anthropology and changes in psychoanalytical formulations of its work might be leading both disciplines to a position where a ‘rapprochement’ might now be taking place between the two disciplines (1994: 3). i I see this book as contributing to the ‘rapprochement’.

Freud was very much engaged in a dialogue with anthropology. He developed some of his ideas through his readings of anthropological works and offered his own theory on society and culture. Anthropological writings that influenced Freud were the works of the evolutionist school, including Spencer, Frazer, Tylor, Lubbock and Robertson Smith (Wallace 1983: 18). From these anthropologists, Freud took concepts such as the psychic unity of mankind, the comparative method, the doctrine of survivals and the idea of recapitulation. These and other anthropological ideas helped Freud develop his thinking on projection, symbolism, the omnipotence of thoughts and neurosis as atavism [survival of the behaviour of our ancestors]. In the early 20th century, there was some dialogue between anthropology and psychoanalysis, particularly over Freud’s ideas of society, as portrayed in TOTEM AND TABOO . At that time, Sapir, Lowie, Boas and Kroeber all commented on Freud’s ideas in their writings, although Boas was mostly sceptical, or even negative about psychoanalytical theory being used in anthropology. Roheim was the first anthropologist to become a psychoanalyst. Robinson credits him with naming [in 1915] the discipline that combined anthropology with psychoanalysis, ‘psychoanalytical anthropology’ (1969: 81). Kroeber, Kardiner and Kluckhohn became psychoanalysts. Devereux became a key psychoanalytical anthropologist following Roheim. Since this initial overlap of subject areas in psychoanalysis and anthropology, there has been a small but steady interest in the application of psychoanalytical themes to anthropology.

In this chapter, the relationship of psychoanalysis to anthropology and why psychoanalysis is chosen as a theoretical modality is shown by way of:

Freud is well known for his view of religion as psychopathology. In THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE Freud describes religion as paranoia (1901: 259). He again describes religion in TOTEM AND TABOO as paranoia and speaks of beliefs in spirits and demons as the projections of people’s emotional impulses into existence as an outside reality, similar to Schreber’s projections (1913: 92). Schreber was a lawyer with a paranoid psychosis who wrote an autobiography. Freud’s major work on psychosis was an analysis of Schreber’s writings (1911).

While for Freud projection is not necessarily connected to paranoia, it is often associated with defence and pathology. Many psychoanalytical anthropological accounts use this notion of projection in their analyses of cultural material. La Barre (1970), for example, sees religious belief as involving the projection of positive relationships of nurturance from one’s parents when one was young onto religious phenomena that then provide some people with some comfort when life is not going so well for them as adults. Spiro (1967) explains witchcraft beliefs in Burma in a similar manner.

Freud also has seen religion as being a mass delusion (1930: 85) and as a blissful hallucinatory confusion (1927: 43). Freud’s first attempt at a psychology of religion is seen in his idea of religion as a universal obsessional neurosis (1907: 126-127). In this view, both religion and its ceremonials [often highly regulated; concerned with purity, prohibitions and taboos; and the issue of guilt] are linked to the phenomenon of obsessional neurosis, characterized by the same features. Both depend on either a repression or suppression of instinct (1907: 124-125).

The view of religious phenomena as psychopathology is very influential and is discussed in the works of many psychoanalytical writings on religion. Masson (1980), for example, saw much of Buddhist and Hindu religious thought as being engaged in a retreat from the difficulties of the world into an ‘oceanic feeling’ where everything is bliss. He sees Ramakrishna, a 19th century Hindu mystic, as suffering from severe psychopathology (1980: 8-9). Badcock (1980), a sociologist, takes Freud literally when Freud says:

Badcock (1980) outlines a schema, a very reductionist one, which shows, to his mind at least, various pathological traits associated with particular societies. Thus, he sees foraging societies based on animism as narcissistic and hunting societies based on totemism as hysterical. He sees Catholic societies as based on megalomania, narcissism and paranoia and Protestant societies as based on obsessionality. This Protestant type of society, he thought, allowed for the development of ‘rationality’ and capitalism in which, he maintained, the epitome of evolutionary thought was reached with the development of psychoanalysis.

While Freud’s psychopathological view of religion seems to imply a negative view, it does have certain interesting aspects making it useful when looking at religious experience, particularly that of healing. Gabriel points out that while Freud’s initial reflex was to look at religion as a collective counterpart to the individual symptom, it was for Freud, ‘…not only a symptom, but also an instrument of expression and communication’ (1983: 149). Gabriel argues that Freud’s view of neurosis changed from its early formulation where it, primarily, had a negative value to a later formulation where it had a more positive value and was seen to be an attempt at a solution to a conflict (1983: 148).

Freud, at times, sees religion as protecting a person against neurosis, although he sometimes sees this taking on of a religious way of life as being at a cost to the individual (1921: 142; 1927: 44; 1930: 85). He explicitly says that the religious anchorite is not necessarily ill and that the process of sublimation may have been used by such people (Freud 1914: 80) [see page 245 ]. This psychopathological view of Freud’s leads on to the foundational view and this combined viewpoint can serve as a positive heuristic tool for studying religion.

The second main view Freud (1927) takes on religion is that it is illusionary. This theme is developed particularly in THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION . In this book, Freud takes religion to be illusionary, as the title suggests, and he takes the illusion to be a defence. In the early part of this work, Freud returns to the idea that civilization is built on, ‘...coercion and renunciation of instinct’ (1927: 7). He postulates an antagonism between the individual and civilization and speaks of civilization needing to be ‘defended’ against the individual (1927: 6). The means of this defence, he sees as coercion and other methods that reconcile men to civilization and compensate them for their sacrifices (1927:10). Freud refers to those aspects of society that reconcile and recompense people as the ‘mental assets of civilization’ (1927: 10). It is stated that:

An example of the idea of compensation gained from taking up an illusion is seen in Roheim’s analysis, in the 1930’s, of the sub-incision practice performed by some Australian aborigine groups. He sees the men as creating a symbolic vagina by the sub-incision process. By this means, the men could separate their sons from the boys’ mothers and unite them to the society of the fathers because the fathers can say, in effect, we too have vaginas, so you belong here and do not need to miss your mothers (1945: 164-65).

Even in THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION , Freud (1927), while stating the similarity of religion to a neurosis and something to be grown out of, also shows some doubt, as if he is struggling to find a better analysis of religious phenomena. He says that, ‘Our analogy does not, to be sure, exhaust the essential nature of religion and does not provide an exact counterpart to neurosis’ (1927: 43). Later, in another work, he comments that perhaps he did a disservice to religion in THE FUTURE OF AN ILLUSION and refers readers to his last great work MOSES AND MONOTHEISM (1939) for a better account of religion, one that talks about the difference between material and historical truth (1935: 72). This view shows that there is, in Freud’s work, both a hermeneutical as well as a positivist orientation towards religious phenomena.

Freud’s third view of the nature of religious phenomena is that it is foundational. This view is of central importance for the work of psychoanalytical anthropologists. In TOTEM AND TABOO , Freud (1913) gives his account of the beginning of society and culture. He brings in the idea of the Oedipus complex as being part of the process of the development of civilization. Here one sees, as Wallace points out, psychology becomes anthropology (1983: 101).

In TOTEM AND TABOO , Freud suggests that before the development of civil society, there was a primitive horde dominated by a ferocious, savage father who kept all the females for himself. The sons grouped together, killed and then devoured the father. They then began to identify with their father and acquired his strength but at the same time felt remorse and guilt. The dead father became even stronger symbolically than when alive and, as a consequence, by a process of deferred obedience, the sons accepted the rights of the father and the renunciation of incestuous and aggressive desires. The brothers then lived in a society governed by laws, rather than being ruled by the most powerful man, and they negotiated and formed alliances to obtain what they desired. The clan [no longer a horde] regularly participated in a ritual meal where they ate part of its totem. This ritual kept alive the power of the father (1913: 145). For Freud, renunciation is at play at the beginning of society, and, at the same time, there is the beginning of morality and religion. Freud talks of the totem meal as:

While Freud’s illusionary/defensive view of religion can be looked at as overlapping with the foundational view, this also applies to his psychopathological view of religion. In OBSESSIVE ACTIONS AND RELIGIOUS PRACTICES , Freud says neurosis deals with repression and religion with suppression or the renunciation of instinctual impulses. However, the renunciation of instinctual impulses in religion is associated with the foundation of human civilization (1907: 125), something he does not associate with the repression that is involved in obsessional neurosis. It is noted that renunciation in religion is not only of a sexual instinct as is renunciation in obsessional neurosis, but it is also a renunciation of self-seeking harmful instincts. While in TOTEM AND TABOO , Freud says neurosis is similar to the great social institutions of art, religion and philosophy, he says they are also caricatures of them. Here, neuroses are seen as asocial and leading people away from the real world, which he seems to equate, not with some physical world, but with the world, ‘… of human society and of the institutions collectively created by it’ (1913: 74). This world is what Lacan refers to as the symbolic.

Freud’s three main views of religious phenomena have been outlined. But, perhaps, more important for constructing a contemporary psychoanalytical understanding of religion is the distinction Boddy makes between orientations that are reductive, naturalizing, rationalizing and functional and those that are phenomenological, contextualizing and pay attention to aesthetics and identity construct concerns (1994: 410, 427). In Freud’s writings, there is a strain between these two poles. While Freud often seems to present himself as engaged in a positivist scientific endeavour with his cultural works being part of the anthropological intellectualist tradition, he can also be considered as being within a symbolist tradition committed to a hermeneutic enterprise. The notions of the real world as being the social world, a symptom as being an expression, truth as being historical rather than material and religion as being an encounter with the ‘other’ point to Freud as belonging to the second tradition.

Psychoanalytical accounts of religious and cultural material have been criticised in various ways. They have been seen as being psychologically reductive, pathologizing and ethnocentric. Stephen (1997), for example, says many analyses of the cargo cult phenomenon see it as being irrational and maladaptive. She sees these analyses as being based on a psychoanalytical approach that privileges the ego over the id, the conscious over the unconscious and secondary process thinking over primary process thinking. Stephen points out that psychoanalytical anthropologists take the second term of each of these categories as being regressive and maladaptive (1997: 337-339, 342-343). Stephen thinks that such accounts of religion shy away from considering political factors (1997: 346).

However, Stephen does not do justice to psychoanalytical theorizing in her criticisms. Stephen, when mentioning Obeyesekere, does not seem to take into account Obeyesekere’s development of the idea of regressive and progressive aspects of experiences, the difference between symbol and symptom and the non-privileging of Freud’s tripartite structure of ego, id and superego, all used to tackle the very question she poses (1990: 9-14, 19-22). ii Stephen also leaves out any reference to Lacan, who rejects the idea of the ego as something that should be strengthened and valued. Rather, Lacan sees the nature of the ego as defensive and alienating. Lacan also rejects Freud’s tripartite structure of the ego, id and superego, which valorises the ego, as being reactionary, and he shows a preference for Freud’s conscious/unconscious typology. There is room in Lacanian psychoanalysis for political discourse to enter its thinking, as demonstrated in Chapter Five where Lacan’s concept of the discourse of the master is used to look at the power of the state in Singaporean society.

Some criticisms of psychoanalytical approaches see them as imposing explanations by way of a psychological discourse that is foreign to the people being studied (Kapferer 1991: xix-xx). Kapferer shows a preference for narrative approaches and tries to steer away from meta-analyses taken from paradigms outside of the people he is studying. However, as Littlewood says, ‘Anthropology is not simply ethnography’ (2003: 260); narrative and description are not everything, and anthropology includes the analysis of what it finds. However, this is not to say that one should not take seriously what informants say about what they are doing. After all, to give psychoanalysis its due, it was founded on a careful listening to the speech of the patient, but it was also based on the idea of a split in consciousness that entails conflict, contestation and self-deception.

Immediately to make out from what someone says something is about that it is about something entirely different is to confuse levels of analysis. To do this, even in psychoanalysis, would be called a ‘wild analysis’ (Freud 1910). Kapferer’s explanation of possession phenomena in Sri Lanka is that, ‘In many ways exorcisms are part of a symbolic discourse revealing the conflicts and contradictions of Sri Lanka’s modern class society’ (1991: xiv). This is Kapferer’s conclusion and no less interesting because of this, but it is not the view of his informants, showing that analysis in terms other than just what informants tell one is also important in anthropological theory.

In eschewing explicit psychological accounts in anthropological analysis, there is a danger of importing unacknowledged psychological assumptions. iii Boddy, in her work, shows a disinclination to use a psychological approach because of the risk of bringing in an interpretation in terms of the individual that is foreign to her informants’ viewpoints. Yet at the end of the work she talks about the Northern Sudanese Zar possession cult as being about increasing consciousness, subjectivity and individuality (1989: 136-137, 307-309). These are, curiously, all themes a psychological approach would address.

Psychoanalysis has been accused of being ethnocentric and a colonialist discourse. Stephen (1997), Brickman (2003) and Khanna (2003) have all argued this point. However, there is a danger in eschewing a psychological approach just because the approach is developed in the West. This would be to see the ‘other’ as so completely ‘other’ that comparisons cannot be made. Such a viewpoint can fall into the danger of being an orientalizing discourse as much as the opposite approach can fall into being a reductionist one. Both Fanon (1986) and Said (1978) have used Freudian ideas for good effect in looking at the politics of colonialism. In Said’s (1978) ORIENTALISM , there is a chapter headed ‘Latent and Manifest Orientalism’, the dichotomy ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ being almost certainly taken from Freud’s concepts of latent and manifest as set out in his dream book (Freud 1900). Said uses the term ‘unconscious’ to describe the word ‘latent’ (1978: 206). He also uses ideas from Freud’s MOSES AND MONOTHEISM , particularly the idea of Moses as an Egyptian, to think about the issues of identity amongst Jewish and other Middle Eastern people (2003). In a similar way, one could use the concept of ‘Lacan the Oriental’ to think about issues of identity amongst Chinese Singaporeans.

The investigation of spirit-medium practices and beliefs, which deal with suffering, illness and healing, involves various aspects of human life. Good speaks about the heteroglossia of the subject matter of disease and suffering and calls for a multiplicity of approaches when trying to understand the phenomena (1994: 62). Psychoanalysis is one perspective anthropologists have taken towards religious matters and spirit-medium phenomena, in particular. In this book, the Lacanian psychoanalytical approach is utilized and developed. In doing this, it is not my intention to show that something in spirit-medium activities resembles or proves a particular Lacanian point of view but to make creative use of Lacanian ideas, modifying them where necessary, to come to some understanding of spirit-medium activities.

Like Moore, I see the enterprise of a psychoanalytical anthropology as being an ‘ethics of engagement’ (2007: 5-6), where psychoanalytical theories are put alongside other theories of society and the ethnographic material in order to give us some insights into the wider aspects of social processes, and how these are related to personal, individual factors of life. Crapanzano calls this endeavour an ‘illuminatory hermeneutic’ and sees it as providing a sort of allegory or counter story against which other explanatory stories can be measured (Molino 2004: 72).

Jacques Lacan has made a significant contribution to psychoanalysis. His ideas have also influenced people working in other subject areas such as feminist studies, cultural studies, literary criticism and political theory. While a psychoanalytical orientation is one approach in anthropology for understanding cultural phenomena, this way of looking at cultural material has not made full use of innovations in psychoanalytical theory provided by the Lacanian orientation. One aim of this book is to contribute to this field. In this section, a general account is given of Lacan and his thinking.

Lacan (1901-1981) started his working life in France as a psychiatrist within the European tradition of phenomenological psychiatry. In 1931, he became a psychoanalyst. At that time, France compared with Britain and the United States had only a small presence of a psychoanalytic culture. The thinking in this psychoanalytical culture was mainly of a positivist, medicalizing nature. Turkle (1992) credits Lacan with changing this state of affairs so that in the late sixties and seventies there developed in France a psychoanalytical culture marked by a strong social/political element.

Lacan had connections with the surrealists. One aspect of their interest was that of automatic writing. This unconscious writing ability is interesting when it comes to thinking about Chinese spirit mediums, some of whom are involved in a process of automatic writing when in a trance. Lacan followed the lectures (1933-1939) of Alexandre Kojeve, the well-known Marxist commentator on Hegel. Again, interestingly for our concerns, during the war years he learnt Chinese.

During the fifties, Lacan came into conflict with the psychoanalytical establishment, particularly over his use of short analytic sessions, rather than the standard forty-five or fifty-minute session. In 1953, he left the Paris Psychoanalytical Society and joined a new psychoanalytical group [Société François de Psychanalyse], not knowing that leaving the Paris Society automatically cancelled his membership of the International Psychoanalytical Association (Turkle 1992: 107-109). Eleven years later, in 1964, the Societe Francois de Psychoanalyse split over the offer to its members of being able to become members of the International Psychoanalytic Society if they cut off ties with Lacan. Lacan then founded a new school, the Freudian School of Paris [Ecole Freudienne de Paris] (Turkle 1992: 116).

Lacan developed his psychoanalytical thinking by reading Freud but also by engagement with structuralism, existentialism, phenomenology, anthropology and linguistics. Mainstream psychoanalytical approaches, particularly that of ego psychology, were castigated for their overvaluation of the ego and for their ignorance of structural linguistics and social sciences. Interestingly, Lacan insisted on seeing psychoanalysis as being different from a psychology of the individual:

Lacan, like Freud, engaged himself with the works of anthropologists. As Trawick says of Lacan’s work, ‘… [it] is already engaged with our own because it is informed by post-Freudian French ethnography, most especially by the work of Mauss, of Mauss’s students, Leenhardt and Griaule and of Lévi-Strauss’ (Trawick 1992: 143). One can add here the works of the linguists Saussure and Jacobson, which were influential in both anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. From such people, Lacan accepted ideas about structure, symbolism, the signifier, language and discourse. Lacan read Freud and developed his own theoretical ideas, some quite different from Freud’s; yet he always saw himself as a Freudian and not as a ‘Lacanian’ (Roudinesco 1990: 662).

At the base of Lacan’s theoretical schema is a central tripartite typology of three orders or registers: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real, within which the psychic life of a person can be located, and which, when joined together in a certain way, gives a person some stability in the world (1988a: 73-34). One advantage of such a typology for anthropology over Freud’s typology of ego, id and superego is that it allows for issues of the ‘cultural’ in human life to be given more valorisation. It decentres the idea of the ego as a rational almost individual part of the self that fights against both instinctual forces [id] and cultural forces [superego], and shows that what Freud calls the id and ego can also be considered as cultural products.

For Lacan, the real is that which underlies reality and which is impossible to be totally taken up in language or by symbolic means. ‘Reality’ here is the symbolically constructed world in which we live, part of the symbolic order (1988a: 66; 2006d: 324). The real can be seen as something like Kant’s noumena or ‘thing in itself’, not very often encountered in its pure form. It would be very easy to see the Tao that Lao-tzu calls the nameless as an example of the real and also the ‘slap’ of the Chan [Zen] master that brings about enlightenment. For Lacan, the real is encountered in psychotic phenomena such as hallucinations, in traumatic phenomena, in symptoms and in mystical experiences, all these states being almost unmediated by the symbolic system. In tang-ki worship, we can see the possession state as being an example of the real. Also, we can see the jouissance [see below] that comes with a confrontation with the words and behaviour of the tang-ki as also being a manifestation of the real. In addition, the illness that people bring to the tang-ki can be taken as an exemplification of the real. A very good example here would be Christopher [see page 64 ], who has been unable to find any mediating symbolic system either in biomedicine, psychotherapy or tang-ki beliefs to make his illness less real.

Before going on to discuss Lacan’s other two registers, we will look at Lacan’s concept of ‘jouissance’ tied up as it is with the real. Jouissance is sometimes translated into English as ‘enjoyment’, but for Lacan, it is more than that, it is also a type of suffering or a ‘painful pleasure’ as Evans (1996: 92) calls it, an experience that is ‘too much’ and that cannot be described in words. We can see such a jouissance in ecstasy or bliss. Also, we see examples of it in the symptom, especially that experienced by the psychotic person.

The concept of the imaginary, while useful clinically in psychoanalysis and in understanding the development of subjectivity, is a more difficult concept to see how it could be of use in anthropology. Moore, however, sees the concept as an important one for anthropology in its attempt to provide an account of the relationship of the individual to the cultural order (2007: 45, 211).

The imaginary for Lacan is not so much what is called imagination but a structuring principle that enables one to see things and primarily ourselves as wholes (1988a: 79; 2006a: 75-81). iv It includes that which Freud calls the ego. For Lacan, the process of the formation of the ego and identity of a person is by way of a mirror imaging process whereby, for example, a baby comes to base its identity on its reflection in a mirror or its (m)others eyes. Before this, Lacan thinks there is not much of a sense of coherency for the baby but only unorganized drives. The mirror-imaging establishment of the ego that brings these drives together is a mimetic process. For Lacan, the establishment of the ego is unifying but also alienating and illusionary in that it is based on an identity, which is not really the true person. It is the beginning of a person’s life as a divided being. The unstable imaginary identification can develop into a more stable symbolic identification when the person is subject to the symbolic order.

Lacan first gave priority to the symbolic order, although much later in his writings the real came more to the fore. Lacan saw himself as restoring this symbolic order to its place in psychoanalysis (2006c: 227). It is a term taken from Lévi-Strauss and refers to the laws of society, which govern kinship and gift relationships. Lacan sometimes refers to this order as ‘the law’. It is also often associated with the term the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ (2006c: 230). Lacan sees the resolution of the Oedipus complex as concerned with this order of existence. A person accedes to the symbolic world of culture and society becoming a subject by subjecting himself or herself or having to ‘kowtow’ to the father’s ‘no’ to the child’s imaginary relationship with its mother (2006c: 230, 319-320). One also sees an instance of this principle in Freud’s (1913) primal myth in TOTEM AND TABOO , where the brother’s accession to the symbolic realm provides for the establishment of society. They can then enter into relationships with each other where their desires [rather than needs] are met by means of negotiation and involvement in the various symbolic systems of society. It is in relationship to the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ and the concomitant entry into society with its language structure that Lacan builds up his nosology of psychopathology.

A use is made of psychoanalytical ideas, including Lacanian ideas, in some anthropological studies on masculinization, male initiation rituals and practices such as circumcision, subincision, male homosexuality and nose bleeding (Lidz and Lidz 1977), (Lidz 1989), (Herdt 1981, 1987), (Heald 1994), (Hiatt 1994), (Gillison 1994), (Bull 1996/1997). Early investigators of these phenomena tended to see castration anxiety and Oedipal factors at play; circumcision, for example, being seen as a symbolic castration. Others pointed to pre-phallic and pre-oedipal themes, especially the idea of men’s envy of women as factors at play in these rituals (Bettelheim 1952), (Dundes 1976), (Lidz and Lidz 1977), (Herdt 1981), (Heald 1994). Dundes (1976), for example, asks the question of how a symbolic castration can make a boy into a man and concludes that it does not – it makes the boy into a woman. The Lacanian categories of real, symbolic and imaginary as they relate to both castration and the father are used by me in examining the Sambian New Guinea initiation ritual (Bull 1996/1997). The practice of nose bleeding in the Sambian rituals and circumcision in other cultures can be considered to be a symbolic castration that allows boys entry into the symbolic, cultural world of men by undergoing the initiation. Other commentators, in my opinion, make the mistake of seeing such practices as imaginary phenomena.

The Lacanian concept of the phallus can be seen as being similar to the structuring principle at work in Sambian life that enables boys to become men. By use of the Lacanian typology of imaginary, symbolic and real, Obeyesekere’s conclusion that these rites are regressive is avoided (Obeyesekere 1990: 61). Spiro’s notion, that the rituals indicate an incomplete formation of the Oedipus complex and are thus a waste of energy that forces people to attempt to complete the process through the rituals, is also avoided (1987b: 96). Herdt’s idea that in the case of the Sambia there is a doubt about masculinity, seen in the ‘male homosexuality’ acted out in the rituals and that it is a transsexual fantasy stemming from this ambivalence is also avoided (1981: 256, 263). v

Moore (2007) analyzes the same material. She would seem to come to the same conclusions as those criticised in my article for seeing the phenomenon as imaginary, rather than symbolic material.

In addition to the criticisms directed at psychoanalysis as a whole, mentioned in the last section, there are two specific criticisms of Lacanian psychoanalysis that stand out. Moore and Sangren, while quite positive about the use of a Lacanian orientation in anthropology, have problems with particular aspects of this orientation. Moore sees the concept of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ and the associated idea of the phallus as the key ordering principles of society as being ethnocentric and phallocentric (1994: 45). Sangren says the concept of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ lacks anthropological imagination in that it does not seem to tell us about what real fathers do in any situation (1997: 100). Both have problems with Lacan’s philosophy of language and its place in determining both the human subject and the cultural system in which we live. They see this as being rather a fixed concept that does not allow for cultural particularities to be taken into account in any given analysis of social phenomena. Sangren puts this as a privileging of ‘langue’ over ‘parole’ and as a fetishization of the signifier (1997: 83,107).

The first criticism of Lacanian theorizing being used in anthropology, that the Lacanian concept of the Name-of-the-Father and associated concepts are phallocentric, has generated a huge debate, particularly in feminist circles. It is not entirely clear, though, that the ideas are phallocentric. Most criticisms of Lacan miss the point that the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ is an ordering principle rather than an ontological principle and that it is a synchronic principle rather than a diachronic one (Richardson 1999: 212-213). The Lacanian analyst, Richardson, suggests it is neither a patriarchal nor matriarchal principle but an ambiarchal one (1999: 213). The fact, for example, that a group of people in China are said to have no fathers (Hua 2001) does not mean that the principle of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ is not operating. However, this is not to say, as Sangren suggests, that this concept is purely a theoretical one. In the psychoanalytic clinic, distinctions between clinical structures of neurosis and psychosis are dependent on the operation or non-operation of this principle. It is thus considered a useful heuristic tool rather than an ontological category.

While I initially thought that the concept of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ would be especially useful in investigating tang-ki worship in Singapore, given the strong presence of patriarchal themes in Chinese society, it turned out to be not as important or interesting as other principles.

The second criticism in regards to language and Lacanian thought is a complex one. Moore mentions that the most valuable part of Lacan’s theories for anthropology is its concern with language (1994: 144). However, she also criticises Lacan’s theory of language as being about structure rather than discourse (1994: 147). The Lacanian saying ‘the unconscious is structured like a language’, the emphasis given to the signifier over the signified and various other Lacanian ideas all point, for Moore and Sangren, towards the idea that the central aspect of language for Lacan is that of structure. While this might be true at one level, the situation is more complex. For example, Lacan also had a concept of ‘full speech’ being speech that makes a difference in the real world; it is performative and creative (2006c: 206-211). Full speech can be seen to be similar to what the philosopher Austin calls ‘performative’ speech, where something actual is brought about through the speech (Austin 1962). One aim of psychoanalysis is to encourage full speech as this can make a difference to a person’s life. The tang-ki’s discourse can also be taken as an example of full speech.

For Lacan, language is not everything and cannot encompass everything. There is the real and while there may not be a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified and between signifier and actual things in the world, there are for Lacan anchoring points where a signifier is connected to a certain signified (2006h: 681-682). Without these anchoring points, one would have psychosis. The symbolic order for Lacan is not just language; it includes the rules and laws of society.

The notions of the self, subjectivity, identity and the person have become of increasing interest for anthropology; even if, as Jenkins and Barrett maintain, interest in these categories has lessened in psychiatry and psychology (2004: 7). These notions are at the heart of psychoanalysis. The concept of subjectivity is a central concept of Lacanian thought. Also associated with ‘subjectivity’ in psychoanalysis is the idea of psychopathology, which to some extent, can be characterized as a lack of subjectivity. In this work on Chinese spirit mediums, the Lacanian thinking on subjectivity and psychopathology is used as an interlocutory medium to assist the understanding of the subject matter.

For a long period in the history of anthropology, particularly in the United Kingdom, anthropology was seen to be about cultural phenomena while psychology and psychoanalysis were seen to be about the individual. Whittaker (1992) gives the early 1970s, with the paper of Meyer Fortes (1973) ‘On the Concept of the Person among the Tallensi’, as the beginning of an interest of anthropology in the notion of the self. He notes the Huxley Memorial Lecture in 1938 called ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self’, given by Marcel Mauss (1985), as an example of an exception to the lack of interest in the idea of the self (Whittaker 1992: 194). In the 1980s, this interest in the ‘self’ continued and is seen in the work of Heelas and Lock (1981) and Carrithers, Collins and Lukes (1985). In North America, the interest in the ‘self’ has always been present and is seen in the work of Sapir (1949), Hallowell (1955) and Bateson (1972). The work of George Herbert Mead (1934) on the notion of the self made an important impact on American thinking in general and on the symbolic interactionist school. More recently, we see in the publications of Jenkins and Barrett (2004); Biehl, Good and Kleinman (2007) and Moore’s (2007) an explicit concern with notions of subjectivity, thus showing that there is a continued interest in the concept of the self and person, this time under the category of subjectivity. In their works, one sees the concepts of the individual and that of culture closely associated with that of subjectivity.

Biehl, Good and Kleinman note that there is no consensus in anthropology on the definition of ‘subjectivity’, and thus no one school can explain all aspects of subjectivity (2007: 15). The authors’ opinion is that ethnographers have often failed to engage relevant theorists of subjectivity and that, conversely, relevant theorists of subjectivity have often failed to be concerned with the everyday reality of people. They call for the need to develop more complex theories of subjectivity that are ethnographically grounded in local situations (2007: 12-15). I see my work as being a contribution to this field in that it deals with the complex theory of Lacanian subjectivity in relationship to tang-ki healing in Singapore and the individuals engaged in the healing.

In psychoanalytical anthropology, the concept of the individual and the relationship of the individual to the cultural world have long been at the centre of its concern. Nuckolls sees the understanding of cultural material as involving a dialectical tension between explanations of external causes and explanations involving of internal causes [which he calls motivational factors] (Nuckolls 1998: xxii). He sees social theorists, such as Durkheim, Weber and Parsons, as unable fully to account for the motivational aspects of those they study, while he considers Freud as able to provide a language to discuss motivation arising from tension and ambivalence. Most social theorists, according to Nuckolls, have ideas about how values are motivational and about the nature of what it is to be a person. However, he contends that in anthropological analyses these ideas are often assumed or intuited rather than explained, while in psychoanalytic theory there are formulated principles and theories about issues of motivation and how the individual is related to the social. Nuckolls sees these ideas as being useful to the anthropologist and he writes, ‘Psychoanalysis has developed methods on the basis of these principles, which, even if they are wrong are still better than ethnological intuitionism, simply because they are overtly theorized’ (1998: 52). While psychoanalytical anthropological theory generally deals with the question of the relationship of the individual to the cultural social world, it is in Lacanian psychoanalysis that there can be seen to be an advance over previous psychoanalytical formulations in the conceptualization of this relationship.

Lacanian psychoanalysis does not see its approach as a psychology of the individual. As Weiner says, psychoanalysis in the Lacanian tradition is more of a social science than a psychology (1999: 238). It is concerned with otherness and interrelationships rather than intra-relationship and many of its concepts show this to be the case. For example, the major concept of psychoanalysis, that of the ‘unconscious’, is for Lacan not seen as being something located inside a person and about individual biological drives but as being ‘the discourse of the Other’ [the other here being the symbolic order] (Lacan 2006e: 10). It must be stressed, though, that Lacan does not see the subject as just being ‘the discourse of the Other’, a position which would render his idea of the subject as similar to Lévi-Strauss’ concept of the subject; that of being purely a product of structure. vi Lacan keeps both the notion of structure and that of subjectivity in his theory.

A second major concept in psychoanalysis, that of ‘transference’ is for Lacan not just a carryover of feelings from one person to the analyst, but, using Mauss and Lévi-Strauss’ ideas on exchange, Lacan sees it as:

Moore, though critical of Lacanian psychoanalysis in some instances, does suggest it is in the area of subjectivity and the related areas of gender and identity that Lacanian theory has a part to play in anthropological concerns (1994: 148; 2007: 43-45). She says that the Lacanian view of subjectivity moves anthropological thought away from being an essentialist position as to the nature of the human self (1994: 148).

Sangren also calls for an incorporation of Lacanian ideas into anthropological analysis. He says that anthropology cannot avoid engaging psychoanalytical theory if one wants to understand the relationship of the individual and his or her motivations to the social-cultural world and how both are producers of each other (1997: 8). To understand such concerns, he says we need to understand how desire operates and to do this one needs psychoanalysis (1997: 9, 31). Sangren is critical of both interpretivists like Geertz and postmodernists like Foucault, DeCerteau and Althusser, whom he accuses of elision of the idea of the ‘subject as agent’ from their discourse and investing their key concepts such as ‘culture as a symbolic system’ in the case of Geertz and ‘discourse’ in the case of Foucault with both agency and desire (Sangren 1997: 41-45).

A major criticism of the use of psychoanalytic theory in anthropology is that it pathologizes people as well as societies. Good gives a summary of critics’ views of the use of notions of psychopathology in anthropology: ‘Diagnostic categories reify western ethnopsychological concepts, decontextualize symptoms, fail to attend to cultural forms and personal meanings and fall prey to the category fallacy’ (1992: 186). Clearly, if Lacanian psychoanalysis is just about psychopathology in the positivist psychiatric sense and if it has nothing to say about culture and society, then Lacanian psychoanalysis would have nothing new to say about possession experience. On the contrary, because it has a lot more to say about culture and living in society, about becoming a person and about subjectivity [all of these aspects tied to the Lacanian notion of ‘psychopathology’], it can serve as a useful tool for looking at possession experience.

Psychopathology is the study, ‘…which tries to understand the human experience of madness or abnormal phenomena’ (Stanghellini 2004: 25). While the school of phenomenological psychiatry started as a descriptive venture based on the work of Jaspers and was interested in understanding abnormal phenomena in human beings, Stanghellini, a psychiatrist, considers it developed into an objectivizing enterprise, less interested in understanding than in categorization. While taking Littlewood’s point that any particular nosology of pathology is always a viewpoint embedded in a particular social context and that psychiatric nosology is based on a methodological individualism (Littlewood 2002: 31), I maintain that the Freudian/Lacanian notion of psychopathology can be a useful heuristic tool in helping one understand tang-ki healing. It can help integrate what Littlewood calls the naturalistic and the personalistic paradigms used in studying religious phenomena (1996: 179). The approach to psychopathology in Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen as, in part, coming from the psychiatric phenomenological tradition, which includes a hermeneutic aspect. For Lacan [as it was for Hegel], madness can be seen as being at the limits of human reason, as a type of horizon in relationship to which people develop their [philosophical] anthropology.

Contemporary works on the association of spirit possession experiences to notions of psychopathology are not common. Ewing (1997), for example, uses a Lacanian psychoanalytic analysis of Sufi masters [pir] in Pakistan to show how subjectivities are constructed within certain political and social discourses of modernity and post-modernity, without mentioning the concept of psychopathology. Chan’s (2002) work on tang-ki worship in Singapore leaves out of account the practice of healing and any ideas of pathology [suffering].

There is still an interest by some anthropologists, mainly working in medical anthropology, in how psychopathology conceptualized in psychiatric and psychological theories is related to local taxonomies of illness and local contexts of illness and healing, whether in Western countries or elsewhere. Littlewood discusses this in his book on the establishment of a new religious group in relationship to its founder’s experience of cerebral disease and in other works on the relationship of multiple personality disorder to spirit possession (1993, 1996, 2002).

Martinez-Hernaez’s (2000) thoughts on the ‘symptom’ pay attention to the question of how psychopathology is viewed in biopsychiatry and anthropology. Boddy, while criticizing psychological reductionism, returns at the end of her paper to what she thinks is an interesting and important line of research, the relationship of the experience of being a spirit medium to the psychiatric classification of multiple personality disorder and to other Western psychiatric classifications such as eating disorders (1994: 427, 262-263). In my own psychoanalytic practice, I have encountered patients who say they see or hear people that others are not aware of [called visual and auditory hallucinations by psychiatrists]. Some patients with eating disorders have seen their illness as almost ‘other’ to themselves and as something they have to fight. Some of these examples are very similar to accounts of experiences of gods or spirits given by tang-kis and their followers. While not saying that these people with mental illness have exactly the same experience as those who are tang-kis, there are some interesting ideas that come from keeping the two accounts together, and knowledge of one area of experience can help understand the other area.

The neo-Kraepelinian biopsychiatric model is dominant in psychiatry (Good 1992; Luhrmann 2000; Good, Subandi, Good 2007; Lovell 2007). Good (1993) talks about the ‘extraordinary’ paradigm shift in American psychiatry from a psychoanalytical model to a biological one, and he notes the challenge of this change for anthropologists interested in the role of culture in psychopathology. He is disappointed by the lack of interest by anthropologists in this shift of paradigms and by the lack of interest of anthropologists in issues of psychopathology. Good calls for these subjects to be topics for future anthropological research (1992: 182). The lack of interest in the concept of psychopathology and healing is worrying, as, at present, the biomedical model in psychiatry is becoming more widespread and hegemonic over other models, in both Western and non-Western countries. Littlewood’s (2002) work on Western pathologies and Jenkins and Barrett’s (2004) edited work on schizophrenia are noticeable exceptions to this lack of interest in notions of psychopathology. It would seem that the study of spirit medium beliefs and practices and how illness is dealt with, along with how the beliefs and practices relate to concepts of psychopathology could make a significant contribution to a critique of the essentialism of biomedical psychiatry.

Freud’s notion of psychopathology can be understood in two ways. It can be taken as a reductionist pathologizing approach when used to analyze religious experiences. Also, it can, from a wider viewpoint, be understood in a less reductionist way. The psychoanalytical concept of psychopathology can be useful in helping to deconstruct a system of psychopathology based on the medical gaze by substituting a more hermeneutic orientation based on listening to the patient. In psychoanalysis, pathology is, as Forsyth notes, on one end of a continuum with normality at the other end. At the pathological end, there is a concentration of extreme conflict that is present all along the continuum (Forsyth 1997a: 149). For Freud, the conflict is mainly an intrapsychic one, whereas for Lacan it is more to do with a relationship to the social world. Skultans sees the taking away of the division between normal and pathological as one of Freud’s greatest achievements and notes that the abnormal and pathological in this view are not part of a separate reality but merely a variant of it. Skultans says:

Lacan, while utilizing a traditional categorization of psychopathology, saw the categories not so much as medical categories but as existential categories and ways of being in the world. In his nosology, Lacan makes a differential diagnosis between three main structures of pathology: neurosis, psychosis and perversion, each governed by a particular process - in the case of neurosis, repression; in the case of psychosis, foreclosure [of the Name-of-the-Father] and in that of perversion, disavowal (1989b; 2006b: 178-184; 2006g: 462-463; 2006h: 697-700). Within neurosis, Lacan saw three different substructures: obsessionality, hysteria and phobia. In psychosis, he saw some difference between paranoia, schizophrenia and autism. As well as contrasting the three structures in terms of three different mechanisms that keep these structures operating, Lacan saw these three core structures as differing from each other in their relationship to his concepts of the ‘Name-of-the-Father’, the ‘Other’ [as both real people and society’s rules and laws] and in the prevailing discourse of each.

Broadly speaking, the psychotic person has not been sufficiently subjected to the ‘Name-of-the-Father’, has not incorporated it into their being and thus has immense difficulty living in the social-cultural world. The perverse person has partly incorporated this structuring principle, while the neurotic person has incorporated it, although is still troubled by it. The psychotic person, then, takes on language and the order of society somewhat more problematically than the neurotic does.

For Lacan, everyone has to take on a certain relationship to other people and to the cultural and social world. This relationship involves inhabiting one of the positions - neurotic, psychotic or perverse. A study then, utilizing these Lacanian terms of reference can be understood as more of a descriptive, rather than a pathologizing enterprise, an ‘illuminatory hermeneutic’ (Crapanzano 2004), rather than an explanatory one. The terms of pathology are used because they are essential in the Lacanian discourse for talking about subjectivity. The point being made here can perhaps be seen more succinctly in the title of a Lacanian work on psychopathology and diagnosis by Verhaeghe (2004): ON BEING NORMAL AND OTHER DISORDERS: A MANUAL FOR CLINICAL PSYCHODIAGNOSIS .

From these conceptualizations, Lacan works out a typology of four possible structures of discourse or social bond that most people can be seen to be positioned in (Lacan 1969/70):

The discourse of the master and the discourse of the university are considered to be what the obsessional person might adopt, although the discourse of the master has also been associated with paranoia. These two discourses are regarded in Lacanian thought to be concerned with filling the lack at the heart of our being and so stultifying both desire and jouissance [enjoyment]. They are concerned with order, structure and totalizing processes.

Freud was interested in various aspects of culture and the social life of people. Throughout his writings, there are many references to non-Western societies. However, one does not see many references to Oriental societies in his work. Two of the most interesting allusions to Eastern thought in Freud’s works are where he makes mention of the concept of ‘the oceanic feeling’ (1930: 64-5, 72) and also where he mentions the ‘Nirvana principle’ (1915: 121; 1920: 56; 1924: 159-160).

In Freud’s thinking, there is a concept of a death principle being at work in a human being that is turned against the person in the first instance and then against others, in aggression. This instinct or drive is opposed to Eros or the life instinct. The death drive strives towards a reduction of tension (1920: 38-41). Freud, also at times, calls this tendency to reduce tension to zero the ‘Nirvana principle’ (1920: 56).

A similar concept to the ‘Nirvana principle’ is that which Freud calls the ‘oceanic feeling’, a term he derived from Roman Rolland, described as, ‘… a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole’ and as being limitless (Freud 1930: 64-65). Freud tends to see this feeling as an experience similar to the experience of a person where there is a dissolution of the bonds of the ego that structures a person and separates them from the outside world. He sees it as a regressive, narcissistic phenomenon parallel to the situation of a helpless infant needing a father figure (1930: 72).

Early psychoanalytical theorizing took up this view of Eastern religions as endorsing an attitude of a passive retreat from life. Alexander’s (1999) paper ‘Buddhist Training as an Artificial Catatonia’ is a classic paper in this type of analysis. Masson’s work on Hinduism (1980) follows the same line of thinking. Since these early works, there have been various revisionist studies on the relationship of psychoanalysis to Eastern religions and philosophy. These cover Hinduism (Kakar 1991; Vaidyanathan and Kripal 1999) and Buddhism (Molino 1998; Safran 2003). A recent work, edited by Akhtar (2005), on psychoanalysis and India has contributions on religious issues. There are some writings on Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis (Fromm, Suzuki and De Martino 1974; Molino 1998; Moncayo 1998a; 1998b) and also some on Taoism and psychoanalysis (Suler 1993). Moncayo and Molino write on Lacanian psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism. Jung, of course, often referred to Eastern culture and religion in his writings. viii

Throughout his works, Lacan refers to various aspects of religious thought, including Eastern religious and philosophical thinking. Lacan’s SEMINAR ONE starts with a reference to a Zen Buddhist master breaking the silence with a sarcastic remark (1988a: 1). SEMINAR TWO contains a reference to Chinese theatre (Lacan 1988b: 264-265). The ETHICS SEMINAR contains a discussion of the monosyllabic signifying units of Chinese language (1992: 167) and to Buddhist and Taoist traditions of ‘the great man’ (1992: 175-176). In FUNCTION AND FORM OF SPEECH , there is a reference to the Chinese language being similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics and to the language of dreams (2006c: 221), and a reference to the kwa (see page 51 ) of the I CHING (Lacan 2006c: 228). In THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS , there is a passage where Lacan takes the example of the Taoist Chuang-tzu and the butterfly dream to help his thinking about knowledge and reality (1979: 76). In SEMINAR EIGHTEEN , there is an extended consideration of Chinese language, mainly via Mencius’ thoughts (1971).

Lacan had a keen interest in the East, particularly in China and Japan. During the Second World War, he gained a degree in Chinese language at The School of Oriental Languages in Paris. He took up the study of Chinese again in the late 1960’s with the well-known orientalist Francois Cheng (1994), author of EMPTY AND FULL: THE LANGUAGE OF CHINESE PAINTING . Lacan was due to join Roland Bathes, Julia Kristeva and others on a trip to China in 1974 but, according to Guo (2003), pulled out in protest at the Chinese government’s negative treatment of Confucianism. Lacan twice visited Japan.

The structure of Chinese and Japanese languages and how this could inform us about reality and language very much interested Lacan. In FUNCTION AND FIELD OF SPEECH AND LANGUAGE , Lacan points to the structure of Chinese language and Egyptian hieroglyphics as being similar to Freud’s idea of the structure of a dream, where the manifest content is like a rebus (2006: 221). Serrano points out that ultimately the rebus remains phonetic so that taking the rebus as a metaphor for the language of the dream keeps it completely unrelated to its significance (1997: 98). Serrano suggests that the reference in Lacan’s text to Chinese characters helps Lacan provide a way out of this dilemma. He thinks that Chinese characters provide a rationale for Lacan’s idea that the dream or unconscious is structured like a language, the Chinese character being more than just a phonetic representation and that it can represent what is seen but not heard or spoken (1997: 101). Lacan, later in the same text, uses an aspect of Chinese Taoist divinatory philosophy to help understand the way language works (2006: 228).

In BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE there is a description of a small boy mastering the absence of his mother by means of the game of lowering and raising a reel over the edge of a cot while at the same time uttering his first words, Fort Da [German], meaning ‘gone, here’ (2006c: 228). Freud’s point here, according to Lacan, is to highlight the function of the symbolic structure of language in managing the world. Lacan, in his commentary on Freud’s text, talks of the presence made of absence by words. He also talks about how words make as well as destroy things.

Lacan refers to the single and broken line of the Chinese kwa as similarly being at the base of the Chinese language. The kwa, taken from the I CHING , is made up of eight groups of single and divided lines with which the Chinese divine the future. According to Serrano, by reflecting on these lines the ancient Chinese could see how the universe was arranging itself (1997: 101). Lacan saw this as an example of how the structure of language and a multitude of meanings can be had from a simple structure. Serrano’s conclusion is that Lacan could have used the Chinese language as the model for his ideas about the language of the unconscious; and that even if it did not serve as the actual model, he suggests it could help one understand Lacan’s account of language (1997: 104). In SEMINAR SEVENTEEN , Lacan explicitly acknowledges that thinking about the Chinese language helped him in coming to an understanding of the function of the signifier (1969/70: III 11). According to Guo, Foucault and Derrida were also inspired in their work by their reading of the I CHING (2003: 2).

One sees in ideas about the self and ego another point of convergence between Eastern thought forms and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Moncayo says the two thought forms converge on the idea of the true self as no self (1998b: 383). For Lacan, the ego, usually taken by psychoanalysts as the subject, is imaginary. In Buddhism, generally, and in Zen Buddhism, in particular, the idea of the self or the soul as an independent, permanent entity is illusory, false and leads to suffering. Therefore, we have in Buddhism the teaching of anatta [no self]. In Taoism and Confucian thought, the self is seen as a function of its relationship to the world and other people. This idea of the self resonates with Lacanian thinking about the subject. In Taoism, the notions of ‘wuzhi’ [no knowledge], ‘wuwei’ [no action] and ‘wuyu’ [no desire or objectless desire], according to Hall and Aymes, help, ‘…establish the deferential relations that [for the Chinese] give rise to the self at any given moment’ (Hall and Aymes 1998: 50). Sullivan, a Lacanian analyst and Chinese medical practitioner, points out that Lacan’s discourse of the analyst depends on, ‘The vacating of both mastery and knowledge as source of agency in social discourse…’ (2006: 35). He sees this as allowing for something else to happen and that it is similar to the Chinese sage’s demeanour of not actively engaging in any particular action or depending on a knowledge attached to any particular desire.

Both Lacanian psychoanalysis and Eastern thought have sophisticated ideas on the notions of lack, nothingness, the void and emptiness that contrast strongly with the concepts of presence and being in Western thought. At the centre of the human subject, for Lacan, is nothingness or lack of being, a gap around which the subject builds a false identity by using various fantasy structures. The goal in psychoanalysis is to transcend fantasy structures and the different identifications built up on them, leaving a lack that will promote desire and a movement in the world. I show in another work that the concept of desire used in Lacan is not the same concept against which Buddhism rails against (Bull 2000a).

For Lacan, language makes a presence out of absence. In discussing this, Lacan mentions the Heideggerian notion of the importance of the vase being its space or nothingness 1992: 120). One also sees in Lao-tzu’s writings a similar idea when he mentions the wheel and the gap between the spokes being important and also the space in a pot (Lao-tzu 1982). It is probably the case, according to Wohlfart (2003), that Heidegger was influenced by Lao-tzu in his thinking about the vase. Therefore, another influence of Taoist philosophy on Lacan comes through Heidegger. For Buddhism, emptiness [sunnyata] and for Taoism, nothingness [wu] are at the base of the becoming of things and people.

While Buddhism and Taoism are suspicious of conceptual thinking and the use of language to obtain truth and aim to move beyond this, Lacan does see that language, on some occasions, can help one get beyond the symbolic and imaginary realm and can also protect us from being overtaken by the real. He does not avow, as some mistakenly think, that language is everything. There is the ‘real’, which is beyond language and this ‘real’ can be affected by analytic practice. Lacan, in SEMINAR SEVENTEEN , looks at language, especially in its written form and especially in Chinese and Japanese script, to develop the idea that there is a discourse that is not a semblant and is not metaphorical, as he sees language as being, and which can pick up on the ‘real’; although he characterizes this ‘real’ as empty. When talking about calligraphy, Lacan says that the purpose of the stroke is one of erasure, similar to the function clouds take on in Eastern paintings, as having the purpose of obliterating form and revealing something else (1969/70: VII 13). This something else is for Lacan the ‘real’.

The discussion above shows there are various convergences of interest between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Chinese thought. Much of the discussion, though, operates at a philosophical and theoretical level that practitioners of religious ritual are not necessarily aware of nor interested in, although such themes may or may not inform their thoughts and practices. Certainly, the tang-kis and their followers are not much interested in discussions about these matters. For tang-ki worship, the main point of correspondence with Lacanian psychoanalysis may be found at the level of style rather than theory. Indeed, Lacan at the beginning of the ECRITS cites the adage, ‘The style is the man himself’ (2006e: 9). Lacan’s own style is considered notoriously difficult, a factor that Lacan says is intentional (2006g: 492). Muller and Richardson liken Lacan’s writings and thinking to a rebus or a hermetic obscurity (1982: 3). They describe the style as, ‘… elusive-allusive-illusive …, the encrustation with rhetorical tropes, the kaleidoscopic erudition, the deliberate ambiguity, the auditory echoes, the oblique irony, the disdain of logical sequence, the prankish playfulness and sardonic [sometimes scathing] humor…’ (1982: 3).

Marini describes Lacan’s style as Mallarméan in its use of syntactical ruptures and ellipsis which suppress words or parts of sentences. He also describes the style as similar to the oratorical tradition with long drawn-out comparisons, subordinate clauses at the beginning and the use of paradoxical reversals (1992: 89-90). Still others would say it is like psychotic speech (Benvenuto and Kennedy 1986: 12).

The difficulty in understanding Lacan’s writings and thoughts parallels the difficulties in understanding Lacanian interpretations given to analysands. Lacan says that interpretations are not meant to be understood, but are designed to evoke (Lacan 2006c: 247-249). Lacan’s aphoristic, paradoxical style of writing is also the style of Chinese philosophy. One finds this in Confucian, Chinese-Buddhist and Taoist writings, especially in Chuang Tzu’s work. We also find much of the same style in tang-ki worship.