Lilia Baglioni is a psychoanalyst in private practice, member of the SPI (IPA) and the International Group Psychotherapy Association (IGPA). A former researcher at the physiological and clinical psychology departments of the National Research Council (CNR), she was National Scientific Director of ABA (Association for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia) and is a co-founder of ARGO (Associ…

Psycho-analysis emerged as the science of modern man within the decline of metaphysics, the limitation of philosophy'' claims to immutable knowledge. Established by Plato as speculation upon eternal structures, followed by the subjectification of truth in Christianity, Kant, and Romanticism, philosophy became with Heidegger a knowledge of the event situated within contingency and history. As metaphysical imperiousness fades, psychoanalysis is recognized as an historical project, invoking a new understanding of truth and bringing up questions about friendship, charity, health and salvation.

In the field of psychotherapy, there is much talk about a "deep division" between two different modes of understanding: the scientific that favors objectivity and the humanistic that privileges the subject. The author speaks to this "deep division," and he shows how the issues have been excessively and counterproductively dichotomized in the literature of psychoanalysis and in other arenas of psychological discourse as well. In doing so, he shows as well how this false dichotomy has in large measure been a product of a vicious circle, in which excessive statements from one end of the artificial divide justify (and perpetuate) excessive statements from the other end. Building on his earlier discussions of the ways in which vicious circles operate in our lives, he explicates here the role of vicious circles in the epistemological and methodological debates that have become increasingly central to the discourse and debates in our field involving the role of positivism, natural science, or empirical validation of the effectiveness of our methods on the one hand, and postmodernism, hermeneutics, and constructivism on the other.

Is there a God of psychoanalysts or shall we accept what we well know that Freud said as the first and last word about the relation of psychoanalysis and religion? If we admit that our patients speak to the analyst as a guarantor of truth, a necessary Someone to whom they address the "oration", a being who is constructed by them, the reality of the Sujet Supposé Savoir is post- and not pre-discursive.

Is there a God of psychoanalysts or shall we accept what we well know that Freud said as the first and last word about the relation of psychoanalysis and religion? If we admit that our patients speak to the analyst as a guarantor of truth, a necessary Someone to whom they address the "oration", a being who is constructed by them, the reality of the Sujet Supposé Savoir is post- and not pre-discursive. In the analytic practice arises a specifically psychoanalytic God. What would that God be like and how would he manifest himself? What relation would there be between him and the God of revelation, the philosophers' God, the God of Kant and the God denied by Freud? The answer should be sought in Lacan's thought. A Lacan who was always loath to call himself either believer or atheist and who expressed himself in terms that enrich this subject precisely because of the provocation he cast upon the two terms of that polar opposition.

Like Freud, Schönberg purifies his Moses figure by strictly opposing the imaginary und the symbolic. A closer investigation however shows that Moses and Aaron subverts Schönberg's own intentions. This subversion is produced by something which Derrida calls the Òforce of rupture of the scripturalÓ. Seen from this angle, the problematic of Schönberg's work seems to anticipate the very modern question, linked to the horrors of the Nazi period, of how to deal with that which is beyond representation.

This paper treats the failure as well as the paradox of representation staged in Schönberg's Moses and Aaron in terms of an extended commentary on the Second Commandment. For example, it shows how God is represented in the opera by the very voice that God makes impossible. In addition, it historically situates a critique of the imaginary father of fascism against both Freud and Schönberg's Moses, with their concern with the insufficiency of the imaginary and with the stuttering occasioned by the "Real," i.e., by an encounter with that which cannot be represented.

In this interview, psychoanalyst and JEP co-editor Anthony Molino engages Christopher Bollas in an exploration of the radical turn in his recent literary output. Focusing primarily on his novels Dark at the End of the Tunnel and I Have Heard the Mermaid Singing, Bollas here discusses in detail his move away from the traditional psychoanalytic essay into the realms of fiction (and theatre). Finding the former suitable to "a much more radical form of theorizing" psychoanalysis, Bollas explores both the internal pressures to which he responded in resorting to the genre, as well as contemporary societal pressures and themes which the genre more readily accomodates. Among these are analyses of modern-day Islam's rise and revolt against the West, and of what Bollas sees as the loss of character in our globalised consumer culture: expressions both of the "catastrophe" that engulfs and pervades our culture, the determinants of which remain, for the most part, "unconscious".

The author, inspired by movie scenes featuring a woman urinating - scenes that are becoming more and more frequent today - develops a number of considerations connecting a particular type of post-modern aesthetics of transparency ("showing all") with the scientific ideal of objectivity. What he calls "porno-objective distancing" is asserting itself in various art forms and has contributed to modifying the corporeal image of woman, tearing it away from the centuries-old tradition of the sublimed womanly body.

In contrast to Freud, for whom the feminine subject is a subject of lack seeking to compensate for deprivation of the phallus, Lacan discovers a feminine jouissance. Sexual difference, for Lacan, is not determined by anatomy but is fundamentally dissymmetrical, arising from different ways of relating to the phallus and to castration. The feminine subject approaches lack and the Other jouissance from the not-all and handles the semblance of the phallus in relation to the desire of the Other through masquerade or through supporting the position of the object cause of desire.

(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005)

(Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2004)

Born into a Jewish family in Boston in 1936, Paul Roazen died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 3 November 2005, while still working on a new study of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt. He was a member of the prestigious English journal, Psychoanalysis and History, edited by John Forrester.