Enlightenment and Psychoanalysis: Will we still call "Logos" our god?

Abstract

This article examines the proposition of “Our God, Logos” written by Freud in “The Future of an Illusion” (1927) in light of the concept of “enlightenment” as understood by Adorno and Horkheimer. We show how some current forms of clinical practice in psychology and psychoanalysis wager on the “disenchantment” of the unconscious as a course for the treatment. In dialogue with critical psychology, we show how, in intending to eliminate the unconscious from the analytical scene, these practices operate in favor of an ideological project that seeks to establish, in the insurrectional place of the unconscious, the politically compromised instance of the ego. We also propose, as a counterpoint, a Lacanian rereading of the Freudian Logos which recalls that the notion of Logos specifically refers to the function of speech [parole] and points to dimension of the “saying” [dire]. Thus, we ask what "(en)lightning" can mean for a psychoanalysis that is critical of a belief in an illuminated reason which would occlude the unconscious and at the height of the forgotten saying behind what one says.