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It isn't really a question of belief…; it is on the other hand a question of desire, but of desire so confirmed, so thoroughly established and nourished, as to leave belief a comparatively irrelevant affair.
Although Jacques Lacan defines his work as a “return to Freud” in both theory and practice, it is far from clear exactly what it is to which Lacan “returns.” The Freud to which Lacan returns is not everybody's Freud, and the Freud Lacan returns to us may not be the Freud we thought we knew or think we want. For example, many readers consider Freud as first and foremost a scientist and physician, believing him when he says that psychoanalysis is a “natural science” analogous to physics, and the unconscious a discovery analogous to that of electricity (1940a, 282). To such readers, Lacan's caricature of Freud's empiricism as a quaint 19th-century pipe-dream appears both condescending and short-sighted. To those who cherish Freud's emphasis on subjectivity, interiority, affect, and libido, Lacan's insistence that Freud saw the subject as an effect of language (or “the signifier”) rather than its source seems pointlessly arcane, if not just pointless.
This essay will consider Lacan's return to Freud as a return of the repressed, or more precisely, as a return of the “negated.” What Lacan and Freud both negate is religious belief. The issue here, however, is not whether or how Freud's Jewishness, or Lacan's Catholicness, affects psychoanalysis, but rather how both are structurally intrinsic to Freudian and Lacanian discourses, but differently, and precisely as a consequence