The Ontological Gap

The concise overview of Lacanian theory provided by Morgan Stebbins is an excellent idea that will help to facilitate any Jungian/Lacanian intellectual exchange. Despite the glaring stylistic disparities between Jung and Lacan, Stebbins seems to be optimistic that a comprehensive term-by-term comparative analysis between the two theories would yield significant conceptual overlap. Without wishing to preempt any such study, I want to demonstrate why we are faced with two distinct visions of subjectivity that cannot be easily reconciled.

While there's the palpable presence of Heidegger when Lacan judges being, the portrayals of a nexus of being and the symbols that suffuse his writing carry his own ontological signature. Towards the end of Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, he again elaborates on this ‘knot’, apropos of a reference to the role played in the reformation by Erasmus. Using the suitable example of the Dutch scholar, he notes that ‘the slightest alteration in the relation between man and the signifier, in this case in the procedures of exegesis, changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being’. Lacan then relates this link to the transformative power exerted by Freudianism in the 20th century, a discourse which, he believed, intangibly revolutionized all aspects of life. My wager, both here, and, implicitly, in my article, is that Jung's influential interventions in psychoanalytic discourse—particularly, of course, his radical innovations: the transformations of the libido and the collective unconscious—emerge illuminated, if viewed in terms of this nexus between discourse and being. Suffice it to consider the concern with being in Septem Sermones, or the existential stakes Jung invested in the construction of his theory, as outlined in ‘Confrontation with the unconscious’. Jung's existential involvement in his discursive innovations reveals how deeply a new organization in the system of the signifier (here psychoan