On the Irish Condition: Psychosis, Lack and Original Sin

Lacan famously used the example of a robbery to describe our emergence into the world. He told his students that our birth as subjects happens at a moment that is analogous to a highway robber putting a gun to our head and saying, “your money or your life.”

In this situation we either refuse to give over our money, thus losing our life, or give over our money, surviving impoverished.

In this forced choice both options are negative.

Here Lacan can be read as offering a type of psychoanalytic reading of Original Sin. For many religious thinkers there has always been a dilemma regarding the idea of sin. In a nutshell, sin is a lack that erupts in the human being (and everything else), yet this lack is the enactment of freedom.

Lacan’s understanding of the birth of the subject offers an interesting, non-theological, way of resolving this. As I have explored earlier, the existentialists show us that being a self involves experiencing ourselves as separate from others. The infant becomes a self insomuch as she experiences a primordial separation, often signified by the mother’s breast.

This separation is experienced as a loss; a loss of something that can never be regained. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the origin of the incest taboo. It is the law that demands we cannot have libidinal union with our mother. Something has to block the way to this union, which is what the Oedipus Complex refers to.

Painful as this separation is, the joke goes that something even worse happens if it doesn’t occur… you become Irish. Hence the argument that Jesus was really of Irish descent – he lived with his mum till he was thirty, and she thought he was God.

There are all manner of problems with the supposed Irish condition. If the separation from the primary care giver doesn’t happen then psychosis results. Psychosis being the condition in which the ego is experienced as fragmented, fluid and under regular threat of dissipation. The person who suffers from psychotic symptoms might have out of body experiences, powerful inner voices, multiple personalities, or an inability to discern where they start and the world stops.

So then, in infancy we either lose something of great value, or lose ourselves.

This loss of the other in separation is however a pure gain. The loss is what gives us to ourselves as conscious beings. While we feel that we lost something, it is the loss that creates the “we” that feels impoverished.

To approach the ancient notion of Original Sin from a Lacanian perspective thus enables us to appreciate the lack as a negative, while simultaneously affirming it.