by Elisa Garfagna
The acceptance of Jewishness reveals itself as a profoundly personal inner journey, a path that inextricably weaves together history, culture, and religion. For a Jew, it means confronting a multifaceted identity, where religious tradition merges with a thousand-year-old culture, shaped by significant historical events such as the Shoah. Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis offers an original interpretive key to understanding this process, inviting us to explore how Jewish identity is constructed through language, images, and traumatic experiences.
Through the concepts of “symbolic,” “imaginary,” and “real,” Lacan helps us understand how the order of language and laws, such as the Torah and rabbinical traditions, structures Jewish reality, while the imaginary, the world of images and identifications, plays a crucial role in the formation of identity. The real, traumatic experience such as the Shoah, challenges human capacity for understanding, leaving an indelible mark.
The Lacanian “Name-of-the-Father,” the symbolic authority, can be interpreted as Mosaic law, while the “Other” represents the expectations and desires that influence Jewish identity, including the challenge of antisemitism. “Foreclosure,” finally, helps to understand how traumatic events such as the Shoah can be excluded from the symbolic order.
The acceptance of Jewishness reveals itself as a continuous dialogue with one’s history and identity, a personal path marked by fundamental questions: what does it mean to be Jewish? What is the relationship with religion, culture, and history? How to deal with antisemitism? The diversity of opinions is a distinctive feature of Judaism, as expressed by the saying “two Jews, three opinions,” which reflects the pluralism and richness of Jewish thought, the importance of debate, individualism and autonomy, as well as humor and self-irony. In summary, the acceptance of Jewishness is a dynamic and personal process, a journey through history, culture, and religion, marked by continuous dialogue and a rich diversity of opinions.
Lacan, although he never dedicated a specific and systematic analysis to the Shoah, provided conceptual tools that have proved valuable in understanding the traumatic impact of this event. His theory, centered on language, the symbolic, and the real, offers a unique perspective to explore how the Shoah shattered the very structures of reality and subjectivity.
One of Lacan’s key concepts, the “real,” proves particularly relevant. The real, for Lacan, is not objective reality, but rather what escapes symbolization, what resists our ability to represent it through language. The Shoah, with its unspeakable horror, represents an extreme example of the real. Victims, survivors, and even indirect witnesses, found themselves faced with an event that exceeded all possibility of comprehension and representation.
“Foreclosure,” another Lacanian concept, refers to a psychic mechanism in which an element of reality is expelled from the symbolic order. In other words, it is a radical refusal to recognize and symbolize an experience. Some Lacanian scholars have suggested that the Shoah represented a foreclosure on a collective scale, an event so traumatic as to be relegated outside the field of consciousness and memory.
The impact of the Shoah is not limited to the individual, but extends to subsequent generations. The trauma is transmitted through language, silences, memory gaps, creating a difficult legacy to process. Lacanian theory, with its attention to language and the symbolic, helps us understand how this legacy manifests itself and how it can be addressed.
Furthermore, the Lacanian concept of “Other” can be applied to analyze the role of antisemitism in the Shoah. The Other, in this context, represents Nazi ideology, a system of thought that dehumanized Jews, relegating them outside of humanity. The Shoah, therefore, is not only a traumatic event, but also the result of a discourse that made the unthinkable possible.
Lacanian psychoanalysis offers a complex and articulated perspective to understand the impact of the Shoah. Its focus on language, the symbolic, and the real allows us to explore the deep dimensions of trauma, its intergenerational transmission, and the role of antisemitism.