Abstract

Radical theology and psychoanalysis both share the characteristic of speaking indirectly. This chapter characterizes the divergent streams of radical theology along three broad trajectories: the early variants expressing the “religionless Christianity” and the gospel of Christian atheism; the deconstructive mode presenting God as an undeconstructible name for an Event; and the psychoanalytic investigation of theology as a collection of symbols invested with meaning, which exist to curtail anxiety. This chapter covers the theological dimensions of repression, the unconscious, the big Other, and the “Lacanian registers”—the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real—before concluding with contemporary examples of psychoanalysis in radical theology.