On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (review)

Eric Santner’s title is meant to call to mind Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in which pathology is brought into the everyday, and by which the particular nature of the psyche is elucidated. Freud points to such phenomena as dreams, forgetfulness, parapraxes (e.g., slips of the tongue), and a host of other similarly manifest symptoms to make his case for the existence of an unconscious that refuses to be explained or contained by consciousness. In other words, the Freudian subject is in part at the behest of unconscious urges that steal their way into daily life, manifesting as [End Page 158] symptoms or “psychopathology.” These unconscious “instincts” or “drives” (Triebe) are more than just physiological forces (e.g., the sex drive); in addition, they represent what Santner figures as an excess, a surplus charge that is better understood within its wider historical social and cultural contexts. While a sexual object may be invested with a subject’s biological drive, this object is also “overdetermined” symbolically, vis-à-vis the myriad social and institutional norms that lend the object its particular significance or charge within the life of the subject. And so, in addition to the unconscious excess or “too much” released as the “psychopathology of everyday life,” Santner investigates the excess significance that comes from outside the subject, from the world, and from the Other—capitalized, he tells us, “to underscore and to keep in view the problem of alterity, the question of what makes another human being or culture strange” ( Psychotheology, 8, note 8). This strangeness of the Other—his or her alterity—is, it is claimed, a “theological” question, rather than a mere psychological one. Santner’s title plays on Freud’s, supplanting pathology by theology; his book is a meditation on the “theological” excess that informs everyday psychic life and defines subjectivity in wider, existential terms.