outside the limits of the ego

Freud never ceases to inquire into the gap between religion and psychoanalysis. The last lines he wrote illustrate his insistence on the question: “Mysticism is the dark self perception of the realm outside the ego, the realm of the id”. By tracking this gap through the equivalence Freud establishes between Kant's categorical imperative, taboo, and the restrictions of obsessive neurosis, we can see how religion captures the subject's possibility of accepting its subjective division. On the basis of Lacan and resorting to a proposition set forth by Agamben, we argue that psychoanalysis invites human beings to profane, to recover the relationship with the cause of their desire, which has been confiscated by religion