"Like Straw": Religion and Psychoanalysis

In describing the end of psychoanalysis as the arrival of the analysand at the point of 'subjective destitution', Lacan cites as an analogy the experience of Thomas Aquinas at the end of his life when he suddenly stopped writing, explaining to his secretary that he could no longer continue because everything that he had written up to then seemed to be 'like straw'. In the following essay, the writer attempts to discern the meaning of Thomas's remark and evaluate the import of Lacan's analogy.…