Raul Moncayo’s project is one of the most fascinating attempts to bridge Lacanian psychoanalysis and Chan/Zen Buddhism, and he does so with remarkable subtlety and philosophical depth. His key works—especially The Emptiness of Oedipus: Identification and Non-Identification in Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Buddhism (2007), and later Lacan and Chan/Zen Buddhism: One World, One Time, One Thought (2012)—show a sustained effort to think emptiness, subjectivity, and desire across these two very different but strangely resonant traditions.
Let me lay out the main threads of Moncayo’s integration:
1. Emptiness and the Subject: Śūnyatā = Lack?
Moncayo draws a conceptual resonance between:
• Lacan’s idea of the barred subject ($)—the subject as constituted by lack, alienated in language
• And the Buddhist concept of emptiness (śūnyatā)—the absence of fixed, inherent self (anātman)
But—and this is crucial—Moncayo refuses to equate them. Rather than saying “lack = emptiness,” he explores how they might touch or mirror each other:
• Lacanian lack is structural and tied to the symbolic order: we are split by the signifier, alienated in language.
• Chan emptiness is ontological and experiential: a recognition that all phenomena (including self and language) are interdependent and empty of essence.
For Moncayo, the challenge is: How do we work with these two kinds of “absence” without reducing one to the other?
2. Identification and Non-Identification
In psychoanalysis, identification is how the subject constructs itself via the Other’s desire—this is where the Master Signifier (S1), fantasy, and ego-ideals come into play.
Moncayo puts this alongside Chan’s dismantling of identification—especially with thoughts, roles, and the “I.”
• Where Lacanian analysis works through the traversal of fantasy,
• Chan practice cuts through illusion via direct, non-conceptual insight—often triggered by a shock (a koan, a slap, a shout).
Moncayo says that non-identification in Zen is not the annihilation of the subject, but the emergence of a different mode of subjectivity—a non-dual subject that does not cling to egoic structuring.
So:
Psychoanalysis deconstructs identification.
Chan deconstructs identification and then lets go of the deconstructor itself.
3. The Analyst and the Zen Master
One of Moncayo’s most original contributions is the parallel between the Lacanian analyst and the Chan master.
• The analyst takes up the “position of the object a”—the silent, enigmatic object that draws the analysand’s desire into speech and rupture.
• The Chan master uses non-linear tactics—silence, paradox, shouting, gestures—to disrupt the ego and allow awakening to occur.
In both cases, the “teacher” is not an authority but a catalyst—an enigmatic presence that helps the subject encounter what cannot be symbolized.
Both are, in a way, empty vessels—figures that embody non-knowledge.
4. Language, the Real, and the Event
Lacan’s Real is what resists symbolization absolutely.
Chan’s awakening is often a sudden, direct encounter with suchness (tathatā)—the real-as-it-is.
Moncayo sees Chan’s moment of satori as akin to the Lacanian “moment of the Real”—when symbolic structures fail, and the subject confronts something beyond the Imaginary and Symbolic.
But unlike in Lacanian trauma theory, Zen does not stop there. It allows for integration—a living with the Real that is not catastrophic but liberating. Moncayo finds this to be a fruitful supplement to psychoanalysis.
5. Practice as Psychoanalysis; Analysis as Practice
Moncayo ultimately argues that:
• Psychoanalysis can be a kind of meditation, a sustained practice of becoming aware of unconscious identifications and letting them go.
• Zen can be understood as a kind of analysis, a ruthless honesty toward one’s illusions, enacted through a different logic—not interpretation, but direct pointing.
So his work asks:
“What would it mean to undergo an analysis that ends not with symbolic integration, but with awakening?”
“What would it mean to practice Zen that includes the full acknowledgement of unconscious desire?”
To Sum Up: Moncayo’s Synthesis
• Lacanian Subject = Split, caught in desire, structured by lack
• Chan Subject = Empty, non-attached, free in the flow of impermanence
• Both deal with illusion, desire, and awakening, but through different languages and ethics
Moncayo doesn’t collapse one into the other. He opens up a third space where the emptiness of the subject in psychoanalysis meets the emptiness of all things in Buddhism—not as a neat overlap, but as a productive tension.
If you’re interested, I could help you build a diagram or poetic reflection that captures this “meeting point” of Lacan and Chan. Or we could write a short speculative dialogue between Lacan and Huineng in the style of a koan.
