René Girard's Revision and Misapprehension of Psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT René Girard's theories of mimetic desire, religious sacrifice, and violence have been immensely provocative and influential. His ways of framing literary desire and conflict are fascinating, as they illustrate how desire and rivalry unleashed lead to violence and derangement. But many of Girard's claims about psychoanalysis, human motivation, desire, personality, and psychopathology become a morass of confused straw arguments. This paper will detail and evaluate some of Girard's central theories, then turn to his revisions of Freudian concepts. The paper argues that while Girard has made some profound contributions to the understanding of desire and rivalry, he egregiously distorts psychoanalytic ideas and makes a host of unsupported assertions that are internally incoherent and contradicted by extensive psychological evidence.