Genesis through Lacan: A shift in God's discourse toward therapeutic management

We propose a reading of Genesis through Jacques Lacan: Acquiring language skills is seen as the passage from preverbal Real Order to Symbolic Order, interpreted in Genesis as the passage from Heaven to Knowledge of Death. Lacan's schemata of the four discourses enables the understanding of four key social phenomena: educating (University Discourse), governing (Master Discourse), protesting (Hysteric Discourse), and revolutionizing (Treatment Discourse). God monolog-type discourse in Chapter 1 is similar to the University Discourse, representing a Mechanistic–Instrumental management mode, governed by the principle man = machine, a working tool, taken as an input for output production. God changes his mode of administrating in Chapters 2 and 3 to dialog-type Treatment Discourse (Human Relations mode), enabling man to become a master of its own. We propose this reading of Genesis as an encouragement to use the Treatment Discourse as main management mode. We shall call it “therapeutic management.”.