Historically the mystic is the one who risks madness at the edge of the real. When he survives he is saint – sanctioned and sanctified by the order of things. Is the difference one of degree or an act only known in its meaning after the fact. How does Jesus go from criminal to law. Both miss the point and are but a misrecognition and misuse by the mass – the Other. What we are concerned with is how he goes from mystic to saint. Saint Thomas Aquinas risked his position too, staging not a jouissance of the body turned poetry as Saint Theresa but an intellectual deconstruction of God as Being – Being not as static, paternal, but as Becoming. Thus the ontology we seek to complement the existential process of mysticism and psychoanalysis we find in Aquinas. Not all ontology is cosmology as some would have us believe. For Aquinas Being is not a transcendent order or thing, but an Act of Being, or Becoming. Thus existence – or being-there – of the subject is one with the ontological Act of Being as Being. The Infinite of Being is recapitulated in each in-finite subject. The subject is nothing but the no-thing: that which is not a thing, and thus that only which shows us Being in its infinite and void nature.

We can thus see the psychoanalytic act as process of the subject – in a world of objects. Or rather that which preserves the subjective pole of Being against the objective pole of existence. In this game we may see the analysand-analyst pair as reprising the mystic-saint pair. There is always first a potential analysand. He falls outside the order of things – he who is symptom. The analyst holds the place of placelessness for the analysand. The symptom created to cover this hole will be dismantled and reworked exposing the lack in the Other, the void of Being. It is here that the analysand needs a collaborator in creative process not a collaborator in repression and denial. Where the doctor of the church and hospital returns the symptom to the social neurosis, the analyst accompanies the analysand to a new creation, not only for himself but each one breathing new life into the social. The psychoanalytic act is an existential act which is the Act of Being. It is not that psychoanalysis replaces ontology: it is what it always was.