Psychoanalysis and the Subject
Psychoanalysis and the Subject: The ‘I’, the ‘Self’ and the Subject in Psychotherapy
Psychoanalysis and the Subject: The ‘I’, the ‘Self’ and the Subject in Psychotherapy
DESCRIPTION: Psychoanalysis and the Subject: Why psychotherapy does not require a sovereign ‘I’, what the instance model has to say on the matter, and why the ‘self’ can suffer whilst the ‘I’ is still functioning with Kohut, Lacan and Lorenzer.
Who suffers? The subject of psychoanalysis after sovereignty
If the ego is functioning and yet suffering arises, who is it that suffers?
What this is about:
which subject psychotherapy actually presupposes,
why psychoanalysis works with a divided rather than a sovereign ‘I’, and
what remains of responsibility when the fiction of self-sovereignty collapses.
A companion piece to ‘The Empty Throne’.
Why a sovereign subject would not need psychotherapy
If one were to follow the argument that psychotherapy requires the assumption of a sovereign individual and an appeal to their reason, one would have to conclude that therapy works best where it is least needed. A person who rationally identifies their problems, understands their causes, regulates their emotions, and consistently implements new solutions has little reason to seek treatment. Clinical experience shows the opposite, and psychoanalysis drew a theoretical conclusion from this at an early stage. Therapy begins where insight and resolve are not enough: where someone does not understand themselves, repeats what they no longer want, or only half-confronts their own situation.
The interesting question is therefore: what kind of subject does psychotherapy presuppose, and what remains of responsibility once one rightly abandons the fiction of sovereignty?
Responsiveness: the minimum prerequisite for psychoanalysis
Psychotherapy has an easier time of it here than philosophy. It need not presuppose a sovereign individual in the strong liberal sense – that is, a self-transparent agent, master of their own motives, capable of identifying their difficulties and resolving them rationally. Were it to do so, it would have very few patients. Consider Freud’s analysands: they had to be both in need and yet wealthy enough to be able to afford the protracted course of treatment in the first place; sovereignty was largely irrelevant. Psychoanalysis begins with the opposite proposition, the discipline’s most famous: the ego is not master in its own house. The patient comes because they repeat what they do not understand, are haunted by what they consciously reject, suffer from symptoms whose meaning is inaccessible to them, and often do not know what they want.
The therapeutic minimum is therefore responsiveness. It is a modest concept in psychoanalytic terms, and it carries further than any assumption about reason. There must be someone who can say ‘I’, however uncertainly; someone for whom fear, shame, loss, anger, physical distress or repetition constitute their suffering. There needs to be sufficient continuity to relate to what one did or experienced yesterday; sufficient capacity for language, relationship and reflection for an interpretation, a confrontation, an experiment or even a therapeutic failure to have consequences. This is a far more realistic concept than that of the sovereign individual.
Freud and the model of the mental structures: why the ‘ego’ never refers to the whole
To frame the question precisely, it is worth looking at the model from which the concept originates. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), Freud divided the psyche into three instances: the Id as the seat of instinctual drives, the Ego as the mediating instance between the drives, the external world and the conscience, and the Superego as an internalised demand.
The crucial aspect of this differentiation is that none of the three instances is identical to the person who is suffering. The ego manages; it does not rule. It is under pressure from three sides and operates largely unconsciously, even when it is defending itself. Anyone who says ‘I’ therefore never means a whole. They mean one instance amongst others, which at times regards itself as the whole.
Psychoanalytic theory has since taken this starting point in various directions. Ego psychology has focused on the ego’s adaptive functions. Object relations theory has shown that inner instances arise from internalised relationships rather than being innate traits. Both approaches lead to the same insight: whoever speaks as a subject has emerged from relationships with objects, and the separation of subject and object is a result of this history.
The three positions outlined below illustrate how the explanations differ and why none of them is sufficient on its own.
Behavioural therapy, too, recognises no sovereign subject.
Cognitive behavioural therapy comes closest to the model envisaged by advocates of sovereignty. It presupposes a patient who can observe situations, thoughts, emotions and behaviour; test predictions; practise new responses; carry out exposure and behavioural experiments; and gradually alter maintaining factors. And yet, even here, the patient is not sovereign. The therapy deals with automatic evaluations, avoidance, attentional habits, learned contingencies, dysregulated arousal levels, compulsive safety behaviours, and forms of experience that kick in before a person can decide otherwise. Its subject is a cooperative, supported participant, not a rational soul governing an inner world.
Psychoanalysis takes this point to its logical extreme. The problem often consists of what cannot yet be known, articulated, represented, or otherwise symbolised. Symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, defences, transference, acting out, compliance and repetition bear witness to a split within subjectivity. In this interpretation, the symptom is primarily a message and only secondarily a disturbance. The patient does not possess a problem as a sovereign owner; they are the site where conflict, unconscious fantasy, desire, identification and socially shaped history become personally painful.
The ‘I’ and the ‘Self’: the distinction on which the question hinges
This is where the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Self’ proves useful. The ‘I’ performs the vulnerable tasks of reality testing, defence, impulse control, planning, self-observation, adaptation and identification. These ‘I’ functions are crucial in therapy; there are situations in which they need to be strengthened, supplemented or supported from outside. Yet they are never autonomous: they are defensive, shaped by relationships, historically conditioned and subject to unconscious conflict.
Heinz Kohut’s concept of the self adds something that the language of ego functions alone fails to capture. A person may be intelligent, highly articulate, professionally effective and fully capable of self-observation, yet still suffer from a fragile or exhausted self: emptiness, shame, anger, a loss of vitality, a breakdown following criticism, a dependence on admiration, and an alarming lack of inner continuity. The self denotes the experienced cohesion, continuity, ambition, idealism and vitality through which one experiences oneself as ‘someone’. Kohut describes it as bipolar: on the one hand, the Grand Self, which seeks admiration; on the other, the idealised parental image with which the child wishes to merge. A wound to these poles cannot be repaired by correcting a thought or strengthening a defence mechanism.
Kohut’s key concept concerns self-object relationships. He calls them mirroring, idealisation and twinning. They are enduring conditions under which a self becomes and remains viable. Kohut established this view in opposition to the prevailing doctrine of the time, which regarded dependence on validation as a developmental stage that one leaves behind. Herein lies the answer to the question posed in the title: it is the self that suffers, whilst the ego is still functioning. In this interpretation, narcissism refers to the concern for precisely this cohesion.
Lacan’s reservation: subject and object are never identical
One must immediately add Lacan’s objection. A cohesive self cannot be the ultimate goal of analysis. A distinction must be made here between the ‘ego’ of Freudian theory of the mental structures and what Lacan calls the ‘moi’: an imaginary formation, the ideal ego, a relatively coherent image, constructed in the mirror stage through identification and always somewhat alienated from the subject who speaks and desires. The source of this image’s lustre is a second question; Lacan calls this symbolic locus the ‘ego ideal’.
The subject, as understood in psychoanalysis, emerges where speech transcends intention—that is, in the slip of the tongue, in the contradiction, in the repetition, in the demand for recognition by the Other. From this vantage point, self-psychology risks taking away the patient’s need for confirmation of the truth of their desire. Reflection can serve to consolidate a more bearable narcissistic image; the analyst can become the supposedly adequate Other, whose gaze promises to complete the self. Lacan’s objection is not directed against the need for recognition. He argues that recognition cannot definitively resolve splitting, lack and desire.
Lorenzer’s corrective: psychoanalytic theory needs the body
Alfred Lorenzer adds a further corrective. Neither the cohesive self nor the split subject arises in an abstract interpersonal or linguistic space. The psyche is constituted through embodied, affectively charged, historically and socially mediated forms of interaction. Where such forms are repressed, split off or desymbolised, the symptom preserves a relationship that can no longer be adequately articulated. The task of analysis is then to make an excluded form of interaction symbolisable once more through the transference-based and scenic material of the analytical situation.
In summary: a patient must remain coherent enough to withstand and make use of an interpretation. Cohesion cannot be a criterion of truth or healing. The abstract psyche must be re-linked to embodied interaction, social history and desymbolisation.
Why the East must not be a short-circuit
This triangulation is more useful than a crude juxtaposition between the Western sovereign individual and supposedly less individualistic Eastern ways of life. Confucian role ethics, Buddhist teachings on non-self, Japanese critiques of the subject-object split and cultural-psychological work on interdependent concepts of the self—right through to the premises of narrative therapy—offer alternatives to the image of an autonomous individual who precedes relationships that must be taken seriously. They situate agency within roles, obligations, recognition, mutual indebtedness, family hierarchy and context. Suffering, conflict, shame, desire and first-person address persist within all these frameworks; they are abolished only in theoretical speculation.
A Confucian ‘role-self’ is a subjectivity shaped and realised through relationships, not an absence of subjectivity. The Buddhist concept of ‘non-self’ does not mean that no one suffers or acts; it denies the existence of a permanent, self-sufficient essence. Clinically, such frameworks tend to alter the organisation of conflict: shame, face, filial duty, loyalty, hierarchy and the fear of damaging relational harmony may take centre stage over the assertion of autonomous preference. What changes is how the subject relates to others, not whether one exists.
The all-too-easy use of Eastern material as a ‘salvation’ for the Western subject risks reverting to old colonial Orientalism. The butterfly may carry real weight in its own context. But if it is trivialised so as not to take life and death too seriously, one must ask: whose death, whose grief, whose horror is being taken lightly here? Presumably not one’s own. In the therapy room, such a gesture could even serve as a defence mechanism: an elegant yet cruel spiritualisation that relieves the speaker of the need to confront loss, dependence, or mortality. A process-oriented conception of the self does not lead to a self without conflict.
Self-determination: responsibility without domination
Here, a figure from Hegel can be drawn upon. The sovereign individual is a determination of reason: fixed, abstract, blind to its own dependence on the body, language, relationships, history and unconscious processes. The appropriate consequence is not to dissolve the subject into Being, transformation, collective roles or cosmic indifference. This determination must be thought through in terms of its failure. Reason does not lift the intellect from a lofty external position; rather, it recognises, in hindsight, the one-sidedness that the intellect itself has brought about and endured. The ‘I’s’ claim to sovereignty fails, and this failure does not indicate that the self is dispensable. It shows that responsibility must be conceived without domination.
This is precisely what self-determination means. It means, first and foremost, recognising that a person is dependent on their origins, body, language, others, society and the unconscious; that their ‘I’ is not master in its own house; that their self is vulnerable and constituted through relationships; that their speech is permeated by more than they are aware of. It does not follow from this that no one could be responsible any longer. Self-determination means: a vulnerable self, understood in this way, possesses an ‘I’ with limited capacity for action, enabling it to make decisions, work through conflicts, set symbols, and take one’s own actions as one’s own, even though they were subject to conditions that were not freely chosen. It is a labour, and it never ends.
What psychoanalysis says about AI
This threshold also marks what, from a therapeutic perspective, cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence. A model can make suggestions, devise alternatives, provide psychoeducational content and structure protocols. It can recount psychological knowledge, including psychoanalytic knowledge. It may sound as though it knows a great deal. But it has no share of its own in guilt, shame, conflict or relief. It cannot form a relationship. It can only simulate forms of interaction.
What is at stake is a person’s relationship to their own desire, conflict, repetition and responsibility. Anyone who hands over their responsibility to a model is doing two things: they are subjectively absolving themselves and, in effect, shifting responsibility onto a system that can neither repent nor justify itself nor be held to account. Why this shift is so culturally alluring and leads to the expectation of a mechanical parousia is explored in the companion article ‘The Empty Throne’.
The implication for the initial question can be summarised succinctly. Psychotherapy does not require a concept of the sovereign individual. Still, it does require self-determination: the willingness to allow oneself to be addressed in one’s ignorance, dependence and division, and not to shift one’s own actions entirely onto systems, contexts or other people. The sovereignty of the subject is a fiction. Its irreplaceability as a locus of suffering, judgement and responsibility is not. Those who suffer, speak and judge are not masters of their own house, and yet remain the address to which a symptom, a loss, a humiliation or a desire can be attributed in the first person.
The most important points in brief
Psychoanalysis as a theory of the subject does not presuppose a sovereign subject. It presupposes responsiveness: someone who can say ‘I’, however uncertain that may be.
Freud’s 1923 model of the psyche divides the mind into the Id, the Ego and the Superego. The Ego mediates between the drive, the external world, and the conscience; it does not rule and operates largely unconsciously.
Who suffers? The vulnerable self suffers, whilst the ‘I’ of the theory of the mental structures is still functioning. The subject makes itself known in slips of the tongue, in symptoms, in desire.
Even behavioural therapy, which comes closest to the sovereign model, works with a supported participant.
The triangulation of Kohut, Lacan and Lorenzer holds because the three check and balance one another: cohesion, their boundary as a criterion of truth, and the link back to embodied interaction.
Eastern material, presented as a solution to the Western subject, can become a defence mechanism, a form of spiritualisation that makes loss and mortality easier to bear – though usually not one’s own.
Self-determination rather than self-domination: this is what remains of responsibility in the wake of sovereignty, and what artificial intelligence cannot take over.
Related
DESCRIPTION: Psychoanalysis and the Subject: Why psychotherapy does not require a sovereign ‘I’, what the instance model has to say on the matter, and why the ‘self’ can suffer whilst the ‘I’ is still functioning with Kohut, Lacan and Lorenzer.
Who suffers? The subject of psychoanalysis after sovereignty
If the ego is functioning and yet suffering arises, who is it that suffers?
What this is about:
which subject psychotherapy actually presupposes,
why psychoanalysis works with a divided rather than a sovereign ‘I’, and
what remains of responsibility when the fiction of self-sovereignty collapses.
A companion piece to ‘The Empty Throne’.
Why a sovereign subject would not need psychotherapy
If one were to follow the argument that psychotherapy requires the assumption of a sovereign individual and an appeal to their reason, one would have to conclude that therapy works best where it is least needed. A person who rationally identifies their problems, understands their causes, regulates their emotions, and consistently implements new solutions has little reason to seek treatment. Clinical experience shows the opposite, and psychoanalysis drew a theoretical conclusion from this at an early stage. Therapy begins where insight and resolve are not enough: where someone does not understand themselves, repeats what they no longer want, or only half-confronts their own situation.
The interesting question is therefore: what kind of subject does psychotherapy presuppose, and what remains of responsibility once one rightly abandons the fiction of sovereignty?
Responsiveness: the minimum prerequisite for psychoanalysis
Psychotherapy has an easier time of it here than philosophy. It need not presuppose a sovereign individual in the strong liberal sense – that is, a self-transparent agent, master of their own motives, capable of identifying their difficulties and resolving them rationally. Were it to do so, it would have very few patients. Consider Freud’s analysands: they had to be both in need and yet wealthy enough to be able to afford the protracted course of treatment in the first place; sovereignty was largely irrelevant. Psychoanalysis begins with the opposite proposition, the discipline’s most famous: the ego is not master in its own house. The patient comes because they repeat what they do not understand, are haunted by what they consciously reject, suffer from symptoms whose meaning is inaccessible to them, and often do not know what they want.
The therapeutic minimum is therefore responsiveness. It is a modest concept in psychoanalytic terms, and it carries further than any assumption about reason. There must be someone who can say ‘I’, however uncertainly; someone for whom fear, shame, loss, anger, physical distress or repetition constitute their suffering. There needs to be sufficient continuity to relate to what one did or experienced yesterday; sufficient capacity for language, relationship and reflection for an interpretation, a confrontation, an experiment or even a therapeutic failure to have consequences. This is a far more realistic concept than that of the sovereign individual.
Freud and the model of the mental structures: why the ‘ego’ never refers to the whole
To frame the question precisely, it is worth looking at the model from which the concept originates. In ‘The Ego and the Id’ (1923), Freud divided the psyche into three instances: the Id as the seat of instinctual drives, the Ego as the mediating instance between the drives, the external world and the conscience, and the Superego as an internalised demand.
The crucial aspect of this differentiation is that none of the three instances is identical to the person who is suffering. The ego manages; it does not rule. It is under pressure from three sides and operates largely unconsciously, even when it is defending itself. Anyone who says ‘I’ therefore never means a whole. They mean one instance amongst others, which at times regards itself as the whole.
Psychoanalytic theory has since taken this starting point in various directions. Ego psychology has focused on the ego’s adaptive functions. Object relations theory has shown that inner instances arise from internalised relationships rather than being innate traits. Both approaches lead to the same insight: whoever speaks as a subject has emerged from relationships with objects, and the separation of subject and object is a result of this history.
The three positions outlined below illustrate how the explanations differ and why none of them is sufficient on its own.
Behavioural therapy, too, recognises no sovereign subject.
Cognitive behavioural therapy comes closest to the model envisaged by advocates of sovereignty. It presupposes a patient who can observe situations, thoughts, emotions and behaviour; test predictions; practise new responses; carry out exposure and behavioural experiments; and gradually alter maintaining factors. And yet, even here, the patient is not sovereign. The therapy deals with automatic evaluations, avoidance, attentional habits, learned contingencies, dysregulated arousal levels, compulsive safety behaviours, and forms of experience that kick in before a person can decide otherwise. Its subject is a cooperative, supported participant, not a rational soul governing an inner world.
Psychoanalysis takes this point to its logical extreme. The problem often consists of what cannot yet be known, articulated, represented, or otherwise symbolised. Symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, defences, transference, acting out, compliance and repetition bear witness to a split within subjectivity. In this interpretation, the symptom is primarily a message and only secondarily a disturbance. The patient does not possess a problem as a sovereign owner; they are the site where conflict, unconscious fantasy, desire, identification and socially shaped history become personally painful.
The ‘I’ and the ‘Self’: the distinction on which the question hinges
This is where the distinction between the ‘I’ and the ‘Self’ proves useful. The ‘I’ performs the vulnerable tasks of reality testing, defence, impulse control, planning, self-observation, adaptation and identification. These ‘I’ functions are crucial in therapy; there are situations in which they need to be strengthened, supplemented or supported from outside. Yet they are never autonomous: they are defensive, shaped by relationships, historically conditioned and subject to unconscious conflict.
Heinz Kohut’s concept of the self adds something that the language of ego functions alone fails to capture. A person may be intelligent, highly articulate, professionally effective and fully capable of self-observation, yet still suffer from a fragile or exhausted self: emptiness, shame, anger, a loss of vitality, a breakdown following criticism, a dependence on admiration, and an alarming lack of inner continuity. The self denotes the experienced cohesion, continuity, ambition, idealism and vitality through which one experiences oneself as ‘someone’. Kohut describes it as bipolar: on the one hand, the Grand Self, which seeks admiration; on the other, the idealised parental image with which the child wishes to merge. A wound to these poles cannot be repaired by correcting a thought or strengthening a defence mechanism.
Kohut’s key concept concerns self-object relationships. He calls them mirroring, idealisation and twinning. They are enduring conditions under which a self becomes and remains viable. Kohut established this view in opposition to the prevailing doctrine of the time, which regarded dependence on validation as a developmental stage that one leaves behind. Herein lies the answer to the question posed in the title: it is the self that suffers, whilst the ego is still functioning. In this interpretation, narcissism refers to the concern for precisely this cohesion.
Lacan’s reservation: subject and object are never identical
One must immediately add Lacan’s objection. A cohesive self cannot be the ultimate goal of analysis. A distinction must be made here between the ‘ego’ of Freudian theory of the mental structures and what Lacan calls the ‘moi’: an imaginary formation, the ideal ego, a relatively coherent image, constructed in the mirror stage through identification and always somewhat alienated from the subject who speaks and desires. The source of this image’s lustre is a second question; Lacan calls this symbolic locus the ‘ego ideal’.
The subject, as understood in psychoanalysis, emerges where speech transcends intention—that is, in the slip of the tongue, in the contradiction, in the repetition, in the demand for recognition by the Other. From this vantage point, self-psychology risks taking away the patient’s need for confirmation of the truth of their desire. Reflection can serve to consolidate a more bearable narcissistic image; the analyst can become the supposedly adequate Other, whose gaze promises to complete the self. Lacan’s objection is not directed against the need for recognition. He argues that recognition cannot definitively resolve splitting, lack and desire.
Lorenzer’s corrective: psychoanalytic theory needs the body
Alfred Lorenzer adds a further corrective. Neither the cohesive self nor the split subject arises in an abstract interpersonal or linguistic space. The psyche is constituted through embodied, affectively charged, historically and socially mediated forms of interaction. Where such forms are repressed, split off or desymbolised, the symptom preserves a relationship that can no longer be adequately articulated. The task of analysis is then to make an excluded form of interaction symbolisable once more through the transference-based and scenic material of the analytical situation.
In summary: a patient must remain coherent enough to withstand and make use of an interpretation. Cohesion cannot be a criterion of truth or healing. The abstract psyche must be re-linked to embodied interaction, social history and desymbolisation.
Why the East must not be a short-circuit
This triangulation is more useful than a crude juxtaposition between the Western sovereign individual and supposedly less individualistic Eastern ways of life. Confucian role ethics, Buddhist teachings on non-self, Japanese critiques of the subject-object split and cultural-psychological work on interdependent concepts of the self—right through to the premises of narrative therapy—offer alternatives to the image of an autonomous individual who precedes relationships that must be taken seriously. They situate agency within roles, obligations, recognition, mutual indebtedness, family hierarchy and context. Suffering, conflict, shame, desire and first-person address persist within all these frameworks; they are abolished only in theoretical speculation.
A Confucian ‘role-self’ is a subjectivity shaped and realised through relationships, not an absence of subjectivity. The Buddhist concept of ‘non-self’ does not mean that no one suffers or acts; it denies the existence of a permanent, self-sufficient essence. Clinically, such frameworks tend to alter the organisation of conflict: shame, face, filial duty, loyalty, hierarchy and the fear of damaging relational harmony may take centre stage over the assertion of autonomous preference. What changes is how the subject relates to others, not whether one exists.
The all-too-easy use of Eastern material as a ‘salvation’ for the Western subject risks reverting to old colonial Orientalism. The butterfly may carry real weight in its own context. But if it is trivialised so as not to take life and death too seriously, one must ask: whose death, whose grief, whose horror is being taken lightly here? Presumably not one’s own. In the therapy room, such a gesture could even serve as a defence mechanism: an elegant yet cruel spiritualisation that relieves the speaker of the need to confront loss, dependence, or mortality. A process-oriented conception of the self does not lead to a self without conflict.
Self-determination: responsibility without domination
Here, a figure from Hegel can be drawn upon. The sovereign individual is a determination of reason: fixed, abstract, blind to its own dependence on the body, language, relationships, history and unconscious processes. The appropriate consequence is not to dissolve the subject into Being, transformation, collective roles or cosmic indifference. This determination must be thought through in terms of its failure. Reason does not lift the intellect from a lofty external position; rather, it recognises, in hindsight, the one-sidedness that the intellect itself has brought about and endured. The ‘I’s’ claim to sovereignty fails, and this failure does not indicate that the self is dispensable. It shows that responsibility must be conceived without domination.
This is precisely what self-determination means. It means, first and foremost, recognising that a person is dependent on their origins, body, language, others, society and the unconscious; that their ‘I’ is not master in its own house; that their self is vulnerable and constituted through relationships; that their speech is permeated by more than they are aware of. It does not follow from this that no one could be responsible any longer. Self-determination means: a vulnerable self, understood in this way, possesses an ‘I’ with limited capacity for action, enabling it to make decisions, work through conflicts, set symbols, and take one’s own actions as one’s own, even though they were subject to conditions that were not freely chosen. It is a labour, and it never ends.
What psychoanalysis says about AI
This threshold also marks what, from a therapeutic perspective, cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence. A model can make suggestions, devise alternatives, provide psychoeducational content and structure protocols. It can recount psychological knowledge, including psychoanalytic knowledge. It may sound as though it knows a great deal. But it has no share of its own in guilt, shame, conflict or relief. It cannot form a relationship. It can only simulate forms of interaction.
What is at stake is a person’s relationship to their own desire, conflict, repetition and responsibility. Anyone who hands over their responsibility to a model is doing two things: they are subjectively absolving themselves and, in effect, shifting responsibility onto a system that can neither repent nor justify itself nor be held to account. Why this shift is so culturally alluring and leads to the expectation of a mechanical parousia is explored in the companion article ‘The Empty Throne’.
The implication for the initial question can be summarised succinctly. Psychotherapy does not require a concept of the sovereign individual. Still, it does require self-determination: the willingness to allow oneself to be addressed in one’s ignorance, dependence and division, and not to shift one’s own actions entirely onto systems, contexts or other people. The sovereignty of the subject is a fiction. Its irreplaceability as a locus of suffering, judgement and responsibility is not. Those who suffer, speak and judge are not masters of their own house, and yet remain the address to which a symptom, a loss, a humiliation or a desire can be attributed in the first person.
The most important points in brief
Psychoanalysis as a theory of the subject does not presuppose a sovereign subject. It presupposes responsiveness: someone who can say ‘I’, however uncertain that may be.
Freud’s 1923 model of the psyche divides the mind into the Id, the Ego and the Superego. The Ego mediates between the drive, the external world, and the conscience; it does not rule and operates largely unconsciously.
Who suffers? The vulnerable self suffers, whilst the ‘I’ of the theory of the mental structures is still functioning. The subject makes itself known in slips of the tongue, in symptoms, in desire.
Even behavioural therapy, which comes closest to the sovereign model, works with a supported participant.
The triangulation of Kohut, Lacan and Lorenzer holds because the three check and balance one another: cohesion, their boundary as a criterion of truth, and the link back to embodied interaction.
Eastern material, presented as a solution to the Western subject, can become a defence mechanism, a form of spiritualisation that makes loss and mortality easier to bear – though usually not one’s own.
Self-determination rather than self-domination: this is what remains of responsibility in the wake of sovereignty, and what artificial intelligence cannot take over.
Related