Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

equation between the subject and the ego, to the detriment of the unconscious; in

other words, in general, they appeared to understand psychoanalysis as a means of

enabling the ego’s “colonization” of the unconscious’s “irrational” drives and in-

stincts. This reading of Freud also allowed the invention of a socially “adaptive”

function of psychoanalysis that Lacan often associates with what he defines as the

“American way of life”: the analysand’s ego had to be “cured” and reinforced by

being reshaped in the image of the analyst’s strong ego.^2

Lacan considers ego psychology to be a tacit but radical betrayal of Freud’s

theoretical subversion, whose main tenet, according to him, is the subject’s pre-

dominantly unconscious nature, and the consequent displacement of the ego

from the central function in psychic activity attributed to it by both Cartesian phi-

losophy and classical psychology. Freud’s view that the ego is not a mental sub-

stance is supplemented by Lacan with the assertion that neither does it correspond

to the supreme synthesizing psychic locus of what Freud named the “perception-

consciousness system.”^3 In other words, according to both Freud and Lacan, the

psychic agency of the ego has to be subordinated to the logicof a more primitive

“layer” of subjectivity. This is precisely what the experience of psychoanalysis

manages to show empirically: that there is an unconscious subject whose reasoning,

far from simply being identifiable with sheer irrationality, does not coincide with

the ego—nor, as will later become clearer, with the ego-related dimension of self-

consciousness—and which manifests itself in phenomena such as dreams, bun-

gled actions, slips of the tongue, and psychosomatic symptoms.

It is therefore within this historical framework that Lacan’s unrelenting call for

a “return to Freud” should be understood—a return that intends first and foremost

to emphasize the narcissistic-specular and consequently alienating and derived na-

ture of the ego, together with the impossibility of constraining the subject within

its boundaries. The ego is not the subject tout court; on the contrary, it corresponds

to the subject’s identifying alienationin the imaginary other (an other that initially

corresponds to the subject’s specular image): in parallel, psychoanalysis does not

aim at strengthening the ego but instead at realizing the subject of the unconscious

through the overcoming of imaginary alienation. The next two sections of this

chapter will deal primarily with the ego as the site of such an alienation, while the

final section will outline the contours of Lacan’s first and as yet only fragmentary

thematization of the unconscious to be understood as a symbolic structure.

1.2 “Je est un autre”: The (De)formative Function of

the Image and the Mirror Stage

At this stage, the distinction between the ego and the subject outlined above should

be reformulated in more specific terms: in the first place, it is correct to maintain

the subject of the imaginary (other)