Passion for the Human Subject

The condition of the human subject demands that he acquire his existence at the price of a real passion. And what indeed could inspire more passion than this ambiguous being, constantly trying to balance dynamically where nature and culture intersect? The psychoanalytical approach launched by Freud a century ago has constantly posited as a structural fact the precarious position of human subjectivity. It conceives the latter as knocked off center, even torn apart, by the different logics emanating from the instances that make up the psychical apparatus. This book does not conceive of the subject as supposed to represent the human person as a whole, nor as the narcissistic image the latter can have of him/herself, still less as the reflexive notion of self which tends to designate an overall self-referential ("self-centered") function. The subject the author is trying to define psychoanalytically is not characterized by plenitude or naturalness, but seems rather to define itself as a precarious function, resulting from the human newborn's condition of prematuration, and therefore from the earliest drive transactions between the baby and its mother, including the mother's verbal and gestural responses. Working as a psychoanalyst to help a patient establish better bonds between the different registers of his psyche does not imply giving in to unifying, globalizing, simplifying, or isolating illusions, but rather requires that we never lose sight of the heterogeneity (including the irremediable differentiation of the sexes) which is just what Freud's metapsychology introduced. Thus the ordeal of otherness-with regard to the sex we don't have, the language we don't speak, the means we don't possess-is indispensable in affirming a subjectivity.