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Unable to separate the term subject from the notion of consciousness, Freud placed it in opposition to the external world or the object, or in their reciprocal reversal (1915e). In "New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis" (1933a [1932]) Freud said the ego was "in its proper sense a subject" (p. 58)—not as an essence, but a function to be filled.

Jacques Lacan (1966) changed this by referring to the subject as "the subject of the unconscious" in its "unwitting" dimension, its ex-centricity in relation to itself. The subject is the "it" that the "I" speaks of when the I wishes to refer to itself as unconscious. Or rather, the subject is this very split between the "I" and the "it." The ego, for its part, is not the "I": a precipitate of identifications, it becomes the locus of misapprehension. How, then, is it possible for "the subject to recognize and name his desire"? The answer is that the truth speaks, even if the words spoken convey both the lie of desire and its truth, and even if "the I that speaks is not the same as the I that is spoken."

The Other gives language its sense and the subject is an effect of that sense. The subject of the unconscious is "the subject represented by a signifier for another signifier," and the only important thing is the degree of difference between the two signifiers. The Imaginary also enters into its determination through that which is imagined about the object a, the only object that can be transferred for transference into the place occupied by phallic lack. Thus, "the truth that the I of the unconscious tells us is that only this nothingness sustains it."

Accordingly, for Lacan, the aim of treatment was not to fill this gaping nothingness, but to manifest it and potentially to express it through sublimation . . . or by training psychoanalysts. He emphasized that the kind of listening that took place in analysis often took wrong turns, and thus attempted, in his last years, to reequilibrate his system, notably by using the topological figure of the Borromean knot, to give "consistency" to the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary: "The subject is what is determined by the figure in question: Not that he is in any sense its double, the subject is conditioned by the points at which the knot catches and tightens in these points."

The Lacanian subject is thus very different from the one based on Freudian metapsychology. Lacan's approach upends the theory of subjectivity by making the subject the subject of the drives, who sometimes directs them and at times is directed by them.

This subject is alien to itself, split between the Self and itself, though there is a constant reciprocity of relations between the mind's agencies, and reversibility of the economic and dynamic transformations within the personality as a whole. Among the various modalities of representance, representation appears as the bridge or articulation between the economic dimension and that of meaning, the product of work whose conscious or unconscious quality constitutes modalities that are more or less contingent or necessary, depending on the case, within the figure of tension that is desire.

If, for Freud, the lifting of repression produced conscious awareness, today the emphasis has shifted onto whether or not a new, "subjectivable" meaning can possibly emerge, be assumed by the subject, and through the effects of deferred action [après coup] that constitute psychic reality, itself become a function of both internal constraints and effects of the psychic reality of the object. Piera Aulagnier's "I," the study of the originating conditions of the process of subjectification (Cahn), and the related Aufhebung (sublation, supersession) illuminated by the notion of transitionality (Roussillon) are new approaches centered on the internal and external elements at stake in the splittings and exclusions that oppose this subjective appropriation. Here, in contrast to the problematics of neurosis, where the work of analysand naturally predominates, it is the work of the analyst that is revealed to be determinant, to contain that work, absorb it, and connect its productions.

RAYMOND CAHN

See also: Alienation; Ego; Ego (analytical psychology); Ego (ego psychology); I; Identity; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification; Individual; Individuation (analytical psychology); Object; Object a; Other, the; Phenomenology and psychoanalysis; Philosophy and psychoanalysis; Self; Self-consciousness; Subject of the unconscious; Want of being/lack of being.