Subjectivity

Freud

Sigmund Freud initiated a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Freud replaced the Enlightenment's autonomous and rational subject with a complex self directed by deep psychological drives obscured from the person's own awareness. Subjectivity is neither innate nor determined, but constituted by gender relations and sexual identifications forged in early childhood, particularly in the nuclear family. Freud suggested that children move through stages in early life where desires corresponding with body regions (oral, anal, genital) are either met or frustrated. Prominent among his concepts is the Oedipus Complex, which operates through the child's recognition of male and female genitals and fear of the father's power; it leads children to identify with either the powerful father (and to imagine sex with the mother) or with the mother and her role as the object of the father's sexual desire. In either case, said Freud, Oedipal desire is understood as inappropriate and is repressed: It is placed into the unconscious to avoid its effects. But repressed drives animate dreams and guide our experiencing, such that adult compulsions and identifications are shaped by unconscious gender associations, repressions of the libido, and projections of hidden and irrational sexual desires. The inner world is thus transparent to the self, yet one can grasp and control these unconscious forces with the objectifying assistance of the psychoanalyst.

Lacan

Not long after Freud, Jacques Lacan modified the former's claims through the application of [Page 801]Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic structuralism. Saussure held that language was a system of differences in which the arbitrary relation between the signifier and signified are held together in one's mind. From this, Lacan reasoned that the unconscious is structured like a language, and that if we are to understand subjectivity, we must understand linguistic human communication.

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