Identification, Alienation, and the Subjectivity of a Divided Subject
Wrote this for my Psychoanalysis and Existentialism course. Got an a-. It's kinda interesting. If you're interested in psychoanalysis. I assume you'll forgive me for not posting footnotes.
Psychoanalysis is unique as a mental science in pronouncing, as its first principle, the division of the human subject. Whereas moral and political philosophy, religion, and even traditional psychology rely on the assumption that humans are unified individuals, psychoanalysis begins by distinguishing between the conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind. This division, in Freudian theory, is tripartite. Within what we call the ‘subject’, there is the ego, the id, and the superego, all of which have their say on what the subject will do. Though the ego “controls the approaches to motility” and ultimately decides what the individual will or will not do, the id, the superego, and the external world all impinge upon the ego with various means of influence. The ego thus finds itself servant to three masters (Ego and the Id, 82), two of which rest internally within the same individual. What is left of the human subject of ethics and existential philosophy? “The subject,” Lacan tells us, “is never more than supposed,” or, as a commentator clarifies, “the subject is never more than an assumption on our part.”
In western philosophy, the subject is found in the Cartesian cogito: the subject thinks, therefore he is. Psychoanalysis does not and can not content itself with this premise for two reasons. Because the self has both conscious and unconscious parts, it is not enough that the conscious part (the ego) know that it thinks. Furthermore, the ego is in no position to say once and for all ‘I exist,’ but “must repeat to himself the words ‘I am thinking’ in order to be able to convince himself that he exists” (Fink, 42). Rooted in temporality, and resting on the surface of the unconscious id (Ego, 28), the ego does not actually find any security in the cogito. The ego may know that he is, but he does not know what he is, and it is security in this ‘what’ that the ego seeks. We are, of course, on the path of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and we are ahead of ourselves. We have not explained what Lacan means when he says the subject is ‘supposed,’ and to do so, we must begin where Lacan himself began: with Freud. Before we can understand how Lacan redefines the subject for psychoanalysis, we must know how Freud broke the subject apart in the first place.
Freud agrees with Georg Groddeck that “we are lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces” (Ego, 27), and he wishes to enter into “the other part of the mind.” He describes very precisely the different parts which exist. The ego, as we have said, is the center of motility. But the ego also “withdraws libido from the id” (81) and creates ego-constructions; it sees objects and identifies with them (we will say more on this later). The ego, which is properly the conscious part of the mind, has to deal with and appease the unconscious forces which find their source in the id. It rides upon the id as a horseman upon a horse (30), seemingly in control of its movements, but dependent upon the complicity and docility of the libidinal vehicle.
The id is the seat of desire. The subject, as psychoanalysis understands him, is driven by the id’s unconscious desires (such as those created by the Oedipus complex) which the ego must try to fulfill. In order to try to regain control, the individual ego forms a superego, or ego-ideal. The superego is both “an energetic reaction-formation against those choices” and a “deposit left by the earliest object choices of the id” (44-5). This faculty is responsible for repressing the Oedipus complex and owes its very existence to that “revolutionary event” (44-5). On the other hand, the superego is an ideal that exerts pressure on the ego, and because this ideal is comprised of the id’s early object-choices, it reinforces the id’s control over the ego. Freud summarizes: “By setting up this ego-ideal the ego masters its Oedipus complex and at the same time places itself in subjection to the id” (48).
Yet, the ego is not just controlled by the id: superego dominates the ego as well by inflicting “an unconscious sense of guilt” (45). In creating the superego, the ego learns how to criticize itself. Because it is not its ideal, the ego feels guilt, or “the expression of a condemnation of the ego pronounced by its criticizing function” (73). The superego acts as a parent, specifically as the father, retaining “the capacity to stand apart from the ego and to rule it” (69). The two rulers can even collaborate in subordination, as the superego can reach down into the id “and act as its representative in relation to the ego” (70).
To mitigate the demands of id and superego, the ego resorts to identification. In a human child, this begins at an early age, perhaps around age three, and continues throughout the length of adult life. The ego learns that the id wants certain objects, and tries to take on the object’s characteristics. “When the ego assumes the features of the object,” Freud writes, “it forces itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and tries to make good the loss of that object by saying, ‘Look, I am so like the object, you can as well love me’” (37). This idea is clarified in an earlier paper: “Identification endeavors to mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a ‘model.’” We find here the beginnings of the ego’s enterprise of subject-construction. Indeed, Freud distinguishes between the mere object-choice of an other (here the father) and actual identification with the other:
"It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends on whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the object of the ego."
The ego may not fully understand its own divided subjectivity, but it is possible, Freud tells us, for the ego to treat an other as a subject. Identification with one’s peers, in the form of a ‘wanting-to-be’ (as opposed to ‘have’), is the beginning of subject-construction in oneself.
It is at this point in our study that Freud ends and Lacan begins. Lacan builds from Freud, from the premise that the subject is split between ego and unconscious, but he places the relationship between ego and other in a decidedly existential light. One commentator explains:
"But something else is always going on in dealings between the need-driven subject and the other who may or may not provide satisfaction. A demand for love is being made. The divided subject, haunted by absence and lack, looks to the other not simply to supply his needs but to pay him the compliment of an unconditional yes."
The needs mentioned here refer to the demands placed upon the ego by the id, the superego, and the external world. The subject, divided into these three parts, realizes that he is a ‘fragmented body’ (corps morcelé), and wonders whether it is just the ego that is his ‘self’. But, as this Lacanian commentator writes, “Whether the subject looks forwards to the ego or backwards to the corps morcelé, he is contemplating a construction” (Bowie, 26).
This is all very abstruse at first glance, but it is actually just a rephrasing of Freud. The first point we must take from Lacan is the concept of lack. The subject lacks fundamental unity, and must somehow construct it. He looks to an other for fulfilment, for a ‘yes.’ This is essentially the same as the point we found in Freud: the individual is divided, the persons in the person (Bowie, 90) are in conflict, and the ego must look externally to the Other for some means of reconciliation. We are inclined to ask, “But why can’t we just place the ‘self’ in the ego, or even in the id? Isn’t Freud more interested in the unconscious anyway? Why not make the id ‘self’?”
The ego, as we saw in discussing Descartes, is no place for selfhood, since “ego thinking is mere conscious rationalization and the being thus engendered can only be categorized as false or fake” (Fink, 44). Nor is Lacan content with finding the subject in the willing unconscious manifest in parapraxes (42). Rather, “the specifically Lacanian subject is not so much an interruption”− which the willing unconscious is− “as the assumption thereof” (47).
So the Lacanian subject is not ego, and neither is it the interrupting id; what, we must ask, does this subject have to take onto itself, ‘assume’? Lacan believes that “one is always responsible for one’s position as subject” (47). How does one assume this responsibility? Is it a simple matter of learning to identify the other as a subject, as it seemed Freud was saying? To answer such questions, Lacan in fact takes a step back from identification and seeks out what caused the subject to identify in the first place. Freud tells us that in identification, the ego tries to appease the id: but why, to press the question further, does the ego need to look outside itself to satisfy its unconscious desires?
Lacan explains this need with the processes of alienation and separation. As a child attempts to communicate with the mother and the rest of the external world, he realizes that he must “submit to language… and allow him or herself to be represented by words” (50). Not only is the child alienated by language; it is alienated by a feeling of separation from its mother. When a human individual first comes into the world, it wants to be its mother’s sole object of desire (51). The mother provides all of a baby’s pleasures, and consequently, when withholding its presence, all of the baby’s pains. The child seeks unity with its mother, hoping to experience only the pleasure. The feeling of separation begins when the subject realizes the mother has her own desires, indeed, that it was her own mysterious desire for a child that brought him into the world (50). Ultimately, “A strict identity between the child’s desire and hers cannot be maintained; her desire’s independence from her child’s creates a rift between them” (59).
It is at this point that we can see the significance in Freud’s distinction between identification with the other as subject or as object (Pg. 3 above). Though the child can stubbornly cling to its mother as an object in order to ignore his division (Fink, 59), he will not understand himself as a subject until he understands her as one. He must recognize her as a lacking and incomplete subject with her own desires and degree of fallibility (53-4). This identification with her as a subjective other− or as Fink says, mOther− retroactively allows the ego to better understand itself: “Man learns to desire as an other, as if he were some other person” (54). To rephrase: the ego overcomes its insecurity about being a divided subject, a corps morcelé, by realizing that everyone else is also the same.
What does it mean to know that everyone else the same? In exchange for the cogito, the psychoanalyst offers the knowledge that the subject is divided. A child does not know how to accept this knowledge: early stages of identification treat others as objects, means by which one can hope to attain unity within oneself. The healthy adult, on the other hand, must accept the fact that one’s peers have their own desires, and in doing so, become himself “a being of desire, a desiring being” (61). The subject learns that others lack in the same way he does, and that they desire to find objects to fulfill that lack. He figuratively ‘splits’ himself and all others into two parts: an ego, and an object in the world of objects (61).
Lacan calls this epiphany jouissance. Jouissance also occurred in the pre-alienated (pre-conscious?) stage when a baby feels united with its mother, but it is a reified jouissance that ultimately allows for a sense of being:
"This second-order jouissance takes the place of the former “wholeness” or “completeness,” and fantasy − which stages this second-order jouissance − takes the subject beyond his or her nothingness, his or her mere existence as a marker at the level of alienation, and supplies a sense of being. It is thus only through fantasy, made possible by separation, that the subject can procure him or herself some modicum of what Lacan calls “being” (60-1)."
Another way to understand splitting and its effect, jouissance, is to consider this process as the choice to become active, as learning to see oneself as an actor, and not just a passive receiver: “Not ‘It happened to me,’ or ‘They did this to me,’ or ‘Fate had it in store for me,’ but ‘I was,’ ‘I did,’ ‘I saw,’ ‘I cried out’” (62). It becomes clear now what Lacan meant when he says “one is always responsible for one’s position as subject” (see Pg. 5 above): the Lacanian subject meets the trauma and insecurities engendered by alienation and separation and proclaims, “Veni, vidi, vici.” He learns that he does not need to identify with others, and he instead takes responsibility for his own desires: “The traversing of fantasy is the process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon him or herself, and assumes responsibility for that jouissance” (63, my emphasis).
Lacan stays true to Freud here, but adds an existential or ‘ethical’ aspect to the subject. He takes Freud’s injunction, “Wo Es war, soll Ich warden” and gives us subject-identification, splitting, and jouissance as the means. To understand this in terms of the Freudian schema we studied earlier, we may say that one seeks to become “an I that assumes responsibility for the unconscious” (46). By treating himself as split, the divided subject attains active subjectivity when he, through his ego, accepts accountability for the workings of his id. The ego cannot help but view the id as an other; it knows not what the id ultimately wants, nor how it will express its desires. But the ego must accept this relationship and accept that there is an other within the subject: “I must come to be where foreign foes − the Other as language and the Other as desire − once dominated. I must subjectify that otherness” (68). We now know what Lacan means when he says the subject is ‘supposed.’ The human subject revelling in jouissance is one who accepts the finitude of its knowledge of itself and makes concord with its self-division. Ironically, this credence was known to philosophy a century before Freud and Lacan. I conclude with a passage from Hegel:
"Thus the ego does not will itself primarily as a knowing subject, but as a finite and immediate entity, and this is the sphere of its phenomenal existence. It wills itself in its own particularity, and it is at this point that the passions come into play, and that individuality realizes its own particular nature. If it succeeds in realizing its finite nature, it has in fact doubled itself; and when the atom has thus reconciled itself with its other, the individual has attained that state which we call happiness. For a man is said to be happy if he has found harmony within himself."
Psychoanalysis is unique as a mental science in pronouncing, as its first principle, the division of the human subject. Whereas moral and political philosophy, religion, and even traditional psychology rely on the assumption that humans are unified individuals, psychoanalysis begins by distinguishing between the conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind. This division, in Freudian theory, is tripartite. Within what we call the ‘subject’, there is the ego, the id, and the superego, all of which have their say on what the subject will do. Though the ego “controls the approaches to motility” and ultimately decides what the individual will or will not do, the id, the superego, and the external world all impinge upon the ego with various means of influence. The ego thus finds itself servant to three masters (Ego and the Id, 82), two of which rest internally within the same individual. What is left of the human subject of ethics and existential philosophy? “The subject,” Lacan tells us, “is never more than supposed,” or, as a commentator clarifies, “the subject is never more than an assumption on our part.”
In western philosophy, the subject is found in the Cartesian cogito: the subject thinks, therefore he is. Psychoanalysis does not and can not content itself with this premise for two reasons. Because the self has both conscious and unconscious parts, it is not enough that the conscious part (the ego) know that it thinks. Furthermore, the ego is in no position to say once and for all ‘I exist,’ but “must repeat to himself the words ‘I am thinking’ in order to be able to convince himself that he exists” (Fink, 42). Rooted in temporality, and resting on the surface of the unconscious id (Ego, 28), the ego does not actually find any security in the cogito. The ego may know that he is, but he does not know what he is, and it is security in this ‘what’ that the ego seeks. We are, of course, on the path of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and we are ahead of ourselves. We have not explained what Lacan means when he says the subject is ‘supposed,’ and to do so, we must begin where Lacan himself began: with Freud. Before we can understand how Lacan redefines the subject for psychoanalysis, we must know how Freud broke the subject apart in the first place.
Freud agrees with Georg Groddeck that “we are lived by unknown and uncontrollable forces” (Ego, 27), and he wishes to enter into “the other part of the mind.” He describes very precisely the different parts which exist. The ego, as we have said, is the center of motility. But the ego also “withdraws libido from the id” (81) and creates ego-constructions; it sees objects and identifies with them (we will say more on this later). The ego, which is properly the conscious part of the mind, has to deal with and appease the unconscious forces which find their source in the id. It rides upon the id as a horseman upon a horse (30), seemingly in control of its movements, but dependent upon the complicity and docility of the libidinal vehicle.
The id is the seat of desire. The subject, as psychoanalysis understands him, is driven by the id’s unconscious desires (such as those created by the Oedipus complex) which the ego must try to fulfill. In order to try to regain control, the individual ego forms a superego, or ego-ideal. The superego is both “an energetic reaction-formation against those choices” and a “deposit left by the earliest object choices of the id” (44-5). This faculty is responsible for repressing the Oedipus complex and owes its very existence to that “revolutionary event” (44-5). On the other hand, the superego is an ideal that exerts pressure on the ego, and because this ideal is comprised of the id’s early object-choices, it reinforces the id’s control over the ego. Freud summarizes: “By setting up this ego-ideal the ego masters its Oedipus complex and at the same time places itself in subjection to the id” (48).
Yet, the ego is not just controlled by the id: superego dominates the ego as well by inflicting “an unconscious sense of guilt” (45). In creating the superego, the ego learns how to criticize itself. Because it is not its ideal, the ego feels guilt, or “the expression of a condemnation of the ego pronounced by its criticizing function” (73). The superego acts as a parent, specifically as the father, retaining “the capacity to stand apart from the ego and to rule it” (69). The two rulers can even collaborate in subordination, as the superego can reach down into the id “and act as its representative in relation to the ego” (70).
To mitigate the demands of id and superego, the ego resorts to identification. In a human child, this begins at an early age, perhaps around age three, and continues throughout the length of adult life. The ego learns that the id wants certain objects, and tries to take on the object’s characteristics. “When the ego assumes the features of the object,” Freud writes, “it forces itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and tries to make good the loss of that object by saying, ‘Look, I am so like the object, you can as well love me’” (37). This idea is clarified in an earlier paper: “Identification endeavors to mould a person’s own ego after the fashion of the one that has been taken as a ‘model.’” We find here the beginnings of the ego’s enterprise of subject-construction. Indeed, Freud distinguishes between the mere object-choice of an other (here the father) and actual identification with the other:
"It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends on whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the object of the ego."
The ego may not fully understand its own divided subjectivity, but it is possible, Freud tells us, for the ego to treat an other as a subject. Identification with one’s peers, in the form of a ‘wanting-to-be’ (as opposed to ‘have’), is the beginning of subject-construction in oneself.
It is at this point in our study that Freud ends and Lacan begins. Lacan builds from Freud, from the premise that the subject is split between ego and unconscious, but he places the relationship between ego and other in a decidedly existential light. One commentator explains:
"But something else is always going on in dealings between the need-driven subject and the other who may or may not provide satisfaction. A demand for love is being made. The divided subject, haunted by absence and lack, looks to the other not simply to supply his needs but to pay him the compliment of an unconditional yes."
The needs mentioned here refer to the demands placed upon the ego by the id, the superego, and the external world. The subject, divided into these three parts, realizes that he is a ‘fragmented body’ (corps morcelé), and wonders whether it is just the ego that is his ‘self’. But, as this Lacanian commentator writes, “Whether the subject looks forwards to the ego or backwards to the corps morcelé, he is contemplating a construction” (Bowie, 26).
This is all very abstruse at first glance, but it is actually just a rephrasing of Freud. The first point we must take from Lacan is the concept of lack. The subject lacks fundamental unity, and must somehow construct it. He looks to an other for fulfilment, for a ‘yes.’ This is essentially the same as the point we found in Freud: the individual is divided, the persons in the person (Bowie, 90) are in conflict, and the ego must look externally to the Other for some means of reconciliation. We are inclined to ask, “But why can’t we just place the ‘self’ in the ego, or even in the id? Isn’t Freud more interested in the unconscious anyway? Why not make the id ‘self’?”
The ego, as we saw in discussing Descartes, is no place for selfhood, since “ego thinking is mere conscious rationalization and the being thus engendered can only be categorized as false or fake” (Fink, 44). Nor is Lacan content with finding the subject in the willing unconscious manifest in parapraxes (42). Rather, “the specifically Lacanian subject is not so much an interruption”− which the willing unconscious is− “as the assumption thereof” (47).
So the Lacanian subject is not ego, and neither is it the interrupting id; what, we must ask, does this subject have to take onto itself, ‘assume’? Lacan believes that “one is always responsible for one’s position as subject” (47). How does one assume this responsibility? Is it a simple matter of learning to identify the other as a subject, as it seemed Freud was saying? To answer such questions, Lacan in fact takes a step back from identification and seeks out what caused the subject to identify in the first place. Freud tells us that in identification, the ego tries to appease the id: but why, to press the question further, does the ego need to look outside itself to satisfy its unconscious desires?
Lacan explains this need with the processes of alienation and separation. As a child attempts to communicate with the mother and the rest of the external world, he realizes that he must “submit to language… and allow him or herself to be represented by words” (50). Not only is the child alienated by language; it is alienated by a feeling of separation from its mother. When a human individual first comes into the world, it wants to be its mother’s sole object of desire (51). The mother provides all of a baby’s pleasures, and consequently, when withholding its presence, all of the baby’s pains. The child seeks unity with its mother, hoping to experience only the pleasure. The feeling of separation begins when the subject realizes the mother has her own desires, indeed, that it was her own mysterious desire for a child that brought him into the world (50). Ultimately, “A strict identity between the child’s desire and hers cannot be maintained; her desire’s independence from her child’s creates a rift between them” (59).
It is at this point that we can see the significance in Freud’s distinction between identification with the other as subject or as object (Pg. 3 above). Though the child can stubbornly cling to its mother as an object in order to ignore his division (Fink, 59), he will not understand himself as a subject until he understands her as one. He must recognize her as a lacking and incomplete subject with her own desires and degree of fallibility (53-4). This identification with her as a subjective other− or as Fink says, mOther− retroactively allows the ego to better understand itself: “Man learns to desire as an other, as if he were some other person” (54). To rephrase: the ego overcomes its insecurity about being a divided subject, a corps morcelé, by realizing that everyone else is also the same.
What does it mean to know that everyone else the same? In exchange for the cogito, the psychoanalyst offers the knowledge that the subject is divided. A child does not know how to accept this knowledge: early stages of identification treat others as objects, means by which one can hope to attain unity within oneself. The healthy adult, on the other hand, must accept the fact that one’s peers have their own desires, and in doing so, become himself “a being of desire, a desiring being” (61). The subject learns that others lack in the same way he does, and that they desire to find objects to fulfill that lack. He figuratively ‘splits’ himself and all others into two parts: an ego, and an object in the world of objects (61).
Lacan calls this epiphany jouissance. Jouissance also occurred in the pre-alienated (pre-conscious?) stage when a baby feels united with its mother, but it is a reified jouissance that ultimately allows for a sense of being:
"This second-order jouissance takes the place of the former “wholeness” or “completeness,” and fantasy − which stages this second-order jouissance − takes the subject beyond his or her nothingness, his or her mere existence as a marker at the level of alienation, and supplies a sense of being. It is thus only through fantasy, made possible by separation, that the subject can procure him or herself some modicum of what Lacan calls “being” (60-1)."
Another way to understand splitting and its effect, jouissance, is to consider this process as the choice to become active, as learning to see oneself as an actor, and not just a passive receiver: “Not ‘It happened to me,’ or ‘They did this to me,’ or ‘Fate had it in store for me,’ but ‘I was,’ ‘I did,’ ‘I saw,’ ‘I cried out’” (62). It becomes clear now what Lacan meant when he says “one is always responsible for one’s position as subject” (see Pg. 5 above): the Lacanian subject meets the trauma and insecurities engendered by alienation and separation and proclaims, “Veni, vidi, vici.” He learns that he does not need to identify with others, and he instead takes responsibility for his own desires: “The traversing of fantasy is the process by which the subject subjectifies trauma, takes the traumatic event upon him or herself, and assumes responsibility for that jouissance” (63, my emphasis).
Lacan stays true to Freud here, but adds an existential or ‘ethical’ aspect to the subject. He takes Freud’s injunction, “Wo Es war, soll Ich warden” and gives us subject-identification, splitting, and jouissance as the means. To understand this in terms of the Freudian schema we studied earlier, we may say that one seeks to become “an I that assumes responsibility for the unconscious” (46). By treating himself as split, the divided subject attains active subjectivity when he, through his ego, accepts accountability for the workings of his id. The ego cannot help but view the id as an other; it knows not what the id ultimately wants, nor how it will express its desires. But the ego must accept this relationship and accept that there is an other within the subject: “I must come to be where foreign foes − the Other as language and the Other as desire − once dominated. I must subjectify that otherness” (68). We now know what Lacan means when he says the subject is ‘supposed.’ The human subject revelling in jouissance is one who accepts the finitude of its knowledge of itself and makes concord with its self-division. Ironically, this credence was known to philosophy a century before Freud and Lacan. I conclude with a passage from Hegel:
"Thus the ego does not will itself primarily as a knowing subject, but as a finite and immediate entity, and this is the sphere of its phenomenal existence. It wills itself in its own particularity, and it is at this point that the passions come into play, and that individuality realizes its own particular nature. If it succeeds in realizing its finite nature, it has in fact doubled itself; and when the atom has thus reconciled itself with its other, the individual has attained that state which we call happiness. For a man is said to be happy if he has found harmony within himself."
posted by Tongue-tied Lightning at 10:09 AM
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