Dissolving the Myth of the Unified Self: The Fate of the Subject in Freudian Analysis

Abstract

Employing Lacan's conception of desire, this paper explores the distinction between self and subjectivity as it emerges in the psychoanalytic situation. Challenging the notion of the self as a singular, coherent, and bounded entity, I demonstrate, through a review of Dora's case, that the "Freudian subject" is a cast of characters, a loose net of contextual, contradictory, and shifting identifications enveloping not a discrete core, but its very absence.