Abstract

 
 
 
 This paper provides a psychoanalytical account of subjectivity. It engages in a Lacanian reading of subjectivity in Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (1889), whose protagonist, the lawyer, illustrates Jacques Lacan’s ideas about subjectivity and the subject. In the story, the lawyer develops a fragmented sense of subjectivity and experiences alienation from the society and all its allegedly logical and supposedly eternal norms, as well as loss and lack in his very being. The story reveals that subjectivity is unstable and constructed within and through language and that remaining a normal person, from the society’s perspective, requires not pondering over and beyond the language, but remaining stuck in it and never suspecting its authenticity and reliability. By contemplating whether the society’s ideologies are everlasting and what are or might be over them, the lawyer expects the society’s ideologies to bring bliss to human and thereby he develops hatred and despise towards them all. The ideas of Jacques Lacan about the development of subjectivity in the course of the mirror stage and the oedipal crisis are drawn upon.
 
 
 
Highlights
Lacan was an avid follower of Freud
The present essay has suggested that the lawyer in Chekhov's “The Bet” illustrates certain of Jacques Lacan’s ideas concerning subjectivity and the subject
In order to eschew temptations of alienation and to find authenticity he seeks refuge in indulging himself in his books whose field is extended from philosophy to religion, to art, literature, math, logic and even, to language
Summary
Lacan was an avid follower of Freud. He came to grasp the main ideas of psychoanalysis via Freud’s main theories. What can be deduced from this part of story is that the lawyer’s unstable I or the self, according to Lacan, was pumping out all through these years This duality of the character and searching for a fixed identity that always encounters with a hole in it disturbs the lawyer more than the banker. The lawyer is obsessed with looking for a real self and this obsession is the direct result of overthinking about the authenticity of the doctrines he has acquired through language, but his search only leads him to new and deeper experiences of fragmentation and alienation. He constantly goes on to adapt a new role to play, which again leads to fragmentation and alienation and to the level in a spiral that leads him away from authentic experiences
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