Freud and the problem of subjectivity: from the Cartesian cogito to the divided subject

Abstract

This article examines the place of Freudian psychoanalysis within the philosophical history of the concept of subjectivity. It argues that Freud did not merely add a new object — the unconscious — to a subject already defined by modern philosophy, but displaced the very axis around which that subject had been conceived since Descartes. The argument reconstitutes the lineage running from the Cartesian cogito to the Kantian transcendental subject and thence to Schopenhauer's and Nietzsche's critiques of the primacy of reason; it then analyses the Freudian formulation of the unconscious and the second topography, showing how far these radicalise rather than inherit those critiques; and it confronts the Freudian decentring with the objections of Foucault and Derrida and the affirmative readings of Marcuse and Ricoeur. It is argued that Freud's decisive contribution lies not in asserting the existence of non-conscious psychical processes, available before him, but in demonstrating that such processes obey a logic of their own — conflictual and interpretable — thereby turning the subject's opacity to itself into an object of method rather than a limit of knowledge.