In Part II of this book I will develop the idea that subject-formation has to do with more than just the individual. Identity concerns the way psychological reality comes into being. Psychological reality bends the real into so-called facts, in the sense of “what is made”—the past participle of the Latin verb facere—and more specifically, facts that are made for and by a subject in its relation to the Other. For Freud, this has to do with how the subject handles guilt, and hence—from our angle—how it manages its own and the Other’s lack. “What lie behind the sense of guilt of neurotics are always psychical realities and never factual ones. What characterizes neurotics is that they prefer psychical to factual reality and react just as seriously to thoughts as normal people do to realities” (Freud 1978 [1912–1913], p. 159).
Described in this way, psychic identity is a largely unconscious representative construction that represents both the subject’s and the Other’s identities, along with the relation between the two. We will call this the fundamental fantasy, an idea that reappears in today’s theory of the mind (Gergeley and Watson 1996). The question is, how does the fundamental fantasy, or more broadly, psychic reality—normal or not—come into being?
We will approach this question through a reading of Freud and Lacan. What is striking is how closely contemporary psychoanalytic attachment theory adheres to their theories. This should not be surprising, given their common starting point (the relationship between the subject and the Other), and their shared clinical experience. We will have several occasions to refer to attachment theory here, all the more so because it has meanwhile been empirically validated.
Part II is both literally and figuratively the heart of this book. Given its contents, it is not an easy section. Identity development, or subject-formation, takes place through the mechanism of retroactivity, and its conceptualization is perhaps best approached in the same way. The reader will encounter my frequent advice to refer to earlier and later parts of the book (as cf infra and cf supra). At the end of each chapter I provide a concise summary to help further clarify the key concepts and relations. Here is an overview of what follows.
Chapter 6 sketches out how the subject comes into being in relation to the Other in the primary mother and child relation. From this, it will become clear how identity is always relative, in the sense that it cannot be understood as a substantial and separate entity but rather in terms of a relation where the distinction between the self and the other is not so easy to make.
Chapter 7 devotes special attention to the mechanisms of defense and retroactivity. We will distinguish between a first and a second period, which form the ground for the specific structure of the relation between the subject and the Other. More specifically, this will enable us to make a distinction between an actualpathology and a psychopathology.
Chapter 8 bids goodbye to the linear-chronological form of reasoning to instead present a circular model of subject-formation. Its mechanisms—alienation and separation—bring about two contradictory tendencies, each favoring a different direction in the subject–Other relation, and hence also in diagnostics and treatment.
Chapter 9 discusses something that is usually missing from contemporary psychology: the underlying causality as situated within neo-Darwinian discourse. Here I will show the affinities of this discourse with Freud’s theory of the drive, and we will ultimately discover that there is a homologous structure between the drive, the unconscious, and the subject.
Finally, Chapter 10, the conclusion, will reconsider our initial questions regarding anxiety, guilt, and depression in the light of a structural psychodiagnostic theory and in the treatment associated with it.