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The Subject in psychoanalysis (Lacan). The Subject of the statement and the Subject of the enunciation. The term "subject" is present from the very earliest of ...Lacan's psychoanalytic writings, and from 1945 on it occupies a central part in Lacan's work. This is a distinctive feature of Lacan's work, since the term does not constitute part of Freud's theoretical vocabulary, but is more associated with philosophical, legal and linguistic discourses. Three Kinds of subject. In 1945, Lacan distinguishes between three kinds of subject. 1. Firstly, there is the impersonal subject, independent of the other, the pure grammatical subject, the noetic subject, the "it" of "it is known that." 2. there is the anonymous reciprocal subject who is completely equal to and substitutable for any other, and who recognises himself in equivalence with the other. 3. there is the personal subject, whose uniqueness is constituted by an act of self-affirmation. It is always this third sense of the subject, the subject in his uniqueness, that constitutes the focus of Lacan's work. Subject and Ego In 1953, Lacan establishes a distinction between the subject and the ego which will remain one of the most fundamental distinctions throughout the rest of his work. Whereas the ego is part of the imaginary order, the subject is part of the symbolic. Thus the subject is not simply equivalent to a conscious sense of agency, which is a mere illusion produced by the ego, but to the unconscious; Lacan's "subject" is the subject of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud Lacan argues that this distinction can be traced back to Freud: "[Freud] wrote Das Ich und das Es in order to maintain this fundamental distinction between the true subject of the unconscious and the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications." Ecrits Although psychoanalytic treatment has powerful effects on the ego, it is the subject, and not the ego, on which psychoanalysis primarily operates. LANGUAGE References to language come to dominate Lacan's concept of the subject from the mid-1950s on. Subject of the statement v the subject of the enunciation. Lacan distinguishes the subject of the statement from the subject of the enunciation to show that because the subject is essentially a speaking being (parlêtre), he is inescapably divided, castrated, split. So "What is the subject of the statement? "The subject of the statement (or subject of the utterance, as it is sometimes also referred to) is I the first person. In psychoanalytic terms it can be equated to the ego. It is the subject that in day-to-day discourse we posit in order to attribute an agent to speech. As Lacanian psychoanalyst Philippe Van Haute writes, The subject of the statement refers to the subject as it appears to itself and to the other (for example, as someone who believes herself to be a diligent student). (Van Haute, Against Adaptation, p.40.) In the Écrits Lacan maintains that this I of the subject of the statement is a signifier, but that it does not signify the subject (Écrits, 800). What does he mean by this? What is known in linguistics as the shifter (or indexical) I gives context to what is said so that the sentence is in some way ‘rooted’ or attributed to that subject. But as linguists recognise, in and of itself this I has no meaning. We have to look at the context, provided by the enunciation (in most cases, what follows after the I), to make sense of what has been said. So the I of the statement functions simply as a way of making sense of the enunciation. In Van Haute’s example above, The shifter ‘I’ has no meaning and no determinable content unless I add something like ‘am a diligent student’. (Van Haute, Against Adaptation, p.39). What is the subject of the enunciation? The subject of the enunciation can be understood as the subject of the unconscious. It is a subject that emerges from within our speech, through our signifiers, and which differs from or contradicts the I of the statement. Lacan calls the subject of the enunciation the subject not insofar as it produces discourse but insofar as it is produced [fait], cornered even [fait comme un rat], by discourse (Lacan, My Teaching, p.36). Here Lacan is pointing to the fact that the subject is not quite the agent of what he says: as much as he speaks he is spoken. The words that he uses carry a meaning which exceeds the one he hoped to convey when he opened his mouth. It is through the act of enunciation that we have access to the unconscious in the psychoanalytic sense. This is why Lacan says in the Écrits that the presence of the unconscious, being situated in the locus of the Other, can be found in every discourse, in its enunciation. (Écrits, 834.) Lacan’s idea is that rather than involving a single subject who uses language to convey a meaning or sentiment, there is a subject revealed which is not equivalent to the one speaking as I, a subject which can be detected in the very words or signifiers themselves. Owen Hewitson In the early 1960s Lacan defines the subject as "that which is represented by a signifier for another signifier; in other words, the subject is an effect of language". Ecrits

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