Introduction

Each one of us has to be born "inter urinas et faeces", as St. Augustine so strikingly put it. More recently, Freud's 1915 discovery of "instincts" — that is, "drives" — and their "viscitudes" leads us further to envision a human subjectivity that would have nothing metaphysical about it.

Early Development

The baby's "feeling of himself" first arises in the midst of the earliest interactions with his parental partner, establishing his "drive monatges" whose accomplishment forms a circuit latching on to something in the first other. In the course of these early interactions, the "new subject" evoked by Freud will gradually take on its own qualities, according to the significations that it can grasp in the primordial partner's messages, responding to the baby's manifestation of needs.

Lacan's Perspective

One of Lacan's key ideas is that "signifiers" are perceived first of all in the Other. The Freudian subject may then be defined as "an agent of corporeal energy caught up in a signifying relation with his parental other (already a subject)".