ABSTRACT
This chapter explores one variant of the logical puzzle of the prisoner's dilemma and does so via the work of Jacques Lacan (2006b), who utilizes this ‘new Sophism’ as a means of grounding a theory of the trans-subjective. My hope in this respect is to make a contribution to a series of recent developments in the contemporary social psychology of interobjectivity, and to do so by means of the ‘extra-disciplinary’ source of psychoanalytic theory. More specifically, I would like to use the prisoner's dilemma, and Lacan's associated threefold schema of logical time, to make two general arguments. I want to assert, first, that we need to grasp a logical succession of modes of subjectivity — from subjectivity to inter-subjectivity, and from inter-subjectivity to a form of trans-subjective social logic — if we are to understand the subject-to-society relation. This sequence of modalities of subjectivity and, more particularly, the distinction between the inter-subjective and the trans-subjective, will be crucial in appreciating the difference between what are sometimes referred to as symbolic and imaginary forms of identification (Lacan, 1988a, 1988b; Žižek, 1996). My second key objective in the chapter is to advance that various declarative, institutional and symbolic activities are important non-psychological bases for imaginary (or what we might loosely call ‘psychological’) identifications. In other words, I am making an argument about the importance of certain symbolic constituents as conditions of possibility for the existence of psychological identifications. The link back to the first part of the chapter becomes clear here, inasmuch as symbolic identifications always entail the dimension of the trans-subjective, whereas what I am calling imaginary identifications do not.
