ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how each register functions as a bearer of human identity. It shows how the postmodern condition constitutes a threat to identity in each register and to the interconnection of the several registers. The chapter discusses various ways in which people as individuals and as members of societies are responding to and trying to counter the postmodern threats and proposes a psychoanalytic alternative. In textbooks on theory, for example, J. Lacan is often included in sections on poststructuralism, itself one of the most significant theoretical instantiations of postmodernism. The Lacanian model of the subject, like the postmodernist model, recognizes the subject's multiplicity, in the numerous and conflicting identifications, desires and enjoyments that are constituents of every subject. The postmodern condition involves disruptions in the Imaginary register of similar scope and consequence as those in the Symbolic order. The body ego figures in postmodernism in a number of very basic ways.
