ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the origin of the subject in Sigmund Freud's work, on the basis of its material determination—in other words, on the basis of an organism which, due to the effect of the external world, ends up by producing a formation not identical, but equivalent, to itself, and which is a function of the external world. There are experiences of satisfaction which Freud centers around a pleasure that appears too much or too little; there are thus different modalities of the functioning of secondary repression. The subject's very relation to the real is just as problematic; effectively, the real only appears to the subject to vanish immediately. Ordinarily, materialism reduces the human individual to a bundle of sense-perceptions. Nevertheless, it accepts the absolute generality of a kind of immediate cognitive self-consciousness in the organism. In this, I think, lies the metaphysical choice of classical materialism.
