ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that traditional psychoanalytic theory has been instructive in formulating a developmental theory of subjectivity which is sometimes off-putting to feminist theorists. Certainly subjects, subjectivity, and agency only ever exist in political and social contexts that affect them in their constitution. The distinction between subjectivity and subject position is the difference between one's sense of oneself as a self with agency and one's historical and social position in one's culture. Most psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and subject formation, including both ego psychology and object relations theories, suppose that there is a primary struggle between the individual and the social or others that is constitutive of subjectivity. The psychoanalytic concept most appropriate to a discussion of unconscious drive energy making its way into the realm of meaning is sublimation. Sublimation is necessary for beings to enter the realm of meaning.
