ABSTRACT
In the political type of representation one person may act as a delegate for a number of other people. This relationship entails both the actual absence of the mandator and the presence of someone else at the seat of power who can legitimately claim that his or her actions realize not only his or her individual will, but also that of the absent mandator. The logic of political representation paradoxically entails both the representative's dependence on the mandator and the representative's independence from the mandator. By conceiving of agencies in the mind as internal representatives of influences and interests outside the subject, Sigmund Freud undermined conceptions of the subject as a self-enclosed entity with strict, impermeable boundaries. In Freud's vision, society lives as much in the subject as the subject lives in society, while neither can be fully reduced to the other or explained by the other.
