ABSTRACT
Beginning with Sigmund Freud and J. Breuer's observations in Studies on Hysteria, the theme of the "splitting of consciousness" and the question of the location of the subject within this "dual consciousness" has reverberated through the succeeding century of analytic thought. This chapter discusses aspects of the concept of the dialectically constituted and decentered subject of psychoanalysis that have their origins in the work of Freud and that were developed by M. Klein and D. W. Winnicott. Freud believed that psychoanalysis presented a reconceptualization of man's relationship to himself that involved a fundamental decentering of man from himself. In Freud's schema, neither consciousness nor unconsciousness holds a privileged position in relation to the other: the two systems are "complementary" to one another thus constituting a single. Freud proposed a model of the mind in which there is no privileged position in which to locate the subject either in consciousness or in the realm of the dynamically unconscious.
