ABSTRACT
This chapter compares and contrasts different psychoanalytic schools’ understanding of how subjectivity, riven by unconscious conflict, becomes divided against itself. The chapter outlines a social psychoanalysis premised on the notion that subjectivity becomes divided against itself due to relationally inflicted trauma and not to drives or to existential limits. The aggression against self and other that is a marker of a divided subjectivity, usually conceptualized as a drive, is here posited as a breakdown product of relational trauma. The chapter argues that one’s view of social psychoanalysis will be shaped by how one conceptualizes the origins of unconscious conflict.
