ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts Young-Bruehl’s historicization of subjectivity, and her criteria for a progressive psychoanalysis, with two other historical accounts of subjectivity and modernity: one proposed by theorists of institutionalized individualization and another by writers in the Foucaultian tradition. The purpose of the comparison is to ground in social history psychoanalytic theories about what humans “need.” I conclude that while contemporary psychoanalysis is a discourse of its time, it can also function as a progressive counter-discourse that can help us understand the effects on subjectivity of a more than 30-year history in the West of repudiating dependency needs and denying interdependence.
