ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses two crucial versions of Sigmund Freud’s model of subjectivity, because they give the most important insight into its general meaning and because they have been the most centrally discussed controversies in cultural theory. Firstly, what is the unconscious; and secondly, where does it come from? Freud’s achievement was to intuit the understanding of self-hood that was coming to trouble his culture, and to give it a theoretical—even, as he claimed, a scientific—form. Freud stands, therefore, as a significant turning-point in an intellectual culture committed to Descartes’ identification of the self with the rational processes of the conscious mind. Although much Freudian theorising is dedicated to evolving models of the topography of the subject, an equal amount of work goes into explaining how the subject ends up with this particular configuration of identities and energies. Oedipal theory emphasises the uninterrupted immediacy with which the boy experiences his mother in the earliest stages of his development.
