ABSTRACT
The body/mind split goes back to Cartesian thought which, consequently, gave rise to the separation between subject and object. This chapter shows how psychoanalytic experience led Jacques Lacan to an even more judicious understanding of the subject/object relationship. Before turning to the psychoanalytic position regarding the body/mind question, the chapter explains briefly one of the most recent movements of cognitivist thought. Psychic reality is nonetheless dependent on its correspondence with objective reality, here the body. One of the distinctive traits of the drive in the newborn, in contrast with what one finds in the older child or in the adult, lies in the Freudian concept of the pleasure principle and the reality principle. At the theoretical level, the Freudian separation between perception and consciousness constitutes the fundamental condition of discovery of the unconscious. In Freud, representation in the philosophical sense of correspondence between subject and object turns into a notion of delegation.
