Freud and Kant: Two Conceptions of Subject and Self

The starting point of the article is the assumption that the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud grows from a new conception of the subject and the self, different from the conception used by Kant. The author tries to make his point by analysing selected fragments of one of the first publications by Freud 'Entwurf einer Psychologie'. It is clear in that work that Freud already had at that time his own idea of the psychic apparatus, and that it consisted of three different systems: consciousness, pre-consciousness and unconsciousness. In this proposal the synthesising operation of consciousness, which is the home of the self, can be reduced to a specific 'defence activity' which protects the self from the loose process of shifting and condensing imagery (the original process) that occurs in the unconsciousness. This approach presupposes, first, new understanding, previously unknown to German idealism, of the subject that does not function as the ultimate foundation of all psychic processes but is engaged in interpreting the original process by rearranging its imagery in a loose and spontaneous manner. Secondly, the synthesising function of the self can no longer be explained as a process of reaffirming one's self-identity - which was presupposed in the Kantian concept of transcendental unity of apperception - but must be seen as a synthesising activity that occurs at the level of the original process by repeated efforts to select and repress its imagery