Becoming subjects: The agency of desire in Jacques Lacan's return to Freud (Alexandre Kojeve, Melanie Klein, Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud)

In this dissertation, I contest the common view that Jacques Lacan, in his interpretation of Freud, decisively repudiates the traditional humanistic ideals of individual autonomy and integrity. I argue that Lacan should instead be seen as laying the ground for a radical reconception of what individual autonomy and integrity come to for the human subject. In arguing for this claim, I also seek to demonstrate the relevance of Lacan's work to discussions in contemporary analytic moral philosophy about the relationship between desire and human agency.; In Chapter 1, I examine Lacan's critique of the still widely influential interpretation of Freud known as ego psychology. This critique is ordinarily understood as an attack on the very idea of personhood. I argue that it should instead be understood as an attack on ego psychology's assimilation of Freud's discovery of the unconscious to a psychology of persons that finds its starkest expression in Kant's moral philosophy, where one's identity as a practical agent is taken to derive from the capacity to master given instincts and passions through the exercise of reason.; In Chapter 2, I spell out and defend the idea that the agency through which we constitute our identities as subjects is the agency of a distinctively human form of desire. Here, I begin with an examination of two recent accounts of practical identity put forth by prominent contemporary analytic moral philosophers. These accounts are explicitly concerned to show that a broadly rationalist conception of persons as distinguished by the capacity to step back from, and reflectively evaluate, given desires and passions is compatible with the recognition that desire and passion play a much more central role in the constitution of our identities as human persons than rationalist views have traditionally allowed. After making the conception of desire assumed in these recent accounts explicit, I go on to show how it is called into question by an argument that, following Lacan, I derive from the work of Alexandre Kojeve.; In Chapter 3, I argue that the clinical basis for Lacan's conception of the unconscious as the locus of the human subject can be found in the work of Melanie Klein. I show that the long-running and historically important debate between Klein and Anna Freud on the question of child analysis can be best understood if we see it as rooted in Klein's recognition, and Anna Freud's failure to recognize, that the unconscious is a locus of human subjectivity. The discussion of Klein's clinical method prepares the way for a discussion in Chapter 4 of a specific case history from her work that figures prominently in Lacan's re-conceptualization of psychoanalysis. Here I argue that what Lacan finds in Klein's case history is a demonstration of the thesis that unconscious human desire has the form of the desire for recognition, and I show that for Lacan this means the human being is staked to the order of human speech already at the level of his unconscious desire. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...