Passion for the Human Subject: Psychoanalysis and the Ordeal of Otherness

Each one of us has to be born inter urinas et faeces , as St. Augustine so strikingly put it. More recently, Freud’s 1915 discovery of ‘instincts’ - that is, ‘drives’ - and their ‘viscitudes’ leads us further to envision a human subjectivity that would have nothing mataphysical about it. The baby’s feeling of himself first arises in the midst