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It has become something of a commonplace in the recent cultural discussions of the decentered self to cite Freud as a major agent of decentration. And, indeed, who could deny the proposition that Freud, by demonstrating that “the ego is not master in its own house” (1917, 143), was a major contributor to the decentering of the modern subject, when the proposition is formulated at that level of generality? As we shall see, however, decentration is an ambiguous concept, and the difficulties, as well as the interesting questions, only begin to emerge when one investigates the preche meaning of that concept in Freud's theory.
In those recent discussions, moreover, the notion of the decentered subject is often counterpoised to the concept of the autonomous individual. Whereas the proponents of the autonomous individual—which is both a product and central ideal of modern European culture—view it as the proper norm for ethical development and psychoanalytic practice, the advocates of the decentered subject see it as a distorted mode of self-formation which reflects the atomistic, anthro-pocentric and imperialistic distortions of the very culture that produced it.
In turn, this opposition is itself obviously part of the larger controversy concerning the fate of the Enlightenment and Freud's by no means uncomplicated relation to it. Indeed, because of the central and productive tension between Enlightenment and Romantic elements in his thinking, Freud has become a key figure in that controversy. On the one hand,