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Psychoanalysis as a clinical praxis has put into question the very definition of the human subject. This strong claim has complex recursive implications for the epistemological status of both psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice. Yet it is a claim that has accompanied the field from its inception.
In comparing his discovery of the dynamic unconscious to those of Copernicus and Darwin, Freud asserted that the idea of the I (Ego) for psychoanalysis would henceforth be radically different from the I of self-conscious reflection. That radical difference, a de-centering analogous to the decentering of the earth in relation to the sun and of the human animal in relation to the other species, would be difficult for Freud to maintain and would continue to be difficult for psychoanalysts after Freud. Jean Laplanche suggested in his essay “The Unfinished Copernican Revolution” (1999) that Freud indeed was caught in a certain dilemma regarding the de-centering of the human subject, a dilemma that Laplanche likens to the dilemma between the Ptolemaic geocentric cosmology and the Copernican heliocentrism, the latter theory ultimately leading beyond its own heliocentric view to the more contemporary idea of a completely uncentered universe.
In Freud's thought, as portrayed by Laplanche, a kind of geocentrism of the psyche continually reasserted itself in terms of the view of the Ego as a structure. It is a geocentrism of theory that reflects the recurrent narcissism of the human subject itself. The object of study exerts a kind of mimetic force on the subject who studies it. This view operates as an obstacle to the complete Copernican revolution of psychoanalysis where instead the self would always be viewed as inescapably decentered through its relation to the other. In other words, the subject is always and inescapably characterized by intersubjectivity—the