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The concept of property–ownership–has a vexed history that trenches on the deepest layers of Western societies. This history is vexed because property is always mixed up with power, whether through direct violence or its more civilized versions: legislation, regulation, and the resolution of legal disputes in the courts. Theories of the person are also dependent on concepts of private property, whether it is viewed as necessary to human flourishing, as Aristotle conceived it, or seen as a central cause of human degradation and worker alienation, as Marx pictured it, or considered entirely coextensive with an entire group of persons as non-human, as in chattel slavery.
Something is mine, and if it is mine, it is not yours. This is one way to describe the essence of property. It comes from the Latin–proprius, properly one's own, whether a feature of an object (a property of gold, for example, is that it shines), or the object itself (that gold ring is mine). There is, as we all know, a vast socio-political apparatus that has developed over centuries in which pieces of paper–bills of sale, notarized trust deeds and titles, professional licenses and certifications–signify ownership of a given thing. If you want to sell your car, you need to find the pink slip. If you want to buy a house, you need to have its ownership status, its title, clarified by the county registrar. If you want to practice psychoanalysis, you need a clinical license issued by the State. Papers accompanied Black slaves that were bought and sold. Papers got torn up by governments to nullify treaties so land could be taken from native peoples. Paper accompanies property (and more generally: the real becomes meaningful by way of symbolic interposition).
There is no way that I can, even if I had a thousand pages, link up what I have just said–this broad sweep of history regarding property and ownership and settler colonialism and the creation of different types of persons–to psychoanalytic practice, and b