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Frances M. Moran's project is a very ambitious one. Who speaks to the analyst, who is meant when the analyst refers to his patient's psychic functioning, unless it be the subject in the most concrete sense of the term? However, the polysemy of the word ‘subject’ gives rise to problems. Its semantic ‘spectrum’ extends between two extremes. The first and older of its meanings is the Greek hypokeimenon, the Latin subjectum, which denotes that which ‘remains lying beneath’, perhaps visible, perhaps concealed, but solid and permanent; while the second and more recent meaning relates to ‘what I am myself’, speaking, thinking, suffering, wishing and capable of describing itself in the self-referential mode. Another definition, closer to psychoanalysis, of a subject coming into being from the combination of all the agencies, and therefore equivalent to the personality as a whole, surely fails to do justice to the decisive dimension, the specificity of the unconscious.
Frances M. Moran's approach is different. Within this problem complex, she distinguishes the agency, which connotes the entity that determines or controls thoughts, words and actions, from the subject, a concept which she reserves for the individual who speaks to the analyst, thereby, in line with her theoretical orientation, placing it at the very centre of the clinical situation. It is from this standpoint that the author successively examines the work of Freud and the theories of Anna Freud, Hartmann, Melanie Klein and Lacan. Let us consider just a few examples.
In his correspondence with Fliess, Freud never asks himself who represses and why. He seems to be preoccupied mainly with the reasons why the repressed memories are of a sexual nature and with their fate. In The Interpretation of Dreams, not only does the location of the censorship (between Ucs. and Pcs. or between Pcs. and Cs.) remain doubtful, so that it is impossible to decide whether it belongs to the subject or the agency, but the origin of repre