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Presented by Manuel Batsch
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I want to come back to Freud’s theory of primary narcissism elaborated from his study on Schreber to his pivotal paper On Narcissism. During this period, Freud understands the ego not as a unity that exists from birth but as the outcome of a process in which the infant transforms a certain perception of his/her body into an infantile idea. The ego is conceived as the result of an obscure operation that transforms a set of bodily needs into a psychic desire. Moreover Freud describes this primary ego as a reservoir of libido from which any affective encounters with otherness can be established.
The aim of this paper is to argue that this model is an essential conceptual moment, which challenges the notion of personal identity. I would like to resituate Freud’s conception of the ego in a tradition of anti-Cartesians thinkers who from Pascal to Hume have undermined the notion of an ego understood as a substance. I argue that in their quest for an alternative to a philosophy of consciousness those thinkers have firmly combatted against any concepts of the ego that could be observed through introspection. Contrary to a common prejudice, I would suggest to think of introspection not as a way to look into one’s own secret identity but more as the impossible attempt to encounter one’s own infantile desires.