The Constituted Subject

Abstract

In order to understand what it means to be a constituted subject, we must first be clear about what we have lost in our thinking: the true, essential, sovereign self that has occupied centre stage in psychology and psychotherapy for more than 100 years. There is, for us, no substantive, essential, core self. This point is repeatedly made in the works of both Foucault (e.g., 1966) and White (e.g., 2004), and is an implication of the constitutionalist power/knowledge formulation. There are no pre-existing personality types, characteristics, or categories into which we normatively grow, and from which we might deviate into abnormality. When we experience personal difficulties, traumas, losses, conflicts, or anxieties, we should not imagine that we are thereby alienated from, or that we have lost touch with, the core of who we ‘really are’. And when we overcome such difficulties, resolve our conflicts and ambivalences, recover from traumas or losses, we cannot reassure ourselves that there is some original, undamaged, authentic self to which we can return.