Abstract

The fundamental and unevitable risk of schizophrenia and paranoia reveals to us that the ego is not originally given ; the ego, that unifies the psyche and gives it a personal character (my psyche), is not from the very beginning necessarily present in my psyche. The ego has to be constituted; and in some extreme cases (i.e. schizophrenia and paranoia ) this process of constitution may radically fail : the ego might not have come about. This constitution cannot be thought as a selfconstitution : it is the effect of the Other. I am constituted by the Other ; I receive my personal being from the Other and not from myself. The fundamental processes of the primary repression ('Urverdrängung'), the mirror phase, identification and idealisation, and finally the discourse of the Other are interpreted by De Waelhens against the back-ground of this primordial, — clinical — evidence. The philosophical interpretation of these fundamental structures of our being induces us to understand the ego from the very beginning as separated from itself by the Other, — the Other in me. The different facets of this original splitting and its consequences for our conception of the ego and his relation with the Other are worked out in this study