Who is 'I'? How does a subject or self emerge in Freud's theory? To what does the repressed return? In original and lucid readings of key Freudian texts, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argues that the constitution of an 'I' at once carries the subject beyond himself to the other; there is no self that is not originally identification with the other. This argument has significant ramifications for various central issues in psychoanalysis: the relation between identification and desire, between desire and violence, and between identification and object relations. It leads to a more ominous reading of Freud by showing that the two types of ties Freud postulated in the Oedipal triangle - object love and identification (the first conceivably less linked to narcissism than the second) - are in fact one. The book should interest not only literature and philosophy specialists concerned with psychoanalytic theory but the psychoanalytic community as well.

Translated by: Catherine Porter
Foreword by: Francois Roustang