Dictionary:

I¹

  (ī)

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Used to refer to oneself as speaker or writer.

The self; the ego.

[Middle English, from Old English ic.]

USAGE NOTE   The question of when to use nominative forms of the personal pronouns (for example, I, she, they) and when to use objective forms (for example, me, her, them) has always created controversy among grammarians and uncertainty among speakers and writers. There is no problem when the pronoun stands alone with a single verb or preposition: every native speaker says I (not me) read the book; They told him (not he); The company bought a computer for us (not we); and so forth. But the decision is more problematic in other environments. • When pronouns are joined with other nouns or pronouns by and or or, there is a widespread tendency to use the objective form even when the phrase is the subject of the sentence: Tom and her are not speaking to each other. This usage is natural in colloquial speech, but the nominative forms should be used in formal speech and writing: John and she (not her) will be giving the talk. • When pronouns joined by a conjunction occur as the object of a preposition such as between, according to, or like, many people use the nominative form where the traditional grammatical rule would require the objective; they say between you and I rather than between you and me, and so forth. Many critics have seen this construction as originating in a hypercorrection, whereby speakers who have been taught to say It is I instead of It is me come further to assume that correctness also requires between you and I in place of between you and me. This explanation of the tendency cannot be the whole story, inasmuch as the phrase between you and I occurs in Shakespeare, centuries before the prescriptive rules requiring It is I and the like were formulated. But the between you and I construction is nonetheless widely regarded as a marker of grammatical ignorance and is best avoided. • In other contexts the traditional insistence that the nominative form be used is more difficult to defend. The objective form sounds most natural when the pronoun is not grammatically related to an accompanying verb or preposition. Thus, in response to the question “Who cut down the cherry tree?” we more colloquially say “Me,” even though some grammarians have argued that I must be correct here by analogy to the form “I did”; and few speakers would accept that the sentence What, me worry? is improved if it is changed to What, I worry? The prescriptive insistence that the nominative be used in such a construction is grammatically questionable and is apt to lead to almost comical pedantries. • There is also a widespread tendency to use the objective form when a pronoun is used as a subject together with a noun in apposition, as in Us engineers were left without technical support. In formal speech or writing the nominative we would be preferable here. But when the pronoun itself appears in apposition to a subject noun phrase, the use of the nominative form may sound pedantic in a sentence such as The remaining members of the admissions committee, namely we, will have to meet next week. A writer who is uncomfortable about using the objective us here would be best advised to rewrite the sentence to avoid the difficulty. See Usage Notes at be, but, we.

The concept of the "I" appears in Jacques Lacan's work as a function that derives from the mirror stage. Piera Aulagnier later develops this term in a different way and defines it as nothing other than a knowledge of itself: "the I is nothing more than the I's knowledge of the I" (1975/2001, p.114).

Despite their semantic proximity, the I, for both Lacan and Aulagnier, is something clearly distinct from the Freudian ego; the latter is an agency, even if it claims to represent the totality of the person, and it has to be understood in relation to the other agencies (id, superego) and to the demands of reality and the object, which it can also oppose by occupying its position and turning, narcissicistically, to the love of the id.

Towards the end of his work (1923b), Freud ascribes a different origin to the ego, no longer considering it as a psychic agency or no longer defining its "character" only as a product of identifications but regarding it as "the mental projection of the surface of the body" and thus primarily as a "bodily ego" that is derived from sensations.

Jacques Lacan introduced the concept of "I" with the mirror stage (1936, then 1949), in opposition not to the Freudian ego but to the philosophy derived from the Cartesian cogito. The mirror stage constitutes an identification; namely, the transformation that occurs in a subject when he assumes an image as his own. This stage constitutes a fundamental identification that precedes the moment when the subject identifies with others through the mediation of language. It comprises several phases: in the first, the child reacts joyfully to the image but identifies it as belonging to an other; in the second, he perceives its imaginary nature and seeks the other behind the mirror; in the third, the child recognizes the image as his own. For Lacan, this entails the progressive and structuring conquest of the I through the intermediary of the subject's own body. "This Gestalt. . . symbolizes the mental permanence of the I at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion" (1949/2002, p. 3]). Therefore the I simultaneously is alienated in this image, because it is always external to it, and finds a stability, if not a permanence, there. Here Lacan adduces the concept of alienation: "[the subject] identifies his sense of self with the image of the other and the image of the other then captivates this sense in him" (1946-50). In a second temporal phase, the subject is mediated by language, thereby returning to the unconscious everything that does not pass into discourse.

Piera Aulagnier fundamentally modifies the Lacanian concept of I by historicizing it, that is, by defining it in terms of the dual processes of "self-historicization" and the "identificatory project." However, it is principally in the mother-child relationship, well before the mirror stage, that she locates the primary identification from which the I will subsequently emerge. For the child, this identification develops from the first experience of pleasure, and it is the mother who identifies the child as the seeker of what she is offering, which thus makes him dependent on her own imagination. Similarly, in the mirror stage, Aulagnier emphasizes that the child, having recognized the specular image as his own, turns to his mother to seek approbation in her gaze and thus to find the "junction between the image and the legend" (1975/2001, p. 124). "She alone will be able to complete the narcissistic image, to add that 'something more' that is indispensable to its sheen and without which it would cease to be anything more than it is in the real: an effect of the laws of optics" (1975).

For Aulagnier, however, the I is not to be confused with the precursor of the I that is constituted by the subject's representational activity in these early stages. The I is first of all anticipated by the mother (as "word-bearer") and as this still-idealized I that is formed during the "representative" stage, that is to say the child's psyche that represents itself as possessing an absolute and immediate power over reality.

How does the I come into being? It is through the act of enunciation, but rather than just any act, it is that which names the affect: "the act of uttering a feeling is therefore at the same time the utterance of a self-naming by the I" ( p. 97). To name the other with the term of beloved, for example, is to designate the subject who is naming as that of the lover. Hence the author's formulation: "It is therefore in and by the deferred action of naming the cathected object [affect and kinship system] that the I comes about . . . the I is nothing more than the knowledge that the I may have of the I" (p. 98).

This knowledge has a sole purpose: to guarantee to the I a knowledge of its past and its future, the former being the precondition for the representability of the latter. The I will be characterized by its work, which differs from the enacting fantasy because it entails a work of making-sense based on "ideational representatives." Despite being anticipated by the mother at a primitive stage, the I can subsequently occur only by itself. The Other, the mother, no longer has the power to respond to questions such as "who am I?" or "what am I to become?": "To these two questions, which must necessarily find an answer, the I will respond on its own behalf by the continuous self-construction of an ideal image that it claims as its inalienable right and which assures it that the future will prove to be neither the result of pure chance, nor forged by the exclusive desire of another I" (p. 116).

What is possessed in this case is nothing but an outline, but what is cathected is the ideal image, as well as the ability to construct it and to recognize oneself through this process of construction. No philosophical observation about freedom can be dissociated from this definition of the I, as the author establishes it on the basis of the preconditions for the emergence of the I, and the way in which these preconditions can be lacking in the case of psychosis.

Bibliography

Castoriadis-Aulagnier, Piera. (2001). The violence of interpretation. From pictogram to statement. (Alan Sheridan, Trans.) Hove: Brunner-Routledge. (Original work published 1975)

Charron, Gyslain. (1993). Le discours et le Je. Klincksieck, Canada: Presses de l'université de Laval.

Lacan, Jacques. (2002).Écrits: A selection. (Bruce Fink, Trans.) London: Tavistock Publications.

Mijolla-Mellor, Sophie. de (1998). Penser la psychose. Une lecture de l'œuvre de Piera Aulagnier. Paris: Dunod.

—SOPHIEDE MIJOLLA-MELLOR