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A basic distinction in philosophy is the difference between subject and [[object]]. We recognize this distinction in our terms "objective" (dealing strictly with the knowledge derived from our observation) and "subjective" (reacting in a manner based on emotions and attitudes of an individual). In psychoanalytic theory, the term "subject" refers to the sum of the physiological and psychological operations that sustain a human individual as a "person". The human subject has both mental and bodily dimensions. Psychoanalysis is critical of the Cartesian vision of the subject as a centered, autonomous "I" whose self-awareness can be taken as a foundation for philosophical inquiry. For psychoanalytic theorists like Freud and Lacan, the subject's autonomy and self-awareness is constantly undermined by impulses from the [[id]] and steered by the pressures of the [[Super-Ego | superego]]. In this sense, "individual" is an inaccurate synonmym for "subject" because the Freudian model of the subject is divided into at least three conflicting parts. A good way to understand the differences between theoretical approaches is to examine what they emphasize in (and leave out of) their accounts of the human subject. Feminism, for example, may pay particular attention to the body as a site of cultural impositions based on gender norms; Marxism may focus on the subject as a source of productive (and exploitable) labor and as itself the product of ideological conditoning. ==def==The primary psychic construct produced by the individual’s traumatic accession to the symbolic is the Lacanian subject. Just as the real is the realm of undifferentiated consciousness and the imaginary is the realm of the ego (pre-symbolic identity formation), so the symbolic is coeval with and constitutive of the subject (Evans 195). The ego, produced by the process of differentiation first experienced in the mirror stage, is superseded by the subject as the primary psychic structure by which the individual relates to the surrounding world. In a radical departure from both traditional humanist conceptions of the self and the Freudian construct of the ego as the privileged mode of human existence, Lacan designates the subject as a function of the signifying chain, a linguistic phenomenon produced by the symbolic order which the infant enters in the originary moment of articulating the mother’s absence. As such, and given the hollowness of signifiers in the Lacanian signifying chain, the subject is reduced to the status of being merely a signifier for another signifier. It exists not independently of the perpetual flux of signification, but only as one in an endless series of events in that flux: