The beginning of psychic life is not in principle distinguishable from the beginning of material life. What a laugh to have for so long wrongly conjoined so directly: the mother, the One! A primary narcissism, Freud quips-- as though biology really were our destiny! As though the intermediate steps weren’t the most important, those developmental phases whose traversal would precisely trace the outline of the crack between Freud’s Oedipalized unconscious and the event of language: Freud’s answer is self-love, presuming the mystical division he would sek to explain. Doctor, how does our subjectivity awaken? Outgrowing a primary narcissism, indeed!
But still only a (lost) love: of the One that is the Self that is the One that is the Self… what he means, we must insist, is that the early mind is merely a little repeating-machine: for Freud, the interconnected flows which constitute our psychic life can never be properly said to be identical to those machinic material assemblages which constitute our organic rhizomatic substrate and origin. Is he wrong–is this a broken Oedpial fantasy or merely egoistic and monotonous delirium? Does the emergence of a proto-subjectivity rather constitute the intervention of an alien multiplicity within the “One”–which was not (and never was)?