Manuel Batsch, '"I masturbate therefore I am": the ego as a primary sexual object'

I want to come back to Freud’s first theory of primary narcissism elaborated from his study on Schreber to his pivotal paper On Narcissism. Freud described primary narcissism as a transitional phase between the autoerotic state of the libido in which the child constructs fragmented objects after parts of its own body and the object-relation in which the child’s libido gets attached to external individuals. From this viewpoint the first complete object the child constructs to satisfy its sexual drive is its own ego. The ego is not understood as a unity that exists from birth but as the result of an imaginary act. The aim of this paper is to argue that this model is an essential conceptual moment, which challenges the notion of personal identity. In the first part I would like to resituate Freud’s conception of the ego in a tradition of anti-Cartesian thinkers who from Spinoza to Hume have undermined the notion of an ego understood as a substance. I argue that in their quest for an alternative to a philosophy of consciousness those thinkers have firmly combatted against any concepts of the ego that could be observed through introspection. In the second part I want to describe the psychoanalytic setting as a dramatisation of an ego that is not the receptacle of a secret identity but an infantile object. Contrary to a common prejudice the analytical framework would not be a device of inquiry for a secret identity but the place of an encounter with one’s own infantile objects.