5 - Schmidt's Reading of Freud's Ego-Development

Summary

MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD … die Transvestiten - :das sind Männer, die stark weiblich empfindn, Frauen, die Männer sein möchtn …

(ZT 944)

An analysis of Schmidt's dialectic of conscious and unconscious thought processes remains insufficient without a more thorough investigation of Schmidt's understanding of subjectivity. An inquiry into what constitutes subjectivity seems even more necessary since Schmidt alludes to the androgynous character of our being. Schmidt's stress on the unconscious as the prime determinant of our conscious mode of processing information unveils the central role the unconscious assumes in any reflection on subjectivity. Throughout the previous chapters, however, I emphasized that reading entails a process of decipherment, which in turn always leads to a process of construction and reconstruction. Since for Schmidt language defines the subject and provides the medium in which the subject comes into being, any attempt to delineate subjectivity has to discern its enabling conditions. To discern this frame of the subject means to dismantle its traditional definition as articulated by the postwar German literary establishment.

Apprehending the frame of subjectivity also requires an analysis of how the subject comes into being in the first place. Considering that Schmidt situates the absence of presence within the dialectic of conscious thought processes and the unconscious, his interest in the constitution of subjectivity inevitably requires the reader to return to Freud or, to be precise, to Schmidt's reading of Freud.