Subjectivization

Subjectivization, as formulated in Fink's preface to The Lacanian Subject, names the second of two faces of the Lacanian subject — the counterpart to the subject's fixation in the symptom. Where the first face designates the subject's capture in the repetitive structure of the symptom (the place where the subject is frozen in an alien formation), subjectivization names the active, transformative process by which the subject retroactively appropriates what was formerly external, imposed, or unconscious. Fink frames this as "overcoming fixation" through the reconfiguring or traversing of fantasy — the fundamental operation that clinical psychoanalysis aims at, and that distinguishes the analytic process from mere symptom-management or ego reinforcement.

The concept is structurally paired with alienation: if alienation is the constitutive operation by which the subject is produced through submission to the Other's signifying chain — always at the cost of a lost being — then subjectivization marks a subsequent, asymmetric movement in which the subject neither simply escapes nor dissolves that alienation, but re-relates to it. To "make one's own" what was formerly alien is not a return to an originary fullness (that path is foreclosed by the structure of alienation itself) but a changed relationship to the symptom, fantasy, and desire that previously operated as foreign impositions. This is consistent with the Lacanian telos of analysis: not the elimination of the symptom but a transformed subjective position with respect to it — what the discourse of the analyst is structurally designed to occasion by placing objet petit a in the agent's position and soliciting a new master signifier from the divided subject.

Within the-lacanian-subject-between-l-bruce-fink, subjectivization forms one pole of the book's central organizing duality: the Lacanian subject has two faces (symptom-fixation / subjectivization), mirrored non-symmetrically by two faces of the objet petit a (as the Other's desire / as letter or signifierness). This "Gödelian," non-parallel structure is what, for Fink, grounds both a theory of sexual difference and the autonomy of psychoanalysis as a discourse irreducible to science. Subjectivization is thus not a peripheral clinical footnote but a structural fulcrum of the entire theoretical project.

In relation to the cross-referenced canonical concepts, subjectivization is best understood as the dialectical complement to alienation — the second movement that alienation's structure makes possible but does not itself supply. Alienation installs the subject in the Other's field at the permanent cost of being; subjectivization names what can happen when the subject, via the traversal of fantasy (the clinical aim enabled by the Discourse of the Analyst), re-appropriates its desire and symptom as its own rather than as the Other's imposition. It is not a cancellation of alienation but a changed subjective stance within it — akin to what the Analysand's labor in analysis is oriented toward. The concept also resonates with Desire: desire is always already the Other's desire (alienated), but subjectivization implies a shift in the subject's relation to that otherness, approaching what Lacan associates with assuming one's castration and the analyst's position at the end of analysis. Subjectivization is thus a specification of the analytic telos rather than a new theoretical object, anchored at the intersection of alienation, fantasy traversal, and the four discourses.

The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and JouissanceBruce Fink · 1995 (p.13)

the second face of the Lacanian subject appears in the overcoming of that fixation, the reconfiguring or traversing of fantasy...the face of subjectivization, a process of making 'one's own' something that was formerly alien.

The phrase "making 'one's own' something that was formerly alien" is theoretically loaded because it condenses the entire dialectic between alienation and subjectivization: the qualifier "formerly alien" presupposes the Lacanian doctrine that the subject is constituted through the Other's signifying chain (alienation), while "making one's own" signals not a recovery of pre-linguistic fullness but a retroactive re-appropriation — a changed subjective stance. The conjunction of "reconfiguring or traversing of fantasy" further pins this to the specific clinical operation (fantasme traversal) that Lacan names as the endpoint of analysis, linking the ontological claim directly to analytic practice.