Freud’s notion of the subject has been misunderstood by all trends in psychoanalysis that followed his death; from Hartmann’s Ego Psychology to Lacan’s “alienated Ego”, no theory has been able to gather and highlight the Kantian milestones behind his notion: to endow the subject’s psychological function with spatial qualities, and to lay objective naturalist foundations for the dynamics governing its formation, in relation to fulfilling life’s primary needs. The genesis of the subject’s identity occurs largely thanks to the role that self-preservation drives play in this process.

