The problem of interiority in Freud and Lacan

The problem of interiority constitutes one of the fundamental problems of modernity. Once the decision is made to ground human experience within the locus of subjectivity, how is it possible to establish connection with an object (Gegenstand) that “stands against” and is somehow independent of human subjectivity—what Lacan refers to as “the real”? A Lacanian reading of Freud’s Project for a Scientific Psychology places the problem of interiority in a radically new, yet continous light. While Freud begins with a conception of reality interior to the subject, Lacan offers a way out of the traditional problem of interiority through a nuanced account of sublimation. Lacan’s “way out” consists of an oblique passage from the “symbolic order” to the real – through “the zone Oedipus entered having scratched out his eyes.”