Abstract

Marcia Cavell’s recent book is the continuation of a ‘conversation between philosophy and psychoanalysis’ in which she has been engaged for some time. Her previous monograph, The Psychoanalytic Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), was a powerful and sustained argument in favour of an interpretation of psychoanalysis and children’s mental development informed by a broadly Davidsonian perspective on mind and meaning. Her theme in Becoming a Subject is the nature of self, which she understands as the self-conscious, reflective, judging, reason-giving self – ‘someone who recognizes herself as an ‘I’, as having her own peculiar perspective’ (1).