Subject, patient, outside world.

In the history of German philosophy the term "subject" can look back on a l ong and venerable tradition. When use is made of it in a psychoanalytic con text, there is no avoiding engagement with the semantics of Nietzsche's con cept of the disappearance and return of the subject. Within this configurat ion, the problematic of the idea of Subject (and its necessary correlative "World") is recast in terms of the tensions between Inside and Outside or i ntra- and inter-. Gearing his remarks to this operative distinction, the au thor discusses recent psychoanalytic approaches where he detects a tendency for the Subject to be relegated to the status of a "blank space", coupled with a radicalization of the trend toward conceiving the psychoanalytic pro cess as an emergent third, something that eventuates through the applicatio n of the psychoanalytic method. This third manifests itself in many forms, some of which the author traces in detail. Central to all of them is an rec ognition structure. Implicit in the third (again in differing forms) is the Outside World.