The author sets himself to examine the organizing principles of Pre-Modernity and Modernity starting from procedures of comparison and opposition among cultural models, a method of investigation of Cultural Anthropology . The effects of these principles on the social relations are also studied. The resulting impasse allows us to locate both the social symptoms and the subjective difficulties. From this psychopathology, we can delimit the psychoanalytic clinical practice, created by Freud. This clinical practice presupposes the modern subject - introduced by Descartes -, and which coexists with diverse clinical practices. A delimitation of this sort implies a definition of the extreme boundaries of the modern subject, his ideals and his imperatives. The metapsychology of the modern subject is characterized by the subject’s submission to the imperative to leave home (thus abandoning the tradition which is his own foundation), to refer itself within time and space with no fixed center, and the submission of the subject to the command of the objects. The psychic apparatus is structured from the material the culture provides the subject with. Hence, the singular "unconscioused" cannot articulate itself outside the social means.
Metapsychology; modern subject; unconscious