One way that we can broaden the debate on economics and happiness is through a psychoanalytic understanding of the subject, or in this case a psychoanlaytic perspective on liberal consumerist subjectivity. The dominant understanding of the subject--eg., economics--- has historically given precedence to the autonomy and self-consciousness of the human being and experience over the social and cultural situation in which human beings live and act. This gives us self-knowing, unified, and stable self. Psychoanalysis forms a deep ground for the challenge to the Cartesian subject or humanist idea of the self: a being who is fully conscious and fully present to himself, and who lives outside of his language and symbols, which are only tools through which he articulates the truth and stability of an identity which transcends culture.

Contemporary concepts of subjectivity (postmodern) emphasize the link between power, language, and identity and the fundamental interdependence of human beings with their social and cultural environment.Thus we have Clive Hamilton's true self and false self created by the seduction of our desires by advertisers. We can introduce the split subject of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis questions the subject's autonomy in that individuals are always "split" subjects, divided between the levels of their conscious awareness and the unconscious. Subjects are always divided between what they consciously know and can say about market things, and a set of more or less unconscious beliefs they hold concerning individuals in consumer advertising, and the kind of economic regime in which they live.

On this account advertisers tap into our unconscious desires and we buy consumer goods because they affirm our deepest desires about what we want to be. So we are not doing what the libertarians----those who think that individuals should be free to pursue whatever they desire ---say we are doing: choosing the kind of person we want to become. If the libertarian self is an ongoing project of taking responsibility for your own life, then it is within power relations and cultural order of the market that shape our desires. How we interpret our desires is formulated by our culture; 'interpret' here should be understood in the fullest sense -- this is how we experience them.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, subjectivity designates a process governed by what lies outside the control of the consciousness of the individual, namely by the violent impulses or desires of the unconscious. It holds that these need to be, and can be, integrated into a psychological whole and it gives us the endless negotiation between the socialised self, the ego, and the primitive animal self, the id. This is a formalisation of the age-old problem of human being's struggle against their carnal urges, (or in religious terms, 'original sin' ). In post-Freudian psychoanalysis subjectivity depends on language and is radically "decentered" or alien to itself. It is the product of both a distorted reflection of itself in someone else's eyes and of a system of language) that pre-exists the subject and is shared by all and
controlled by none. In this sense, subjectivity is not the discourse of the autonomous self as understood by the libertarians.