I definitely think such a defense is possible, indeed, it has been made. I have written about two philosophers who would make that defense. Max Scheler: https://medium.com/inserting-philosophy/max-schelers-philosophy-of-the-person-e61f13e06904 and José Ortega y Gasset https://medium.com/inserting-philosophy/jos%C3%A9-ortega-y-gassets-philosophy-of-life-893fdceafb84.

I am not as anti-Descartes as many are. His critics tend to strawman his claims. Descartes’s main mistake was seeing the human being as strictly a rational being. But that is a mistake made by the majority of philosophers from the ancients to the analytics today. Descartes was correct that we are a thinking thing, but he wanted to reduce all human activity to logical computation, which is very nonhuman. We are also experiencing and emotional things. See my article on Edith Stein, https://medium.com/inserting-philosophy/edith-stein-philosophys-saint-adc6c3884b71.

When we step out of the analytic tradition and engage with the rest of philosophy, we can easily see how a defense of the substantiality of thought and the self is self-evident.

I took a post-graduate course in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I came away quite unconvinced. I don’t see how it addresses the reality of human experience and being.