"The Woman" does not exist: Lacan's formulas of sexuation vs. Neo-Jungian Phallogocentrism

 

            Contemporary thought would have us believe that gender expression (masculinity and femininity) and removed from biological sex and are also symmetrical. This would imply that gender is on a “spectrum”, with masculinity on one end and femininity on the other, and that the two would be inversely proportional, where the more masculine you are, the less feminine you are, and vice-versa.

            This is what I call the Jungian view, since it was Carl Jung who most vehemently defended this view (as well as neo-Jungians like Robert Johnson, Jordan Peterson and Camile Paglia), where everyone is a mix of masculine and feminine energies, thus us needing to find a balance “right in the middle”. This is, of course, a step in the right direction from pure biological essentialism and stereotypes, because they correctly point out that not all biological males are stereotypically “masculine” and not all biological females are stereotypically “feminine”.

However, I want to challenge this view by contrasting it with Jacques Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, presenting the two sexed positions as fundamentally asymmetrical. From this framework, we will analyze Jung’s anima as equivalent to Lacan’s objet petit a, demonstrate how Jung’s “animus” does not make sense as a concept, as well as show how Jordan Peterson was quite paradoxically “right in the most wrong way” when he stated that masculinity is order and femininity is chaos. In the end, I will relate all this to Slavoj Zizek’s conception of political difference and how it relates to sexual difference, to show how in both sex and politics, difference precedes identity, retroactively giving the illusion that identities come first.

 

I: THERE IS NO RELATION BETWEEN THE SEXES

 

            If masculinity and femininity were inversely proportional (“gender is a spectrum”), then that would imply that the more masculine you are, the less feminine you are, and the more feminine you are, the less masculine you are. Thus, there would be a (logical) relationship between the sexes, a relationship of contradiction (“man” and “woman” would cancel each other out).

            However, Lacan’s thesis is precisely that there is no such thing as a (logical) relation between the sexes, not that there is a relationship of contradiction. Lacan believes that the relationship of contradiction (sexual difference) is inscribed within each sexual identity. Hence, it would be more precise to say that the more masculine you are, the less masculine you are, and the more feminine you are, the less feminine you are, and there is no relationship between how masculine and how feminine you are (hence, there is no relationship between the sexes). In other words, sexual difference (contradiction) is inscribed in each sexed position insofar that in every society, one has to choose between multiple, contradictory types of masculinity or multiple, contradictory types of femininity, hence one never fully being able to be a “real” man or a “real” woman. The masculine archetypes are multiple, and they contradict each other, and so do the feminine archetypes. In order to be masculine/feminine in one way, you have to sacrifice another kind of masculinity/femininity.

            But is this all? If this were the case, there would be no relation between the sexes, but the two sexes would still be symmetrical. To all this we need to add that sexual difference (the difference between the sexes) looks different when viewed from the perspective of either masculinity or femininity, hence sexual difference being humanity’s failed attempt “to make two out of one”, as Zupancic says¹. There is only one unsymbolizable and unimaginable sexual difference (difference, unlike identity, can only be “palpated”², but not directly experienced, such as the difference between two things, or just pure difference-in-itself), but there are two failed attempts at symbolizing this impossibility in the one of sexual difference.

            Thus, for Lacan, as well as for many other French philosophers, it is identity that is the result of difference, and not the other way around. “Common sense” guides us to think that we must first understand two “things” and only after that we can understand the difference between them. With sexual and political difference, the opposite happens: first we must (mis?)understand the difference between the sexes, and only after that we can attempt to understand each sex. We can view the relation between difference and identity as the relationship between questions and answers, or problems and solutions. The difference “between” men and women (and I intentionally put “between” in sarcastic quotes there, as it is also the difference within simultaneously) is a problem, or a question, and the masculine and feminine positions are two failed attempts at solving or answering it. In order to understand an answer (masculine or feminine), we must first understand the question it is trying to answer (sexual difference).

            This leads Lacan to his infamous formulas of sexuation. When he spoke of sexual “relation” (rapport, in French), he was referring to a literal logical relation. His process was taking Aristotle’s logical square, negating each term, and coming up with four logical formulas where the left side of the table was represented by “man” and the right side of the table by “woman”. There was a logical relation of contradiction between the two masculine logical statements as well as between the two feminine ones, but there was no logical relationship between the masculine and the feminine side of the table: unlike in Aristotle’s square, there was no implication, no equivalence, no contradiction and no contraries.

 

II: THE WOMAN DOES NOT EXIST

 

            Without going into the entire math behind it, the masculine side of the table approaches sexual difference through the logic of the “all” (universality) while the feminine one approaches it through the logic of the “non-all” (negativity, exception). This is why in society, masculinity is a signifier for “defaultness”, it is almost synonymous with “agender”. Masculine words are simultaneously unisex words. “Dude”, “bro”, “guys” can refer to either men or to everyone but never to just women. We speak of “mankind” or “humankind” but never womankind. There are feminine clothes and unisex clothes but there are no strictly masculine clothes that women would look uncomfortable wearing (a woman wearing a suit is more acceptable than a man wearing a dress, since suits are both “unisex”/default and masculine). In my native language, we have two words for the third-person plural (they): the masculine ei and the feminine ele. For a group of man, we use “ei”, for a group of woman, we use “ele”. But what if you have a mixed group? In Romanian, if a group is composed of one million woman and a single man, we still use “ei” as a translation for “they”. The masculine pronoun is also the gender neutral one.

Hence the unsolvable deadlock of sexual difference is partially solved by the masculine approach by trying to encompass all sexual positions into one, by being the sex, by the erasure of any other alternative. (To be clear: here we are not referring to biological sex, nor to gender identity, nor to gender expression, we are referring to the fundamental deadlock that neither sex nor gender nor gender roles can fully symbolize, sexual difference. Hence, this problem is experienced by all three categories, but never fully symbolized by any of them, only partially represented. In the problem of biological sex, of anatomy, the same problem is seen: it is way easier for a biological female to “pass” as male than for a biological male to look female, hence why “man is the position of the all” is neither a statement about culture, nor a statement about biological nature, it is a statement about the clash between the two.)

The masculine position quite literally hides this difference that separates a person from themselves, the difference that psychoanalysis often calls symbolic castration. Masculinity is a veil over castration by substituting it with the symbolic phallus (a signifier that you own an object of desire, that would indicate that you have social status).

The feminine partial solution does not take this approach, instead she approaches it by the logic of the “non-all”, resisting generalization, by rendering itself invisible, the “second sex”, to use a phrase coined by Simone de Beauvoir. Femininity is defined in relation to masculinity, but not the other way around. This leads Lacan to the famous controversial statement: “the woman does not exist”:

 

“Does it not occur to you that what is specific to man in 'sexual reality', as I put it just before, is that between male and female man there is no instinctual rapport? That nothing makes it the case that “all men” - to designate man by what suits him reasonably well, given that he imagines the idea of the ‘all’ naturally - that not all men are suited to satisfy every woman? Obviously, not every male satisfies every female, but it is just a question of whether they are suited to do so or not. Man has to make do with dreaming about it. He has to make do with dreaming about it because it is quite certain that not only does he not satisfy every woman, but that Woman does not exist. There are women, but Woman is a dream of men.

I didn't say that woman is an object for man. On the contrary, I said that here is something he never knows how to cope with. In other words, he never fails to burn his fingers whenever he approaches any whatever - either because he has made a mistake, or because she is precisely the one for him. But he only ever realises this after the event.”³

 

One can see here how sexual difference (the sexual “non-relationship”) is fundamentally asymmetrical, the two sexes are not “opposites”, one cannot simply take a male stereotype and reverse it and find the female one, or vice-versa. There is no balanced “sweet spot” in the middle between masculinity and femininity because there is no scale or gradient in the first place. Apples and oranges are different, but one is not the opposite of the other, and when we compare men with women, either at the biological or at the cultural level, we are comparing apples with oranges.

But there is more than that, as one consequence of the feminine logic of the non-all is that femininity is not a material “substance” or “thing” that can be compared with any other. It is “a nothing”, to be truly feminine is a form of rendering yourself invisible, unsymbolizable, mysterious, impossible to understand or categorize (hence the stereotype that men can’t understand women). Femininity, regardless of whether it’s practiced by biological men or women, is not a way “to be”, but a way “to not be”, it’s a form of non-being, non-existence (hence Lacan’s statement “the woman does not exist”). Whatever human is feminine (regardless of biological sex) is whatever human is mysterious, atopic, we cannot say anything about them without paradox. Since the woman does not exist, it is impossible for anyone to “be” feminine, since femininity is a form of “not being” anything that can be put into words.

 

III: BEHIND EVERY MAN THERE IS A WOMAN… BUT THERE IS NO ANIMUS

 

The cliché that “behind every (successful) man there is a woman” does not simply refer to the fact that women tend to be viewed as an object-of-desire, a “trophy” for men to win that motivates men to take action and achieve goals. Beyond that, it should also be interpreted that beneath every man, there is a hidden feminine nature that motivates them, a fundamental feminine archetype that they are trying to obtain but never finding in reality, which often is shaped by their mother-figure in childhood. This is what Carl Jung called “the anima” and it’s one subset of the larger concept of what Lacan called “objet petit a”.

This is why Lacan proactively states that (paraphrasing): “A woman does not believe she truly is a woman. A man thinks he is a man. A man, therefore, is a woman who believes herself to be a man, while a woman is not a woman who believes herself to be a woman”. The logic of the non-all, of non-identity, of difference and contradiction is the feminine solution to the fundamental deadlock of sexual difference that haunts both sexual positions. Hence, quite paradoxically, “femininity” is simply how society calls the difference between (and within) men and women. Thus, another reason that there is no symmetrical relationship between the sexes: women are the difference between men and women, while men are not. “Femininity” is an attempt at situating yourself inside this very paradoxical difference-in-itself, while “masculinity” is a way of hiding or ignoring it, finding a fetish object (the symbolic phallus) as substitute to distract yourself from the deadlock of sexuality itself. This is why whenever we use masculine words in most languages, or when a group of men are talking to each other, then can completely forget that sex and gender exist, and discuss things in a “gender-neutral” way that ignores all problems related to sex. However, to acknowledge anything related whatsoever to women or femininity implies acknowledging the existence of men and the difference between them too: when a women joins a large group of men, we remember that women and men exist too.

Objet petit a for Lacan is not the object-of-desire (the imaginary phallus), but the object cause of desire. It is that “permanent lack or “inner emptiness” inside ourselves that can never be temporarily filled, although we can obtain temporary or partial satisfaction through attaining particular objects of desire. This is what leads Lacan to his famous mantra, that we desire to desire. The masochistic nature of humans does not let them rest satisfied on a single object of desire; the human must keep on desiring (…) An analogy often used is that this “objet petit a” is like the tail of a dog that keeps chasing its tail, never reaching it. Another one I’ve seen used is that of a pig chasing a carrot that is right in front of it, tied to its back, thus never quite getting it but always being “quite close”:”⁴

 

Jung’s name for this unattainable, phantasmatic imaginary object that we desire but never find in real life is the anima. Objet petit a is like an empty form, a ghost or a silhouette that can take on many forms, which makes sense since “anima” literally translates to ghost or soul. Since both objet petit a and ‘the woman’ do not literally exist, they are not a form of how to be but way of how to “not be”, a fundamental lack that can never be filled, then it only makes sense that objet petit a will always take on a feminine form, through the anima.

This anima, this objet petit a, is the fundamental void or chaos upon which every identity is built. We have the deadlock of the object cause of desire, a fundamental desire to desire that can never be settled, and then our behaviors and identities as a failed attempt at filling this lack. We start with non-being, and then being as a partial, failed attempt to fill in that emptiness. This is why I insist again that behind every man there is a woman (just as strong) – in all literal and metaphorical senses of the expression. In a certain culture, one cannot simply analyze masculine stereotypes and expect the opposite to happen for women and vice-versa. Masculinity is a way of acting in a feminine way without realizing, it is a cover or mask for femininity (“a man is a woman who thinks she is a man”), but we can never say that femininity is a cover for masculinity (“a woman does not believe herself to be either man or woman”, she is pure difference-in-itself).

To give the best example of this: take communication. It is usually split along a “direct/indirect” dichotomy, where direct communication is characterized by literal, explicit, clear and precise language (logos), while indirect communication is characterized by mystery, hints, allusions, metaphors and other encryptions that must be “interpreted” (eros). The stereotype is that women tend to be more indirect, harder to understand, complex, but that men are direct and upfront about what they want. Yet, even ignoring the entire human dimension, and only speaking abstractly: language itself is structured in such a way such that direct communication is founded upon indirect communication, even if we retroactively get the illusion that it is the other way around. The trap we need to avoid falling on is to think that we first have direct, literal speech (a sentence means whatever it means), and then indirect communication is a way of alluding to this primordial, literal statement (ex: through a hint that you have to decipher). This illusion is perhaps what Jacques Derrida may have called “phallogocentrism”. But the reality is the other way around: first we have the allusion, and the true “hidden meaning” behind it is retroactively created after the act of censoring our speech. Hence, indirect communication is primordial: we first need metaphor and metonymy in order for us to be able to have any words to speak at all, and it is not true that first we need to have a set of words and only after we can build metaphors with them.

A distinction between “empirical” and “transcendental” may suffice. Empirically, in experience, we first have identities (“things”), and only after that we find difference (by comparing multiple “things” and seeing how they are different). Transcendentally, however, it is difference that comes first, in the sense that the possibility of the existence of identities depends on the possibility of existence of difference, but not vice-versa. Similarly enough, empirically, we first find denotation (literal, explicit, direct language), and only after that we build metaphors with words that initially mean whatever they mean. Transcendentally, however, the existence of literal communication (denotation) depends on the possibility of creating metaphors. Without metaphor, no new words could be learned or created. An analogy with sexual difference would be that masculinity stands for the “literal and direct” position, while femininity stands for the “metaphor”. Empirically, women depend on men for protection and status in society, while transcendentally, men depend on women since they give birth to both men and women (in the same way that metaphors “give birth” to both metaphors and denotations in language).

In other words, like I showed in a previous article, a person who is ‘direct’ is simply a person who is indirect without realizing:

 

“Consider a limit scenario: I want to ask for a favor from my friend, but I consider that it’s very likely for him to reject it, but since it’s very important for me, I spend a few days catching up to him, asking him about his day, etc. Then, one day in the morning, I strike up a new conversation with him and immediately in the beginning of the conversation I ask for my favor instead of beating around the bush. He will likely praise me for being so “direct” or “upfront” about what I wanted, yet, little does he know that I wanted that thing for almost a week already, in my mind, me thinking of what I am doing in quite the opposite terms – an indirect approach.

This leads us to believe that this division is a matter of perspective, what we call a ‘direct’ approach is simply an indirect approach where we redefined the start and or the end of that approach such as to make it seem shorter.”⁵

 

In order to preserve his symmetrical view of sexual difference, Jung then forces himself to posit that there must also be a sort of “man behind every woman”, that femininity is also a mask for a hidden masculinity just as we saw with the previous example, that women also have inside them a masculine side. He called this counterpart the animus. However, even his approach subtly implied that most of his statements about the anima applied to both the anima and animus, while when he talked about the animus (about women), he talked about the in isolation. So not even he escaped this asymmetrical (non-)relation between the sexes. In Jungian circles, the anima is mentioned much more often than the animus. More than that, whenever he tried to find archetypical examples in mythology of the anima, he found plenty (the siren, Aphrodite, etc.). However, when he tried to find archetypal representations in mythology of the animus, some sort of “ideal man” that women dream of but never find in reality, he didn’t really find any good ones, so he resorted to all sorts of mental gymnastics in attempt at saving his theory by positing that the animus is not mythologically represented by one single person, but as “a collective” which resembles something more alike the paternal super-ego than the objet petit a:

 

“The animus does not appear as one person, but as a plurality of persons. In H. G. Wells’ novel Christina Alberta’s Father, the heroine, in all that she does or does not do, is constantly under the surveillance of a supreme moral authority, which tells her with remorseless precision and dry matter-of-factness what she is doing and for what motives. Wells calls this authority a “Court of Conscience.” This collection of condemnatory judges, a sort of College of Preceptors, corresponds to a personification of the animus. The animus is rather like an assembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incontestable, “rational,” ex cathedra judgments. On closer examination these exacting judgments turn out to be largely sayings and opinions scraped together more or less unconsciously from childhood on, and compressed into a canon of average truth, justice, and reasonableness, a compendium of preconceptions which, whenever a conscious and competent judgment is lacking (as not infrequently happens), instantly obliges with an opinion.”⁶

 

            The animus does not exist. The anima also does not literally exist, in the sense that we can never find her in reality, yet she exists as a concept. But a concept of the animus does not make sense. Everyone has an unconscious, and the feminine position simply accepts this fact and lives it out, so there is no need for an inner ‘animus’ as she already embodied the anima in her behavior, while the man did not. In other words, a man cannot understand women but falsely thinks that he can understand himself, while a woman knows that she does not know herself. The feminine subject takes the philosophical position of Socrates: “I know that I don’t know”.

 

IV: CHAOS AND ORDER

 

            Jordan Peterson thinks that masculinity is order and femininity is chaos. In a very weird way, he is so correct for all the wrong reasons. It is order that arrives out of chaos, but in the beginning, there was only chaos. Empirically, order precedes chaos, but transcendentally, chaos precedes order.

“Order”, just like masculinity, is a misrecognition of the ego, a snapshot of a constantly changing world, a moment of “freezing in time” a process that is constantly evolving. As Gilles Deleuze wonderfully puts it:

 

“Nietzsche says that if the universe had an equilibrium position, if becoming had an end or final state, it would already have been attained. But the present moment, as the passing moment, proves that it is not attained and therefore that an equilibrium of forces is not possible. But why would equilibrium, the terminal state, have to have been attained if it were possible? By virtue of what Nietzsche calls the infinity of past time. The infinity of past time means that becoming cannot have started to become, that it is not something that has become. But, not being something that has become it cannot be a becoming something. Not having become, it would already be what it is becoming - if it were becoming something. That is to say, past time being infinite, becoming would have attained its final state if it had one. And, indeed, saying that becoming would have attained its final state if it had one is the same as saying that it would not have left its initial state if it had one. If becoming becomes something why has it not finished becoming long ago? If it is something which has become then how could it have started to become? ‘If the universe were capable of permanence and fixity, and if there were in its entire course a single moment of being in the strict sense it could no longer have anything to do with becoming, thus one could no longer think or observe any becoming whatever’.”⁷

 

The real is chaos and only chaos, order is an illusion of our mind, a complex set of imaginary borders (“territorializations”, to use Deleuzian term) that we draw around the chaotic real in order to make sense of it. Femininity, by embodying chaos, is true to reality and true to the fact of the unconscious. But chaos never looks chaotic when viewed “from the inside”, chaos is only chaotic relative to an arbitrarily chosen order. There are multiple orders, multiple ways of drawing imaginary borders around reality: an object, like a water bottle, is an imaginary line that separates the molecules in one place from another, a country is an imaginary border drawn on a map, etc. We can choose one order we like and call all the other ones “chaotic”. So if femininity is “chaotic”, it is only from the perspective of men that it looks chaotic, but a woman is way less often chaotic for other women, she is chaotic when you ask a man. For most women, ‘understanding’, or separating the world between order and chaos, is way less often a problem. To say that masculinity is orderly and femininity is chaotic is technically true, but only one of the two “partial truths” that dance together in a disjunctive-synthesis, since it already implies that we view men and women from the perspective of a man. But there is also the feminine perspective, where there is only chaos, and an arbitrarily chosen misrecognition of it that we call order or ‘manhood’.

The reality of the body is as chaotic and traumatic at the same time. The newborn is thrown into chaos. William James thought that “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion”⁸. Our body is a misrecognition of our image in the mirror, an imaginary border separating our disjointed, chaotic organs from the molecules of other substances in another place, giving us the illusion that “I am one” when in reality I am a liver, and two lungs, and four limbs, and a heart and a brain and… “Thus, this Gestalt, by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making tends to find completion”⁹.

Political difference, for Slavoj Zizek, is marked by the same antagonism as sexual difference. Common sense guides us to think that we must first understand what left-wing ‘is’, what right-wing ‘is’, and only after we have clearly defined the two political positions, we can finally understand the difference between left and right, why they argue so much. The reality is the opposite: first we must understand the difference between left and right, and only after we do that, we can finally grasp the left and the right as two failed attempts at solving this problem! The difference between them is a problem, or a question, and “left” as well as “right” are two different attempts at solving or answering it. Thus, not only do the definitions of “left-wing” and “right-wing” change depending on whether you ask a leftist or a right-winger, but the definition of the difference between them changes as well! (They quite literally disagree about what they disagree about, they identify "the problem" somewhere else.) For example, a right-winger might say that libertarians are for small government, while leftists are for state intervention in the economy, while a leftist would say that they are neither for less nor for more state intervention in the economy, a leftist will deny that you can even quantify “how much” the state intervenes in the economy, since for a leftist, when the state cuts taxes, it is also an intervention in the economy just as raising taxes is. So the problem that the right-winger is trying to solve is simply not a problem in the first place for the leftist. Similarly enough, most men will say that men are orderly and women are chaotic, while most women will neither agree nor disagree, they simply do not care about who is chaotic and who is in order, that is not a problem or question for them, they have other concerns.

Leftism is marked by infighting, chaos, while the right is marked by signifiers such as “law and order”, by unity. Just like the feminine, the left-wing position takes up the very antagonism between left and right within it, they stand for the very difference as such, while the right-wing masculine position attempts to find a substitute phallic object in order to hide this antagonism itself (ex: “let’s compromise, find a middle-ground”), this antagonism that psychoanalysis calls symbolic castration.

And personal conflicts have the same structure. When viewed from the standpoint of identity, we think that first we have what each particular individual wants (desires), and then an incompatibility between the two arises, giving rise to conflicts (“differences”). This retroactively gives the illusion that more communication would have solved it, if only each particular individual would have been a bit clearer about what they have wanted, and had communicated it to the other, then all of their problems could have been avoided! Yet this is precisely the illusion, because what happens more often than not is that the “difference(s)” between two people in a relationship precede their particular desires, as what separates humans from animals is that we do not merely desire material substances (“things”, like food and water), but we also desire the other person’s desire (we lack the other person’s lack). The tragic situation of most relationships is how first we have a conflict, an unsymbolizable hidden difference, and only after that the two individuals start wanting various things just to unconsciously hold this conflict alive: this is the cliché in cartoons where the two main characters have been enemies for life, hating each other, while forgetting why they started arguing in the first place. It is not that first the two of us want certain things, and then when our desires are “incompatible”, conflict emerges. Sometimes, the conflict comes first, and we start wanting different things just to have an excuse to keep fighting, giving us the illusion that if we had just “communicated more”, it would have solved the problem, as if humans don’t have an unconscious…

EDIT: To elaborate on the last point, just as sexual difference looks different when viewed from either the masculine or the feminine position, so does "communication". Quite ironically, when people say that "communication is important", everyone means something else. So all of us are "on the same page", but on the same page in a different book. When two partners break up, what very often happens is that both of them will accuse the other of "not communicating enough". In reality, both of them were talking to themselves in front of each other, because both of them were playing a different "language game" to use a term borrowed from Wittgenstein. For example, if one partner says "You never help me, you're so unreliable!", the other might hear this as part of the "Stating the facts" language game, like saying "World war I started in 1914", so they might respond by citing facts about how actually "I got the car insurance yesterday and I bought some groceries too". But the first person was not playing the "citing the facts" game, they're playing the "words as reassurance" game. And neither of those two games ("citing the facts", "words as reassurance") are the default or "normal" way to use language. So both partners will accuse the other one of not communicating and not speaking enough.

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NOTES:

1: See Alenka Zupancic, “Sexual difference and ontology” (2012): http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_8948423.pdf

2: See: Gilles Deleuze – Difference and Repetition

3: Jacques Lacan, Geneva lecture on the symptom

4: Ștefan Lastrevio, Objet petit a is a concrete universal: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/04/objet-petit-is-concrete-universal.html

5: Ștefan Lastrevio, Why thought is indirect towards itself: https://lastreviotheory.blogspot.com/2023/06/why-thought-is-indirect-towards-itself.html

6: Carl Jung, Two essays on analytical psychology, Part 2, Chapter 2.2, p. 332

7: Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, p. 47

8: William James, The Principles of Psychology, p. 488

9: Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage as formative of the function of the ego as revealed in psychoanalytic experience