Ego Ideal
ELI5
The Ego Ideal is the imaginary picture of yourself that you try to live up to — a kind of internal standard made from what you think other people (especially important figures like parents) expect you to be, so that you feel loved and worthy when you match it.
Definition
The Ego Ideal (Ichideal / Idéal du moi) is a psychic formation that emerges from the subject's relation to the symbolic Other, functioning as an internalized standard or point of reference from which the subject perceives itself and organizes its identifications. In Freud's original formulation — elaborated across "On Narcissism" (1914) and The Ego and the Id (1923) — the ego ideal is the structural heir to primary narcissism: when the infant is forced to relinquish its original self-sufficiency under the pressure of external reality and the castration complex, the libido withdrawn from the world is not simply lost but displaced onto an internally constituted ideal. "The development of the ego consists in an ever-increasing separation from one's primary narcissism, and gives rise to an intense struggle to retrieve it. This separation occurs through the displacement of libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without." The ego ideal thus becomes the recipient of the self-love previously enjoyed by the "real ego," functioning simultaneously as the measuring rod of repression (anything that fails to meet its standard is subject to repression) and as the heir to the Oedipus complex (carrying the introjected parental prohibition into the psychic apparatus as the proto-superego).
Lacan's decisive intervention is to re-register the ego ideal strictly in the symbolic order, sharply distinguishing it from the ideal ego (Idealich) which belongs to the imaginary. Where the ideal ego is the specular, narcissistic image produced in the mirror stage — a totalising imaginary projection — the ego ideal is the symbolic point placed in the field of the Other from which the subject sees itself as seen. Lacan formalises this at the point I(A) in the Graph of Desire and as the position I in the optical schema (the inverted vase): "The point of the ego ideal is that from which the subject will see himself, as one says, as others see him — which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation that is satisfactory for him from the point of view of love." The ego ideal is grounded in the einziger Zug (single unary trait), a sign rather than a full signifier — the minimal mark of the Other's assent that fixes narcissistic cathexis without global envelopment. "The ego-ideal is a symbolic introjection, whereas the ideal ego is the source of an imaginary projection." The constellation of signifiers produced by the Other's responses to the subject's demands constitutes the substance of the ego ideal: "those signifiers or 'insignia' that constitute the ideal of myself that I imagine satisfies the Other." The ego ideal thus names the symbolic coordinates of identification, while remaining structurally distinct from the objet petit a — which is the cause of desire rather than its idealized support.
Evolution
In Freud (represented here by "On Narcissism," The Ego and the Id, and Group Psychology), the ego ideal begins as the structural substitute for lost primary narcissism. It is initially co-identified with the superego as its heir ("The ego-ideal is thus heir to the Oedipus complex, and as such an expression of the id's most powerful impulses and most important libidinal experiences"), and the tension between the actual ego and the ego ideal generates conscience and, when aggression is turned inward, the superego's cruelty ("the more a person succeeds in controlling his aggression, the more intense becomes his ego-ideal's aggressive disposition towards his ego"). Freud's texts preserve a productive ambiguity between the two German terms Ichideal and Idealich — an ambiguity Lacan reads not as confusion but as designating two distinct structural functions.
In Lacan's early seminars (Seminar I, period: return-to-freud), the critical work is the separation of these two functions. "The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting. These are things that one tends to gloss over." The optical schema with the inverted vase illusion is introduced to model this distinction: the ideal ego (i(a)) is the real image produced by the spherical mirror and tied to primary narcissism, while the ego ideal (I) is the symbolic position regulated by "the voice of the other." "The ego-ideal governs the interplay of relations on which all relations with others depend." At this stage the ego ideal is still closely tied to the imaginary structure of love (in passionate love "the loved object is confounded... with the subject's ego-ideal"), but Lacan is already insisting on its properly symbolic, regulatory function.
By the object-a period (Seminars X–XI, XIV), Lacan sharpens the distinction further through the einziger Zug. The ego ideal is grounded in the single unary trait in the field of the Other: "It is the field of the Other that determines the function of the single stroke, in so far as it is from it that a major stage of identification is established... namely, idealization, the ego ideal." This grounds the ego ideal in symbolic identification (a discrete signifying trait) rather than imaginary envelopment. At the same time, the ego ideal is increasingly set in structural opposition to the objet petit a: hypnosis demonstrates "the conjunction of the a with the ego ideal," and the transference's first stage operates at the level of the ego ideal while its deeper movement toward separation involves the objet a. Lacan also challenges the ego-psychological notion that "the ego ideal rests on the investment of a desexualized libido," insisting no libido can be genuinely desexualised. In Seminar XIV and the topology-borromean period, the ego ideal becomes the target of a late critique: its proliferation alongside ideal ego, superego, ego, and id is dismissed as "a whole population of subjective entities" inadequate to grounding analytic practice in the subject as effect of the signifier. In Seminar XXIV, Lacan cryptically inverts its valence: "The ideal, the Ego Ideal, in short would mean finishing with the Symbolic, in other words saying nothing," contrasting it with the superego as the demonic compulsion to speak and teach.
Secondary literature extends these distinctions. Boothby (using Schema R) describes the ego ideal as "a purely virtual positionality, an unimaged figure" on the I–M axis distinct from the imaginary i–m axis. Žižek emphasises the structural opposition between symbolic identification with the ego ideal I(O) ("identification with the very place from where we are being observed") and imaginary identification with the ideal ego i(o). Han's Burnout Society re-reads the shift from disciplinary to achievement society as the superego's "positivization" into the ego ideal, which now "seduces" rather than prohibits — producing auto-aggression when the real ego falls short. Ruti similarly rehabilitates the ego ideal as the symbolically productive counterpart to the imaginary ideal ego, enabling "transition from the deceptive universe of the mirror stage to collective structures of meaning production."
Key formulations
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.283)
The point of the ego ideal is that from which the subject will see himself, as one says, as others see him—which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation that is satisfactory for him from the point of view of love.
This is Lacan's most economical definition of the ego ideal's structural function: it is not a specular image but the symbolic vantage point placed in the Other from which specular identification becomes possible and love is sustained.
Seminar VIII · Transference (p.369)
The ego-ideal is a symbolic introjection, whereas the ideal ego is the source of an imaginary projection.
The sharpest single-sentence articulation of the imaginary/symbolic distinction between the two ideals, grounding the ego ideal in the einziger Zug and categorically separating it from narcissistic identification.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (page unknown)
The development of the ego consists in an ever-increasing separation from one's primary narcissism, and gives rise to an intense struggle to retrieve it. This separation occurs through the displacement of libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without.
Freud's foundational account of the ego ideal as the structural mechanism that drives the break from primary narcissism — the passage that anchors Lacan's entire reworking of the concept.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (page unknown)
The ego-ideal is thus heir to the Oedipus complex, and as such an expression of the id's most powerful impulses and most important libidinal experiences.
Establishes the phylogenetic-structural dimension of the ego ideal as the condensation of the Oedipus complex's dissolution, linking it simultaneously to the id's libidinal legacy and to the origins of conscience.
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (p.271)
It is the field of the Other that determines the function of the single stroke, in so far as it is from it that a major stage of identification is established in the topography then developed by Freud—namely, idealization, the ego ideal.
Re-grounds the ego ideal in the einziger Zug (single stroke/unary trait) as a signifier in the field of the Other, decisively relocating its foundation from imaginary narcissism to the symbolic order.
Cited examples
Fight Club (film) — Tyler Durden as Jack's ego ideal (film)
Cited by Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club (p.141). Tyler is theorised as Jack's ego-ideal — the image of what the subject wishes to be — connecting the film's dissociated self-structure to the image-basis of commodity culture. Tyler's declaration 'I look like you want to look' explicitly links the psychoanalytic concept of the ego ideal to media apparatus and celebrity culture as generators of desirable identities.
Jean Genet's The Balcony — the brothel's clients occupying symbolic roles (bishop, judge, general) (literature)
Cited by Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious (p.253). Lacan uses Genet's play to argue that the ego ideal is not the result of sublimation (desexualisation) but of an eroticisation of the symbolic function: the clients seek jouissance precisely by inhabiting symbolic roles (ego-ideal positions), demonstrating that the symbolic and the libidinal are never fully separated in idealisation.
Schreber's psychosis — hallucinated signifiers as substitute ego ideal (case_study)
Cited by Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' (p.192). In Schreber's psychotic reorganisation (I-schema), the normally symbolic ego ideal is replaced by hallucinated signifiers: 'These hallucinated signifiers make up Schreber's ego-ideal; with these signifiers he can articulate who he is in relation to the Other.' This shows how the ego ideal's symbolic function can be substituted by hallucinatory formations when the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed.
Little Hans — identification with the maternal phallus as ego ideal (case_study)
Cited by Seminar IV · The Object Relation (p.407). Lacan argues that Hans's phobic resolution is atypical: rather than forming a proper superego through symbolic castration, Hans identifies with the maternal phallus as his ego ideal — 'it is in so far as little Hans has a certain idea of his ideal, insomuch as he is his mother's ideal, namely a substitute for the phallus, that he takes his place in existence.' The case illustrates how the ego ideal can remain on the imaginary plane when the Oedipal transition is incomplete.
September 11 attacks and American social bond — Freudian group psychology of leadership (history)
Cited by Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (p.175). McGowan invokes Freud's account from Group Psychology: 'all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society.' The post-9/11 social bond is analysed through the ego ideal's function of sustaining group cohesion via shared identification.
Mulholland Drive — Coco transformed into an ego ideal in Betty/Diane's fantasy (film)
Cited by The Impossible David Lynch (p.111). In Diane's fantasy-world, the harsh maternal figure Coco becomes 'wholly benevolent — an ego ideal, seeing Betty in the way that Betty wants to be seen.' This contrast with the desire-world illustrates how fantasy reorganises symbolic relations by installing an affirming ego ideal where previously there was only rebuke.
The Titanic as the ego ideal of bourgeois society (history)
Cited by The Sublime Object of Ideology (page unknown). Žižek reads the Titanic as 'a kind of microcosm of the social structure, an image of society not as it really was but seen as society wanted to be seen… in brief the ego-ideal of society.' Its sinking functions as the traumatic collapse of that idealised self-image, illustrating how collective ego-ideal formations are invested with narcissistic libido and are vulnerable to catastrophic disillusionment.
Tensions
Within the corpus
Whether the ego ideal belongs primarily to the imaginary or the symbolic register, and thus what kind of identification it grounds
Lacan (Seminar IV, 1956-57): The ego ideal can operate within the imaginary dialectic. In the Little Hans case and in the Oedipal resolution involving the maternal image, the ego ideal can remain 'in the imaginary dialectic, in the specular dialectic of the subject's relation to the little other.' The Oedipus complex requires something beyond the imaginary ego ideal for genuine symbolic stabilisation. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-4 p.199
Lacan (Seminar VIII/XI, 1960-64): The ego ideal is strictly a symbolic introjection, operating through the einziger Zug (single unary trait) in the field of the Other, and is categorically opposed to the imaginary ideal ego. 'The ego-ideal is a symbolic introjection, whereas the ideal ego is the source of an imaginary projection.' Narcissistic identification with the ideal ego is enveloping; ego ideal identification operates via isolated signifying traits. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-8 p.369
Lacan's own teaching shifts: in Seminar IV imaginary and ego-ideal registers can overlap in pathological cases, but by Seminar VIII the symbolic/imaginary distinction is theorised as categorical and structural.
Whether the ego ideal is a therapeutically viable goal of analysis or should be dissolved/traversed
Hook/Neill/Vanheule (reading 'Remarks on Lagache'): The proper telos of analysis is the 'réintégration not of the ideal ego, but of the ego-ideal' — the symbolic assumption of one's history, contrasted with ego-psychology's aim of identification with the analyst's ego. The ego ideal is the positive symbolic endpoint of the cure. — cite: derek-hook-calum-neill-stijn-vanheule-reading-lacan-s-ecrits-from-the-freudian-t p.285
Lacan (Seminar XII, 1964-65): 'psychoanalysts themselves... would laugh if they were told that what it is a matter of transmitting is a function of the ego-ideal type. The identification involved can only be defined, grasped elsewhere.' Analytic transmission cannot be grounded in ego-ideal identification; the ego ideal is explicitly ruled out as the locus of analytic transmission. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-12 p.26
This tension maps onto the broader clinical debate: is analysis about symbolic re-identification (via the ego ideal) or about encountering the objet a as cause of desire beyond all ideals?
Whether the ego ideal is primarily the seat of an exalting/libidinal function or of a repressive/critical one that turns aggression back on the ego
Lacan (Seminar I, 1953-54): 'The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting. These are things that one tends to gloss over, because we move from one term to the other as if the two were synonymous.' The ego ideal is distinguished by its exalting rather than constraining function, associated with the imaginary structuration of narcissism and love. — cite: jacques-lacan-seminar-1 p.106
Freud (The Ego and the Id, in the corpus): 'the more a person succeeds in controlling his aggression, the more intense becomes his ego-ideal's aggressive disposition towards his ego. It is tantamount to a displacement, to the ego-ideal turning on the person's ego.' The ego ideal accumulates suppressed aggression and redirects it at the ego, making it a vehicle for self-destruction rather than exaltation. — cite: penguin-modern-classics-sigmund-freud-beyond-the-pleasure-principle-and-other-wr p.null
Freud's own texts are internally divided on whether the ego ideal's aggression is structurally distinct from or continuous with the superego's cruelty; Lacan's early distinction sharpens the separation that Freud himself left ambiguous.
Across frameworks
vs Ego Psychology
Lacanian: For Lacan, the ego ideal is strictly grounded in the symbolic order through the einziger Zug (unary trait) — a discrete signifying mark from the Other's field that does not totalise the subject but merely fixes a point of reference. The ego ideal rests on a libidinally invested (not desexualised) identification, and its proper analytic treatment involves exposing rather than strengthening it. Ego psychological strengthening of the ego via identification with the analyst perpetuates pathological alienation by installing the analyst in the analysand's ego ideal.
Ego Psychology: Ego psychology (Hartmann, Loewenstein, Kris) treats the ego ideal as a product of neutralised, desexualised energy — part of the conflict-free sphere of the ego that can be strengthened through analytic work. The analyst's goal is to help the analysand form healthier identifications, ultimately replacing pathological ego ideals with more reality-adapted ones, ideally by offering the analyst's own 'healthy' ego as a model.
Fault line: The core disagreement is whether idealisation is irreducibly libidinal (Lacanian) or can be genuinely desexualised/neutralised (ego psychological). Lacan insists 'it seems to me very difficult to speak of a desexualized libido,' making the ego psychological project of therapeutic re-idealisation conceptually incoherent.
vs Humanistic Self Actualization
Lacanian: The Lacanian ego ideal is not a representation of the subject's authentic potential but an external symbolic construction assembled from signifiers of the Other's desire. The subject is constitutively alienated in the ego ideal — it is what the subject imagines it must be to satisfy the Other — not an expression of inner resources. The analytic task is to loosen identification with the ego ideal, not to realise it.
Humanistic Self Actualization: Humanistic psychology (Maslow, Rogers) conceives the ideal self as a natural horizon of growth and self-actualisation. The 'ideal self' represents the person's authentic potential that healthy development tends toward. Therapy aims to close the gap between actual and ideal self through genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathic understanding — not through deconstruction of the ideal.
Fault line: For Lacanian theory the subject is constituted by lack and the ego ideal is a defence against that lack — there is no 'authentic self' beneath it to actualise. Humanistic psychology presupposes precisely the plenitude that Lacanian theory regards as a structural fiction.
vs Frankfurt School
Lacanian: Lacan analyses the ego ideal's social dimension through group psychology: group members install the leader in the position of the ego ideal, and this shared identification produces social cohesion at the cost of subjects' singularity. The ego ideal is the psychoanalytic mechanism through which ideology operates — it is the point from which subjects experience themselves as seen and affirmed by the collective, which is why Copjec and others use it to explain totalitarian subjection. No amount of critical enlightenment can dissolve the structural necessity of the ego ideal.
Frankfurt School: The Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) analyses ideological domination through the categories of reification, false consciousness, and instrumental reason. The authority of cultural ideals is a product of social relations of domination that can be critically unmasked and, under transformed social conditions, overcome. The ideal function is a historical product of bourgeois society rather than a structural constant of subjectivity.
Fault line: Where Frankfurt Critical Theory treats the pathological authority of ideals as historically contingent and potentially dissoluble through social transformation and critical reason, Lacanian theory insists the ego ideal is a structural feature of subject-formation tied to the Other's desire — it may change its content but cannot be abolished without the dissolution of the subject as such.
All occurrences
Where it appears in the corpus (195)
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#01
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.9
Slavoj Zizek
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's reading of Kant reveals a more uncanny Kantian ethics than liberal interpretations allow: the Kantian transcendental subject (empty, decentred) is the Freudian subject of desire, and this entails grounding ethics not in the Good or superego-morality but in desire's non-pathological a priori cause (objet petit a), yielding a 'critique of pure desire' that radicalises Kant's own project.
the ethical act proper should be distinguished from the Ego-Ideal (the Law of the public Good) as well as from the superego, its obscene supplement.
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#02
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.83
From the Logic of Illusion to the Postulates > 'Person also means mask'
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues that Kant's paralogism of personality and its resolution through the transcendental idea structurally anticipates Lacan's optical schema and the concept of the Ego-Ideal as 'the way I see the Other seeing me', showing that the unity of the subject-as-person is an inevitable dialectical illusion produced by identification with a virtual point of view that already marks the subject's division by the Other.
we have reached not only the transcendental idea which corresponds to the paralogism of personality, but also the Lacanian conception of the Ego-Ideal as 'the way I see the Other seeing me'.
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#03
Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan · Alenka Zupančič · p.275
Index
Theoretical move: This is the index of Zupančič's *Ethics of the Real*, a non-substantive navigational apparatus listing key concepts, proper names, and page references without advancing any independent theoretical argument.
Ego-Ideal 70
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#04
Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.141
<span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Mode of production in Fight Club** > **Creative destruction**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* theorizes the structural entwinement of destruction and production under capitalism, advancing the thesis that psychic self-destruction is a necessary precondition for politico-economic revolution — that any change in the mode of production must simultaneously be a change in the mode of subjectivization.
He suggests that he is not only a compensatory personality, but an ego-ideal, a fulfillment of Jack's ambitions for the way he wants to be seen.
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#05
Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club · Anna Kornbluh · p.152
<span id="page-6-0"></span>**[ACKNOWLEDGMENTS](#page-5-0)** > **Ideology in Fight Club** > **Generalizing ideology**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that *Fight Club* operationalizes a sophisticated theory of ideology—drawing on Marx, Althusser, and Žižek—whereby ideology is not false belief but practical consciousness constituted in consumption, work, and even ostensibly anti-ideological resistance; the film's formal devices (editing, lighting, indistinct setting) underscore that there is no outside of ideology, and that the subject's critical distance from ideology is itself ideological.
connecting the generating of ego-ideals to the ubiquity of images in phantasmagoric celebrity culture.
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#06
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.30
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Resistance to the resisters
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of ego-psychological defense analysis shows it to be self-defeating: by privileging the ego as analytic interlocutor, it redoubles alienation and misrecognition, reinforces defenses rather than dissolving them, and substitutes the analyst's suggestive opinions for genuine analytic truth—whereas Lacan insists that the Freudian Thing speaks even through defenses, making everything said (or unsaid) by the analysand available to interpretation.
the analysand is pushed into the alienation of identifying with the person of the analyst, reforming his/her ego under pressure so as to enshrine what the analyst represents (or pretends to represent) in the guise of a new ego-ideal
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#07
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.42
[The Freudian Thing, or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-003) > Imaginary passion
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's mirror stage grounds the ego in a constitutive double alienation—imaginary and symbolic—such that the ego is structurally paranoid, narcissistic, and rivalrous, making ego-to-ego analysis (as in ego psychology) a therapeutic dead end that merely amplifies imaginary passions rather than dissolving the transference.
Freud's account of the ego includes an insistence on an inherently normative aspect of ego-level self-identity/identification (reflected in the concepts of ego-ideal and superego).
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#08
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.126
[The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-005) > Once upon a time on an enchanted couch
Theoretical move: Lacan's satirical fable in "The Situation of Psychoanalysis and the Training of Psychoanalysts in 1956" exposes how the IPA's bureaucratic institutional structure produces narcissistic identification, imaginary prestige, and endless subordination rather than genuine analytic transmission, arguing that the institutional training machine is structurally self-defeating and anti-intellectual.
the narcissism of small differences that denies the very existence of the other, the 'One Extra'
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#09
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.182
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacan's 'return to Freud' culminates in a formal, symbolic account of the unconscious as the Other's discourse, articulated through the L-schema and R-schema, which positions subjectivity as constituted by signifiers at the level of the Other rather than by imaginary ego-dynamics—thereby decisively separating psychoanalysis from both Cartesian consciousness-philosophy and Jungian imaginary interpretation.
I is the symbol of the ego-ideal, which, in the R-schema, is indeed situated at the level of the ego (a′)... The ego-ideal refers to the signifiers that mark the subject and with which identification takes place.
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#10
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.185
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > III. With Freud
Theoretical move: The passage demonstrates how Lacan's formula of metaphor, applied to the Oedipus complex as the paternal metaphor, structures subjective identity through the substitution of the Name-of-the-Father for the Mother's Desire, while the R-schema (reconceived as a Möbius strip) situates the objet petit a as the virtual support of reality in neurosis versus its chaotic real manifestation in psychosis.
What the child thus adopts are signifiers that will henceforth function as ego-ideals... identification with signifiers or traits detected in the Other takes place; signifiers that are seen as indications of that which causes desire
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#11
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.192
[On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-007) > IV. Schreber’s way
Theoretical move: The passage argues that Schreber's psychosis is structurally determined by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, which produces a cascade of effects—absence of phallic signification, invasion of the Real by hallucinatory voices and gazes (object a), and compensatory metonymic 'forced thought'—all of which Lacan formalizes through the R-schema and the I-schema as an alternative symbolic architecture to neurotic repression.
These hallucinated signifiers make up Schreber's ego-ideal; with these signifiers he can articulate who he is in relation to the Other.
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#12
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.259
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > I. Structure and the subject
Theoretical move: Lacan's commentary on Lagache's paper argues that structure must be understood in strictly formal, linguistic-mathematical terms (not naturalistic or organismic ones), such that signifying structure is not an abstract beyond but actively functions in the real—shaping organisms, producing the barred subject, and establishing the priority of the Other's discourse over any putative being-in-itself of the child.
the new concepts developed by Freud in the post-First World War period, such as narcissism and the ego-ideal, do actually show a continued interest in thinking about the ego on Freud's part
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#13
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.271
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > II. Where is id?
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that negation (Verneinung/Bejahung) is not a logical operation but a structural one grounded in the signifying chain: the "failed negation" of the French 'ne' exemplifies how repression and the return of the repressed are identical, and how the subject of desire emerges precisely from the space carved out between the statement and enunciation by this structural capacity for one signifier to replace another — making lack, not fusion or adaptation, the founding condition of both subject and objective reality.
this creation of a negative or empty space in the id... affords other agencies the opportunity to organize themselves and situate themselves therein as well – this is why the natures of the ego, ego-ideal, ideal ego, and superego are different from that of the subject proper.
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#14
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.) · p.279
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person
Theoretical move: The passage uses the inverted vase schema to articulate the layered structure of imaginary and symbolic identification — distinguishing i(a)/ideal ego from i′(a)/ego-ideal, situating the Other (mirror A) as the structural third that disrupts dyadic imaginary relations, and arguing that the subject of desire emerges in the gap between statement and enunciation opened by signifying substitution — against object-relations developmentalism and ego-psychology.
The ego-ideal – labeled I in the figures – is a placeholder, a sort of replacement or stand-in, in the symbolic, for this vanishing subject.
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#15
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the psychoanalytic cure works by progressively exposing object *a* as the cause of the subject's desire and fading, thereby enabling the analysand to traverse their fundamental fantasy, reduce ego-ideal identifications, and face the irreducible aporia of castration as the proper terminus of analysis.
The 'constellation' of the signifiers involved in these responses to demands is what ends up constituting 'the subject's ego-ideal' – those signifiers or 'insignia' that constitute the ideal of myself that I imagine satisfies the Other
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#16
Reading Lacan's Écrits: From 'The Freudian Thing' to 'Remarks on Daniel Lagache' · Derek Hook, Calum Neill & Stijn Vanheule (eds.)
[Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: “Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure”](#ch05.xhtml_tocbook-part-009) > III. On the ideals of the person
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the ego functions as a structural misrecognition-faculty — a lens that distorts rather than corrects — and that the proper distinction between the ideal ego and ego-ideal (as well as the difference between Verwerfung/foreclosure and repression) requires a topological-optical model rather than behavioral observation, demonstrating how the symbolic and imaginary registers differently shape (intra)subjective structure.
the ego-ideal, as that which obeys 'the law to please,' creates a situation in which the subject only manages to upset herself whenever the 'commandment' is obeyed
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#17
Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis · Todd McGowan · p.175
I > Th e Appeal of Sacrifi ce > From Enjoyment to Pleasure
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the social bond is constituted through the enjoyment of traumatic loss rather than through pleasure, and that every social project (war, monument-building, political identification) uses pleasure as an alibi for this foundational enjoyment—while the structure of the signifier itself generates paranoia about the Other's enjoyment, rendering utopian equality impossible.
According to Freud, all group members install the leader in the position of an ego ideal, and this ego ideal held in common furthers the bond among members of society.
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#18
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_97"></span>**introjection**
Theoretical move: Lacan redefines introjection against Kleinian and Ferenczian usage by locating it exclusively in the Symbolic register (as introjection of the signifier/speech of the Other, constitutive of the Ego Ideal), while relocating projection to the Imaginary register, thereby dissolving the classical introjection/projection symmetry and exposing it as a confusion between fantasy and structure.
Introjection thus refers to the process of symbolic identification, the process by which the EGO-IDEAL is constituted at the end of the Oedipus complex
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#19
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_198"></span>**Suggestion**
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes psychoanalysis from suggestion/hypnosis by arguing that psychoanalysis operates precisely where suggestion fails: by maintaining the distance between identification (I/ego-ideal) and objet petit a, rather than collapsing them as hypnosis does, and by directing the treatment rather than the patient, embracing nonsense over signification, and holding the analyst's knowledge as merely presumed rather than real.
Freud shows how hypnotism makes the object converge with the ego-ideal (Freud, 1921). To put this in Lacanian terms, hypnotism involves the convergence of the object a and the I.
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#20
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_134"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_page_0151"></span>***O*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part25.xhtml_ncx_139"></span>**Optical model**
Theoretical move: The optical model serves as a provisional didactic apparatus that illustrates how the symbolic order structures the imaginary, and distinguishes the ideal ego (real image) from the ego-ideal (symbolic guide governing the mirror's angle), before Lacan replaces optical models with topology to escape imaginary capture.
the ego-ideal, which is the symbolic guide governing the angle of the mirror and hence the position of the subject (S1, 141)
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#21
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_57"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_page_0075"></span>***E*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part15.xhtml_ncx_59"></span>**ego-ideal**
Theoretical move: Lacan systematically differentiates three Freudian 'formations of the ego'—ego-ideal, ideal ego, and superego—by assigning them to distinct registers (symbolic vs. imaginary vs. unconscious) and developmental moments, thereby grounding their algebraic notation I(A) and i(a) in a structural topology of identification.
the ego-ideal is a symbolic introjection, whereas the ideal ego is the source of an imaginary projection... The ego-ideal is the signifier operating as ideal, an internalised plan of the law, the guide governing the subject's position in the symbolic order
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#22
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_9"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_page_0025"></span>***A*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part11.xhtml_ncx_16"></span>**algebra**
Theoretical move: Lacan's algebraic formalisation of psychoanalysis is theoretically motivated by three interlinked aims: scientific legitimacy, integral transmission of psychoanalytic knowledge, and the prevention of imaginary (intuitive) understanding in favour of symbolic manipulation — the mathemes and associated symbols thus function as epistemic and pedagogical devices, not mere notation.
I = the ego-ideal (schema R) I(A) = the ego-ideal (graph of desire)
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#23
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_87"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_page_0105"></span>***I*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part19.xhtml_ncx_89"></span>**identification**
Theoretical move: The passage maps Lacan's theory of identification as a two-tier structure (imaginary/symbolic) grounded in the mirror stage and Oedipus complex respectively, then traces Lacan's progressive reframing of symbolic identification as identification with the signifier (unary trait/S1), and concludes by contrasting false identificatory ends of analysis with the genuine end as subjective destitution and identification with the sinthome.
Symbolic identification is the identification with the father in the final stage of the OEDIPUS COMPLEX which gives rise to the formation of the EGO-IDEAL.
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#24
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_43"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_page_0056"></span>***D*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part14.xhtml_ncx_56"></span>**dual relation**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the imaginary order is constituted by dyadic relations while the symbolic order is essentially triadic, and that the failure to theorise this distinction reduces psychoanalytic treatment to an imaginary power struggle; Lacan's broader theoretical preference for triadic over binary schemes follows from this structural principle.
the three formations of the ego (ego-ideal, ideal ego and superego)
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#25
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_173"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_page_0195"></span>***S*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part29.xhtml_ncx_199"></span>**superego**
Theoretical move: The passage traces Lacan's progressive retheorization of the Freudian superego: from a symbolic agency tied to the Law and the Oedipus complex, to a paradoxical structure that is simultaneously the Law and its destruction, culminating in its identification with the Kantian categorical imperative and the jouissance-commanding voice of the Other.
he distinguishes clearly between the superego and the EGO-IDEAL, terms which Freud seems to use interchangeably in The Ego and the Id
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#26
An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis · Dylan Evans
<span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_66"></span><span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_page_0084"></span>***F*** > <span id="9781134780112_Part16.xhtml_ncx_72"></span>**formation**
Theoretical move: The passage maps the concept of "formation" across three Lacanian registers—unconscious, analytic training, and ego—showing how Freud's laws of condensation and displacement are recast by Lacan as metaphor and metonymy, constituting the structural grammar of the unconscious.
The 'formations of the ego' are the three elements related to the ego: the superego, the ideal ego, and the ego-ideal.
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#27
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.189
**XIV**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the fundamental aim of psychoanalytic technique is the symbolic recognition of desire—not narcissistic revelation or imaginary ego-remodelling—by demonstrating through the Dora case that Freud's error was intervening at the imaginary level (remoulding the ego toward Herr K.) rather than naming Dora's true desire (Frau K.) and thereby integrating it on the symbolic plane; this critique positions Object Relations analysis (Balint) as a dead-end that mistakes narcissistic mirage for therapeutic outcome.
it is in as much as he makes a fresh conquest of his Ichideal that Freud can then take his seat at the level of the Ichideal
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#28
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.130
**X**
Theoretical move: Lacan extends the inverted bouquet/vase optical schema by introducing a plane mirror to model the reflexive (narcissistic) relation to the other, distinguishing two narcissisms and showing how the ego-ideal (Ichideal) as the captivating image of the other structures the imaginary order of reality and libidinal being—against pseudo-evolutionary stage theories inherited from Ferenczi.
The other, the alter ego, is more or less confused, according to the stage in life, with the Ichideal, this ego-ideal invoked throughout Freud's article.
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#29
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.117
**IX**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's article on narcissism to argue that the distinction between egoistical and sexual libido—and the corresponding distinction between neurosis and psychosis—requires the tripartite framework of Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, with the Mirror Stage grounding the imaginary constitution of the ego, and the neurosis/psychosis structural difference hinging on whether the subject retains access to imaginary substitution when withdrawing from reality.
the loved object is confounded, by means of one whole facet of its qualities... with the subject's ego-ideal
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#30
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.145
**XI**
Theoretical move: Lacan deploys the optical schema to articulate the structural difference between the Ideal Ego (Idealich) and the Ego-Ideal (Ichideal): the imaginary is regulated by the symbolic (governed by the voice/speech of the Other), and love/transference are theorised as perturbations of that symbolic regulation—love confusing the two registers, transference exploiting the same imaginary mechanism but within the analytic symbolic frame.
The ego-ideal governs the interplay of relations on which all relations with others depend. And on this relation to others depends the more or less satisfying character of the imaginary structuration.
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#31
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.106
**vin** > **1**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the case of Robert and his single word "Wolf!" to distinguish the superego (as senseless, ferocious law located in the symbolic) from the ego-ideal (as exalting), and to articulate how even the most reduced form of language ties a subject to the human community, while also returning to the optical schema of container/contained to theorize the nascent imaginary in psychotic structure.
The super-ego is constraining and the ego-ideal exalting. These are things that one tends to gloss over, because we move from one term to the other as if the two were synonymous.
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#32
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.138
**XI**
Theoretical move: The passage works through Freud's "On Narcissism" to distinguish two distinct functions—Ideal Ego (*Idealich*) and Ego Ideal (*Ichideal*)—arguing that their coexistence in Freud's text is not a confusion but marks two different structural functions; simultaneously, the passage establishes that both narcissistic and anaclitic object choices are imaginary and grounded in identification, and separates sublimation (object-libido process) from idealization (ego-libido process) as theoretically distinct operations.
he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego-ideal. Here we find the two terms 'ideal ego' and 'ego-ideal'.
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#33
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.169
**Xffl**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes méconnaissance (misrecognition) from simple ignorance by arguing that misrecognition presupposes a correlative knowledge behind it, and uses this distinction to pivot from ego-psychology's conception of the ego as a synthesising function toward a Lacanian account of the ego as fundamentally imaginary and constituted through the specular/linguistic relation to the other.
what is at issue relates to the constitution of the Idealich, and not the Ichideal — in other words, to the fundamentally imaginary, specular origin of the ego.
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#34
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.307
xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**
Theoretical move: This is an index page (partial, letters I–L) from Seminar I, listing page references for key concepts and proper names; it is non-substantive in itself but registers the conceptual vocabulary in use across the seminar.
passionate, contrasted with Eros 112, 126; equivalence of ego-ideal and object in 126
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#35
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.127
**X**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses ethological evidence (Lorenz/Tinbergen's releasing mechanisms) to argue that the libidinal drive is structurally centred on the imaginary—on image rather than real partner—thereby grounding the distinction between ego-drives and sexual drives in the Imaginary register, and reframing Freud's two narcissisms as two distinct relations to the image.
an object-libido which invests something which may perhaps be the ego-ideal, and is in any case an image of the ego
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#36
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.285
xxn > The concept of analysis > **0. MANNONI: ft** *is the navel of speech.*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference must be understood through the dialectic of the imaginary and symbolic registers rather than reduced to the real (Ezriel) or to ego-normalization (ego psychology); the imaginary relation, rooted in the mirror stage and the ideal ego, crystallizes transference while the symbolic—via speech and the analyst as mediating Other—enables the subject's integration of repressed history.
the réintégration not of the ideal ego, but of the ego-ideal
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#37
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.140
**XI**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the animal ethology of Gestalt-governed sexual behaviour (stickleback dance) as a contrast case to argue that in the human animal, the imaginary function is radically disordered — no image adequately releases sexual behaviour — which is precisely why the mirror apparatus (real image/spherical mirror schema) is needed to theorise how the ego-ideal operates at the joint of the imaginary and the symbolic, and how this bears on the question of the end of analysis.
The development of the ego consists in an estrangement from primary narcissism and gives rise to a vigorous attempt to recover that state. This departure is brought about by means of the displacement of libido on to an ego-ideal imposed from without
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#38
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.311
xxn > A spoken commentary on Freud's *Verneinung,* by Jean Hyppolite\* > **INDEX**
Theoretical move: This is an index passage from Seminar I, non-substantive in theoretical argument but mapping the key conceptual terrain of the seminar across entries such as speech, subject, symbolic, transference, and signifier.
and ego-ideal 102. 134. 186 ... distinguished from ideal ego 83
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#39
Seminar I · Freud's Papers on Technique · Jacques Lacan · p.10
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **OVERTURE TO THE SEMINAR**
Theoretical move: Lacan's opening move in Seminar I is to frame psychoanalysis as a recovery of meaning and reason within a structure of subjectivity, distinguishing Freud's dialectical method from both scientistic reductionism and systematised dogma, while positioning the analytic situation as a structural formation irreducible to a dyadic encounter.
the ego-ideal is an organism of defence established by the ego in order to extend the subject's satisfaction. But it is also the function that depresses most, in the psychiatric meaning of the term.
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#40
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.265
**x** > **THE VOICE OF YAHWEH**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces the Voice as a new form of objet petit a — separated, not reducible to phonemic opposition — by way of the shofar, which he deploys to distinguish the vocal dimension from the scopic, and to show that while the mirror-stage/eye level produces a closed image with no remainder, the voice opens the question of the big Other's memory (and thus repetition) in a dimension irreducible to space and the specular.
The diagram on the blackboard is designed to ground the function of the ideal ego and the Ego Ideal
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#41
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.319
**xx** > **FROM ANAL TO IDEAL**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the obsessional's impossibilized desire is structurally linked to the fantasy of an Almighty God (ubiquity/omnivoyance), which functions as the Ego Ideal covering over anxiety — such that true atheism, conceived as the dissolution of this fantasy of almightiness, is the analytic task specific to the obsessional structure.
At the level at which anxiety is covered over, the Ego Ideal takes the form of the Almighty. This is where the obsessional seeks and finds the complement of what is necessary for him when it comes to constituting himself in desire, namely, the fantasy of ubiquity
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#42
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.344
**xx** > **FROM THE** *a* **TO THE NAMES-OF-THE-FATHER**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that desire and jouissance are structurally disjoint—separated by a central gap—and that the object *a* as the irreducible remainder is the cause of desire, not a brute forced fact; it then uses the inhibition-symptom-anxiety grid at the scopic level to reframe mourning as the labour of restoring the link to the masked object *a*, distinguishing Lacan's account from Freud's while following the same trajectory.
In the third row, as turmoil, stands the ideal. It's the Ego Ideal, that is, that part of the Other that it is most convenient to introject.
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#43
Seminar X · Anxiety · Jacques Lacan · p.41
BookX Anxiety > **FROM THE COSMOS TO THE** *UNHEIMLICHE*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the hiatus between the mirror stage (specular/imaginary) and the signifier (symbolic) is not a temporal discontinuity in his teaching but a structural articulation, where the specular image is always-already dependent on ratification by the big Other; he further stages this through a three-phase cosmology (world → stage → world-laden-by-stage) to distinguish Lévi-Straussian analytic reason from psychoanalytic reason grounded in the primacy of the signifier over any homogeneous materialism.
concerning what at the time I called respectively the ideal ego and the Ego Ideal
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#44
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.161
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Theoretical move: This is a transitional Q&A fragment in which an interlocutor raises questions about the schema's resemblance to an eye, the role of objet petit a as a lens/cataract, the distinction between ego ideal and ideal ego, and the term "enactment" — Lacan's reply is cut off before any substantive theoretical development occurs.
I would also like you to say more about the ego ideal and the ideal ego specifically in relation to this schema.
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#45
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.145
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that transference is fundamentally resistant (Übertragungswiderstand) — it is the closing up of the unconscious rather than its opening — and that the big Other is always already present in every fleeting opening of the unconscious, making the analyst's interpretation a secondary reflection of the unconscious's own prior interpretive work. This grounds a sharp critique of ego-alliance conceptions of transference.
the conceptions of the relation of the subject to one or other of those agencies which, in the second stage of his Topography, Freud was able to define as the ego-ideal or the super-ego, are partial
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#46
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.170
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hallucination is only possible through the sexualization of objects (not mere need-satisfaction), and that the reality/pleasure principle opposition is grounded in desexualization; furthermore, transference reveals the weight of sexual reality running beneath the discourse of demand, which he begins to map topologically via the interior 8 figure.
it is said, for example, that the ego ideal rests on the investment of a desexualized libido. It seems to me very difficult to speak of a desexualized libido.
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#47
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.259
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: Lacan draws a structural distinction between projection and introjection by assigning them to different orders — the symbolic and the imaginary respectively — arguing that the intuitive, unreflective use of psychoanalytic vocabulary (identification, idealization, projection, introjection) is the primary source of theoretical confusion, and that language itself has a fundamental topology that pre-orients the speaking subject.
The ego ideal and the petit a
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#48
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.271
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire is best mapped by analogy with the slave (not the master), and pivots to ground the ego ideal in the "single stroke" (einziger Zug) as the first signifier in the field of the Other/desire, distinguishing it from narcissistic identification and showing how Freud's identification topology opens onto the Lacanian subject.
in order to map in it, and to detach from it, the einziger the single stroke, the foundation, the kernel of the ego ideal.
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#49
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.159
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan reverses the traditional topology of the unconscious — from a closed interior reservoir (double sack) to an open structure (hoop net) — to argue that the subject is constituted in the space of the Other, such that the locus from which the subject sees, speaks, and desires is not interior but external, with the unconscious closing through an obturating effect rather than being an innate enclosure.
it is in the Other that the subject is constituted as ideal, that he has to regulate the completion of what comes as ego, or ideal ego—which is not the ego ideal
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#50
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.76
TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Kierkegaard's essay on Repetition as a philosophical precursor to Freudian repetition, arguing that true repetition is not the return of need but demands the new and the same simultaneously — its radical diversity is concealed by adult variation — and that the child's insistence on the identical retelling reveals the primacy of the signifier over meaning.
the most false of demands, that of narcissistic satisfaction, the ego ideal whether it is or the ego that regards itself as the ideal
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#51
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.283
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (the ego ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject is seen) and the deeper, alienated level at which the objet petit a is encountered in transference — love as deception is contrasted with the paradoxical 'something more than you' that the analysand addresses to the analyst, culminating in the logic of the gift-turned-into-excrement as the swerve that marks analytic conclusion.
The point of the ego ideal is that from which the subject will see himself, as one says, as others see him—which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation that is satisfactory for him from the point of view of love.
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#52
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.287
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's schema of hypnosis as structurally equivalent to his own topology, identifying Freud's 'object' as the objet a and demonstrating that hypnosis (and collective fascination) operates by the superposition of the objet a with the ego ideal — with the gaze as the nodal point of this conjunction.
he designates what he calls the object—in which you must recognize what I call the a—the ego and the ego ideal. As for the curves, they are made to mark the conjunction of the a with the ego ideal.
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#53
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.272
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two forms of identification operative in transference — one anchored in the ego ideal (narcissistic, specular) and one introduced by separation and centred on the objet a as topological object — and argues that it is the signifier's entry into human life that makes sex capable of bringing death into presence, collapsing the life/death drive distinction into a single articulation at the level of the unconscious signification of sex.
the subject sees appearing, not his ego ideal, but his ideal ego, that point at which he desires to gratify himself in himself. This is the function, the mainspring, the effective instrument constituted by the ego ideal.
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#54
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.76
TUCHE AND AUTOMATON > TUCHE AND AUTOMATON
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes Freudian repetition from any natural return of need, aligning it with Kierkegaard's insight that repetition is oriented toward the new and toward the primacy of the signifier—not toward satisfaction or narcissistic closure—thereby grounding repetition in the insistence of the signifier rather than in biological or memorial recurrence.
the most false of demands, that of narcissistic satisfaction, the ego ideal whether it is or the ego that regards itself as the ideal
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#55
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.145
PRESENCE OF THE ANALYST > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: Lacan inverts the standard clinical view of transference: rather than being a vehicle for unconscious communication, transference is fundamentally resistant—it is the mechanism by which the unconscious closes up again—and the big Other is already present in every opening of the unconscious prior to any analytic intervention.
the relation of the subject to one or other of those agencies which, in the second stage of his Topography, Freud was able to define as the ego-ideal or the super-ego, are partial
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#56
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.159
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > THE TRANSFERENCE AND THE DRIVE
Theoretical move: By replacing the traditional imagery of the unconscious as a closed inner reservoir (the double sack) with a topological figure of the hoop net, Lacan reframes the unconscious as constituted through its opening/orifice and its relation to the Other, arguing that the subject constitutes itself—sees itself, speaks, and forms desire—from the locus of the Other rather than from an interior self-image.
it is in the Other that the subject is constituted as ideal, that he has to regulate the completion of what comes as ego, or ideal ego—which is not the ego ideal
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#57
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.161
ANALYSIS AND TRUTH OR THE CLOSURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS > QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Theoretical move: This passage is a brief transitional exchange (question posed, answer cut off mid-sentence) in a seminar Q&A, raising but not developing questions about the optical schema, objet petit a, ego ideal, ideal ego, and "enactment"; it contains no substantive theoretical argument.
I would also like you to say more about the ego ideal and the ideal ego specifically in relation to this schema.
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#58
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.170
SEXUALITY IN THE DEFILES OF THE SIGNIFIER > SEXUALITY
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that hallucination is possible only through the sexualization of objects, not through a simple re-presentation of need; reality is defined as desexualized in Freud's two principles, and transference restores the weight of sexual reality beneath the discourse of demand. This is mapped topologically via the "interior 8" figure placing libido at the junction of its lobes.
it is said, for example, that the ego ideal rests on the investment of a desexualized libido. It seems to me very difficult to speak of a desexualized libido.
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#59
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.259
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes identification, idealization, projection, and introjection by anchoring them topologically in different orders (symbolic vs. imaginary), arguing that intuitive "common" usage of these terms is the root of theoretical misapprehension, and that language orients the speaking subject in a fundamental topology that exceeds everyday understanding.
The ego ideal and the petit a
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#60
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.271
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire should be mapped in relation to the slave (not the master) in the Hegelian dialectic, and then pivots to ground the ego ideal in the "single stroke" (einziger Zug) as a signifier in the field of the Other—distinguishing it from narcissistic identification and situating it as the kernel of the ego ideal within the field of desire.
the single stroke, the foundation, the kernel of the ego ideal... It is the field of the Other that determines the function of the single stroke, in so far as it is from it that a major stage of identification is established in the topography then developed by Freud—namely, idealization, the ego ideal.
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#61
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.272
FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE > FROM INTERPRETATION TO THE TRANSFERENCE
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two axes of identification—the ego ideal (narcissistic, sustaining the transference) and the objet a (topological, linked to the drive and separation)—and argues that the life/death drive distinction is valid only insofar as all sexual drives are articulated at the level of unconscious signification, where sex necessarily makes present death as a signifier.
the essential mainspring of the effects of the ego ideal. I have described elsewhere the sight in the mirror of the ego ideal, of that being that he first saw appearing in the form of the parent holding him up before the mirror.
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#62
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.283
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: The passage pivots on the distinction between specular identification (grounded in the Ego Ideal as the point in the Other from which the subject sees itself) and the objet petit a as the paradoxical object that disrupts the deceptive mirroring of love in the transference, introducing mutilation and the gift-of-shit as the truth of analytic alienation.
The point of the ego ideal is that from which the subject will see himself, as one says, as others see him—which will enable him to support himself in a dual situation that is satisfactory for him from the point of view of love.
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#63
Seminar XI · The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.287
IN YOU MORE THAN YOU > TO CONCLUDE
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Freud's schema of hypnosis as structurally identical to his own topology of identification, demonstrating that what Freud calls "the object" in hypnosis is precisely the objet petit a in its coincidence with the ego ideal, and that this convergence is anchored in the gaze.
he designates what he calls the object—in which you must recognize what I call the a—the ego and the ego ideal. As for the curves, they are made to mark the conjunction of the a with the ego ideal.
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#64
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.98
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the optical model of the inverted bouquet to distinguish the non-specularisable status of objet petit a from the body-image and ideal ego, arguing that the impasses of identification at the end of analysis can only be resolved by orienting the work around the o-object rather than settling for identification to the analyst as a rectification of the ego ideal.
The ego ideal, locus of the function of the unary trait, point of departure of the attachment of the subject in the field of the Other, around which no doubt there is played out the fate of the identifications of the ego in their imaginary root.
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#65
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.133
**Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan rereads Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysteric's desire-to-desire) as demanding a tripartite structural framework—privation, frustration, castration—in which the status of the subject (oscillating between zero and one) must be posited prior to any account of demand, transference, or castration, thereby exposing the conceptual limitations of post-Freudian analytic practice.
it is a matter of the most mythical primordial reference… since it is the one in which there is structured the function of the ego ideal, the primordial reference is made in terms of the evocation of the body.
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#66
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.26
**Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the transmission of psychoanalytic experience cannot be grounded in ego-ideal identification or immanent developmental schemas (à la Piaget), but must be seized at the level of structure—specifically the structure of language as a topology that is irreducible to any instrumental or biunivocal logic, implicating the subject as such.
psychoanalysts themselves, even those most entrenched in one or other traditional process... would laugh if they were told that what it is a matter of transmitting is a function of the ego-ideal type. The identification involved can only be defined, grasped elsewhere.
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#67
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.62
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the topology of the Klein bottle and its non-orientability to ground a structural account of the subject and language — specifically Identification — that supersedes the crude imaginary of Freud's second topology (ego-ideal, superego), while simultaneously critiquing Russell's theory of types/metalanguage as an evasion of the real problems of language and the subject.
the only valid support and one which does not find itself at the mercy of the crudest images which are the ones which were given in Freud's second topology - I am talking especially about the images of the ego-ideal, even of the superego
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#68
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.111
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis and logic share profound structural relationships, positioning psychoanalytic practice as articulating a "logic of lack" centred on the subject, the objet petit a, identification, and the unary trait — and announces Frege's arithmetic as the key external reference for establishing the logical status of the subject this year.
the functions of the ego-ideal and of the ideal ego, for example, a pivotal, determining function that the **o**-object, in its two opposed terms of identification
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#69
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.111
**Seminar 9: Wednesday 24 February 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that psychoanalysis and logic share an intimate, essential relationship—psychoanalysis is itself a logic—and frames his ongoing project as establishing a "logic of lack" centred on the subject, the o-object, and the one/unary trait, with Frege's arithmetic as the privileged reference point for grounding the subjective constitution of the One.
the functions of the ego-ideal and of the ideal ego, for example, a pivotal, determining function that the **o**-object, in its two opposed terms of identification
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#70
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.98
**Seminar 8: Wednesday 3 February 1965**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the end of analysis cannot be reduced to identification with the analyst (rectification of the ego ideal) but must reckon with the non-specularizable objet petit a, which centres specularization without itself being visible in the mirror — thereby positing two irreducible poles (ego ideal and objet a) that govern identificatory processes and determine the impasses of analytic experience.
The ego ideal, locus of the function of the unary trait, point of departure of the attachment of the subject in the field of the Other, around which no doubt there is played out the fate of the identifications of the ego in their imaginary root.
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#71
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.26
**Seminar 3 : Wednesday 16 December 1964**
Theoretical move: Lacan dismantles psychological and Piagetian models of intelligence by showing that language is not the instrument of intelligence but its constitutive difficulty, and pivots to the claim that the subject is only a subject by being implicated in structure—thereby grounding analytic transmission not in ego-ideal identification but in the topology of the signifier.
psychoanalysts themselves, even those most entrenched in one or other traditional process... would laugh if they were told that what it is a matter of transmitting is a function of the ego-ideal type.
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#72
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.62
**Seminar 5: Wednesday 13 January 1965** > (10) [Various noises] You see that we are in a police state!
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that topological analysis of the Klein bottle/false torus grounds a theory of the 'structural unconscious' that surpasses Freud's second topology and its crudely imagistic concepts (ego-ideal, superego), while simultaneously demonstrating that language is non-orientable and cannot be mastered by any metalanguage—a critique directed at Russell's theory of types and its attempt to resolve the liar paradox through hierarchical meta-languages.
the only valid support... which does not find itself at the mercy of the crudest images which are the ones which were given in Freud's second topology - I am talking especially about the images of the ego-ideal, even of the superego
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#73
Seminar XII · Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.133
**Seminar 10: Wednesday 3 March 1965**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Freud's three forms of identification (incorporation, being/having alternation, hysterical desire-to-desire) as a scaffold to argue that analytic experience cannot be exhausted by demand and transference alone, and that a tripartite structure of privation, frustration, and castration—grounded in a radical materialism of the body as libido—is required to make castration thinkable and to properly situate the subject in relation to the Other.
at the moment when it is a matter of the most mythical primordial reference, and one could say, and one would not be wrong to say, of the most idealising one, since it is the one in which there is structured the function of the ego ideal, the primordial reference is made in terms of the evocation of the body.
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#74
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.236
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's Las Meninas as a structural diagram that maps the mirror stage's optical model—with its interplay of ideal ego, ego ideal, the gaze, and the Objet petit a—onto the monarchical scene, showing that the painting is not a representation but a "trap for the look" that captures the subject within fantasy, thereby demonstrating that the o-object is not specular and cannot be recovered in the mirror's field.
the first as the ego that one believes one is and the other as the one that one wants to be
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#75
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.130
**Seminar 10: Wednesday 9 February 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Pascal's Wager as a vehicle to articulate the structure of the subject's division between knowledge and truth, arguing that the Wager's logic—wagering a finite life for an infinite series—mirrors the fantasy structure in which the subject is constituted as split by the objet petit a, while also repositioning feminine masochism and narcissism as the deceptive face of truth itself.
by putting her in the position of the I of the ego ideal in the field of the other as a point of reference, by organising this status of love, one only exalts this narcissism
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#76
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.106
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage stages a methodological debate about the analyst's position as predicating subject: it distinguishes narcissistic phantasy (unconscious) from narcissistic myth (conscious/preconscious), argues that the analyst's interpretive word operates from a place irreducible to the transference position attributed to him, and pivots on whether the analyst's word constitutes a Verneinung (negation/denial) or Bejahung (affirmation) — ultimately framing interpretation as a cut that denies narcissistic omnipotence and is constitutive of desire.
the constitution of the ego ideal ego qua inheritor of primary narcissism
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#77
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.29
[Foot note
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object relations theory is grounded in its suppression of the Symbolic by reducing psychic life to a Real-Imaginary opposition, while the ideal ego / ego ideal distinction is repositioned as a platform for theorising the subject's relation to the Other.
The opposition between the ideal ego and the ego ideal (Nunberg-Lagache) serves as a platform for the theoretical developments of Lacan which are inserted in the perspective of the relationship to the Other.
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#78
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.28
I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER
Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical development of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs, arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between Subject and Other (via the Mirror Stage) and between Subject and Ego Ideal (via Schema R), while the Symbolic field alone provides the third term—the Name of the Father—that structures the whole process, inaccessible by any direct route.
o' is inscribed on the line which goes from the subject to the ego ideal through the specular forms of the ego.
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#79
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.224
**Seminar 18: Wednesday 18 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan develops a projective-geometry account of the subject's inscription in the visual field, arguing that perspective's two "subject poles" (the vanishing point and the point at infinity) articulate the split subject's double presence/absence within the picture-plane, and that the painting (exemplified by Las Meninas) functions as a "trap for the look" precisely because the picture-within-the-picture saturates reality while the objet petit a—the falling, ungraspable element—is what the painter is really aiming to capture.
Just as we have several ego ideals or egos ideals - you can say both - it is for certain ends
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#80
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.96
Dr Lacan
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Dante's poetic structure—particularly the Narcissus/mirror motif and the figure of Beatrice in courtly love—to argue that the objet petit a (o-object) is non-specular: it appears as an image of nothing, and this structure of sublimation (where jouissance is withdrawn) establishes a privileged equilibrium between truth and knowledge that poetic construction can illuminate more directly than psychoanalytic theory alone.
It is that of courtly love in so far as we can locate in it in an outstanding fashion the terms (I) the ego ideal, (o) the o-object, i(o) the image of o, foundation of the ego, and $.
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#81
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.236
**Seminar 19: Wednesday 25 May 1966**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Velázquez's *Las Meninas* as a visual matheme for the structural relationship between the gaze, the mirror, the Objet petit a, the Ideal Ego, and the field of the big Other: the painting is not a representation but a "trap for the look," and the royal couple's invisible gaze from the mirror-position enacts the function of the big Other in the narcissistic/specular relationship, while the o-object (objet petit a) remains irreducibly non-specular and therefore haunts the schema from outside it.
the first as the ego that one believes one is and the other as the one that one wants to be.
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#82
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.29
[Foot note
Theoretical move: Lacan's critique of object relations theory is grounded in its failure to account for symbolic mediation, reducing psychic life to a Real-Imaginary dyad; meanwhile, the Nunberg-Lagache distinction between ideal ego and ego ideal serves as a platform for Lacan's theorisation of the Other.
The opposition between the ideal ego and the ego ideal (Nunberg-Lagache) serves as a platform for the theoretical developments of Lacan which are inserted in the perspective of the relationship to the Other.
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#83
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106
Another question.
Theoretical move: The passage stages a theoretical dispute between Stein/Conté/Melman and Lacan over the status of narcissism, the analyst's word, and the place of predication, arguing that the analyst's interpretive position is structurally distinct from the narcissistic/transference position (Bejahung) and operates instead as a cut—a denial of narcissistic omnipotence correlative to repression and desire.
the constitution of the ego ideal ego qua inheritor of primary narcissism
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#84
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.28
I - JACQUES LACAN"S OBJECT: A RAPID REMINDER
Theoretical move: The passage traces the theoretical evolution of the o-object (objet petit a) through Lacan's earliest graphs—from the Mirror Stage to the L Schema and Schema R—arguing that (o) functions as the indispensable mediation between the subject and the Other, and between the subject and the ego ideal, while the symbolic field alone provides the third term (Name of the Father) that structures the whole process.
o' is inscribed on the line which goes from the subject to the ego ideal through the specular forms of the ego.
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#85
Seminar XIII · The Object of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.96
Dr Lacan
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the objet petit a is non-specular — it appears as an image of nothing — and that courtly love (as in Dante's poetic construction) uniquely structures the relationship between the subject, the ego ideal, the o-object, and jouissance, thereby grounding psychoanalytic theory of sublimation in a topological framework.
we can locate in it in an outstanding fashion the terms (I) the ego ideal, (o) the o-object, i(o) the image of o, foundation of the ego, and $.
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#86
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.217
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a biographical anecdote but a structural-logical condition that "norms" the subject with respect to the sexual act, and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the mediation of a value-function tied to castration — a move that repudiates ego-psychology's proliferation of subjective entities and the concept of primary narcissism.
distinguishing the ideal ego from the ego ideal
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#87
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.194
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan advances the thesis that there is no sexual relation by showing that the field between the small o (objet petit a) and the big Other is structured as a hole — not a unifying One — and that identification (ego ideal/ideal ego) operates in this gap; the Oedipus myth is then mobilised to demonstrate that jouissance itself is constitutively bound to rottenness and the hole, not to any unitive fullness.
the formula for what is called, in psychoanalysis and in the Freudian text, one of the forms of identification, identification to the ego ideal, whose stroke I put precisely in the Other
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#88
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.217
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 20: Wednesday 24 May 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that castration is not a narrative fantasy but a structural condition—being "normed" with respect to the sexual act—and that the passage from masturbatory jouissance to the sexual act requires the introduction of jouissance to a value-function through negation/castration, while simultaneously repudiating ego-psychological entity-multiplication and the notion of primary narcissism as an analytic foundation.
the bringing into play of a whole population of subjective entities … the ego, the ego ideal, the super ego, the id … distinguishing the ideal ego from the ego ideal.
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#89
Seminar XIV · The Logic of Phantasy · Jacques Lacan · p.194
the smallest whole number which is not written on this board > **Seminar 17: Wednesday 19 April 1967**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the "sexual relation" does not exist as a consistent dyadic unity — it is structurally a hole or gap between the small o and the big Other — and uses the cauldron metaphor (from Freud's Witz) to indict analytic theory for triply refusing to acknowledge this void; the Oedipus myth is recruited to demonstrate that accessing full jouissance covers over a foundational rottenness that truth cannot tolerate.
the formula for what is called, in psychoanalysis and in the Freudian text, one of the forms of identification, identification to the ego ideal, whose stroke I put precisely in the Other, as indicating at the level of the Other this mirror reference
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#90
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act (alt. translation) · Jacques Lacan · p.64
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of an analysis (which belongs to the analysand as task) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know and its replacement by the objet petit a as cause of the subject's division constitutes the act that makes one a psychoanalyst — thereby grounding the logic of the phantasy in the structure of alienation, desire, castration, and the lost object.
the one that relates in their dependence the ideal ego and the ego ideal.
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#91
Seminar XV · The Psychoanalytic Act · Jacques Lacan · p.64
**THE SEMINAR OF JACQUES LACAN** > **Seminar 4: Wednesday 6 December 1967** > **Seminar 5: Wednesday 10 January 1968.**
Theoretical move: The psychoanalytic act is located not at the beginning of analysis (on the side of the analysand) but at its end, where the fall of the Subject Supposed to Know gives way to the Objet petit a as cause of the subject's division — and it is this terminal act that grounds the analyst's capacity to begin each new analysis.
the one that relates in their dependence the ideal ego and the ego ideal.
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#92
Seminar XVI · From an Other to the other · Jacques Lacan · p.156
Seminar 10: Wednesday 5 February 1969
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes psychoanalytic discourse from philosophical discourse by insisting that the subject is primordially constituted as an effect of language (as 'o', the bet/zero), and uses a critical reading of Bergler's account of the superego to argue that Durcharbeitung (working-through) and the superego must be rethought together—not as a theatrical agency hitting the ego but as structurally related to identification, the ego ideal, and the limit-encounter in treatment.
people have clearly mapped out, he says, that this has a relation with the ego ideal. But it must be admitted that absolutely nothing is known about it; no one has yet put things together.
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#93
Seminar XXIV · L'insu que sait de l'une-bévue s'aile à mourre · Jacques Lacan · p.60
So then what is this lack? > **Seminar 6: Wednesday 8 February 1977**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces topological figures (flattening of the Borromean knot) to generate the Real/Imaginary distinction, then cedes the floor to Alain Didier Weill, who constructs a multi-stage circuit using the Graph of Desire and the Purloined Letter schema to theorise the *Passe* as a process by which successive inversions of knowledge between subject (Bozef) and Other (the King) propel the subject through positions of innocence, duplicity, and finally radical exposure before the Other.
The ideal, the Ego Ideal, in short would mean finishing with the Symbolic, in other words saying nothing.
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#94
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.221
**XVI**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the psychotic subject's testimony about their relationship to language must be taken literally rather than filtered through academic clinical categories, because the psychotic's "turning" in relation to language reveals a dimension constitutive of all human subjectivity — namely, the half-external position every subject occupies with respect to the signifier. The Schreberian case is thus elevated from pathological curiosity to methodological key for understanding the signifier/signified relation and the ego's grounding in the Other.
the big Other, the paternal imago, insofar as it founds the double perspective within the subject of the ego and the ego ideal - leaving the superego to one side on this occasion.
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#95
Seminar III · The Psychoses · Jacques Lacan · p.186
**XII** > **XIII** > **The hysteric's question (II):** *What is a woman?*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the dissymmetry of the Oedipus complex between the sexes is not anatomical but fundamentally symbolic: the absence of a signifier for the female sex forces the girl to take a detour through identification with the male (phallic) image, making the phallus as signifier — not as organ — the pivot of sexuation for both sexes; this symbolic lack is what structures neurosis and, specifically, the hysteric's question "What is a woman?"
the ego is here as an illusion, what Freud called the ego ideal. Its function, which is not that of objectivity but that of illusion, is fundamentally narcissistic
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#96
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.190
THE FETISH OBJECT > THE PHALLUS AND THE UNFULFILLED MOTHER
Theoretical move: The passage argues that perversion in general, and fetishism in particular, is structurally grounded in the child's pre-Oedipal attempt to trick the unfulfillable desire of the mother by turning himself into a deceptive object—thereby constituting the intersubjective relation and the ego's stability—while also marking the danger of regression to an oral-devouring figure (Medusa) that underlies both phobia and perversion.
you will better see what I indicated last time, namely the function of the Ego-ideal that takes shape against this backdrop.
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#97
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.172
THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes two ways the penis enters the imaginary economy — as compensatory oral object and as the phallus marking the mother's lack — and argues that access to the missing phallus as substitutable object requires passing through two successive phases: symbolic primal identification (superego formation) and narcissistic specular identification (mirror stage), the latter being the precondition for the subject's discovery of lack and its offer to substitute itself for the missing phallus.
It's a matter of knowing, as Freud puts it very well at the end of his article, what is meant by this object coming to position itself either in the place of the ego or in the place of the Ego-ideal.
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#98
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.199
ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Oedipus complex cannot be resolved on the imaginary plane alone (where it produces only anxiety and symptom), but requires the introduction of a real element into the symbolic order — the paternal figure who "truly has" the phallus — such that castration becomes the necessary condition for the male subject's accession to the virile position and the inscription of the Law; yet the symbolic father as such can never be fully incarnated by any real individual.
the introduction of the maternal image in the form of the Ego-ideal, we remain in the imaginary dialectic, in the specular dialectic of the subject's relation to the little other.
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#99
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.206
ON THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Theoretical move: The symbolic father is constitutively unthinkable and absent—only ever retroactively posited through myth (Totem and Taboo) as the dead father—while it is the real father who momentarily embodies the paternal function; the Oedipus complex concludes by instituting the Law as repressed in the unconscious, crystallising as the superego, and this structure ensures that love is always marked by castration and a fundamental duplicity rather than any harmonious object-relation.
the perspective that I've laid out for you allows both the imaginary game of the Ego-ideal and the sanctioning intervention of castration in virtue of which these imaginary elements take on stability and a fixed constellation in the symbolic to be located in their reciprocal relationships
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#100
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.407
FAREWELL > FROM HANS-THE-FETISH TO LEONARDO-IN-THE-MIRROR
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that little Hans's case resolves not through a properly symbolised castration complex and superego formation, but through identification with the maternal phallus as Ego Ideal — a structurally atypical Oedipal outcome that positions Hans as a fetish-like object, leaving him on the margins of full phallic symbolisation and masculinity.
Rather, it's a function that belongs to the order of the Ego Ideal… it is in so far as little Hans has a certain idea of his ideal, insomuch as he is his mother's ideal, namely a substitute for the phallus, that he takes his place in existence.
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#101
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.167
THE FETISH OBJECT > IDENTIFICATION WITH THE PHALLUS
Theoretical move: Lacan reframes the Freudian impasse between identification and object-choice by grounding both in the symbolic structure of the love relation and the oral drive, arguing against the Kleinian symmetry of introjection/projection and proposing instead that the drive always targets the real object as a part-object of the symbolic object—a dialectic of frustration and need that structures the constitution of the object from the outset.
another question captures the essence of this situation, namely whether the object is set in the place of the Ich or of the Ichideal.
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#102
Seminar IV · The Object Relation · Jacques Lacan · p.399
XVIII CIRCUITS > 'ME DONNERA SANS FEMME UNE PROGÉNITURE'
Theoretical move: By tracing Little Hans's movement through signifying permutations toward an imaginary resolution, Lacan argues that Hans's phobia dissolves not through genuine traversal of the castration complex but through a narcissistic-imaginary fixation, leaving the subject alienated from himself—he has not "forgotten" but "forgotten himself."
In this imaginary game where he makes use of his little sister literally as a sort of Ego Ideal, she becomes the mistress of the signifier, the mistress of the horse
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#103
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.288
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the formation of the Ego Ideal has a fundamentally metaphorical structure: the father-object, desired and refused, is substituted for the subject and becomes a metaphor of the subject, thereby transforming desire and reorganising the subject's entire signifying history — a process categorically distinct from the prohibition of jouissance and the foreclosure-like rejection (*Verwerfung*) that produces melancholic states.
This leads us to attempt to formulate the relationship between the ego-ideal and a particular vicissitude of desire in the following manner.
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#104
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.277
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the phallus functions as a privileged "crossroads-signifier" through which desire must pass to gain recognition, and uses this to pivot into a differentiated account of ego-ideal versus ideal ego, showing that the ego-ideal structures intrasubjectivity as an intersubjective (signifier-governed) relation — a framework then deployed to analyze the masculinity complex and female homosexuality via Horney and Deutsch.
the effect of the repression that results from the exit from the Oedipus complex is to constitute an identification in the subject... equipped with what? The answer is - with an ego-ideal.
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#105
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.352
**THE DREAM BY THE BUTCHER'S BEAUTIFUL WIFE** > Then Freud makes this parenthesis: > A further parenthetical remark by Freud:
Theoretical move: By working through the Dora case, Lacan demonstrates how hysteria is structurally defined by the subject's inability to advance beyond demand to desire: the hysteric's identification with the little other (Herr K.) functions as a substitute for the beyond-of-demand constituted by the paternal metaphor, and the collapse of this identification reveals the fundamental interchangeability—and fragility—of the two lines connecting desire and demand in the Graph of Desire.
the identification called the ego-ideal takes place... normally it's always produced after the line of the Other is crossed twice, at I(A).
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#106
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.318
**SYMPTOMS AND THEIR MASKS**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that demand, constituted through the symbolic parenthesis of presence, generates two distinct formations along separate signifying lines: the ego-ideal (produced via the transformation of rejected demand through the mask) and the superego (produced along the line of signifying prohibition from the Other); the mask itself is constructed through dissatisfaction, and a privileged signifier—the phallus—will be required to unify the subject across the plurality of masks.
What is known as the ego-ideal is produced at the conclusion of this transformation of demand... the ego-ideal is produced along the [upper] line of the transformation of desire, insofar as it's always linked to some kind of mask.
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#107
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.165
**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**
Theoretical move: The passage advances the thesis that the father's function in the Oedipus complex is not grounded in any real, imaginary, or simply symbolic agency but is precisely a metaphor — a signifier substituted for the maternal signifier — and that this paternal metaphor is the unique mainspring through which the phallus emerges as the signified of desire, resolving the impasses of the Oedipus complex for both sexes.
the privation that is correlated with identification with the ideal... It's to the extent that the father becomes her ego-ideal that the girl's recognition that she doesn't have the phallus occurs.
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#108
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.157
**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**
Theoretical move: Lacan maps the historical evolution of debates around the Oedipus complex onto three structural poles—superego, reality, and ego-ideal—arguing that the function of the father and the Oedipus complex are co-extensive, and uses Melanie Klein's own findings to demonstrate that the paternal third term (the phallus) is irreducible even in supposedly pre-Oedipal imaginary relations, thus preparing the ground for his formal account of the paternal metaphor.
Virility and feminization are the two terms that translate what is essentially the function of the Oedipus complex. Here we find ourselves at the level at which the Oedipus complex is directly tied to the function of the ego-ideal.
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#109
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.253
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**
Theoretical move: By reading Genet's *The Balcony* as a clinical illustration, Lacan argues that the Ego Ideal is not the product of sublimation but of an eroticization of the symbolic function, and that perversion consists in enjoying the image of a signifying function; the drama's resolution—where the Chief of Police finally achieves symbolic recognition only through castration—demonstrates that accession to the order of the phallic symbol is inseparable from castration.
What happens at the level of different forms of the ego-ideal is not, as is thought, the result of sublimation, in the sense in which this means the progressive neutralization of deeply rooted internal functions. On the contrary, it's a formation that is always more or less accompanied by an eroticization of the symbolic relationship.
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#110
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.150
**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > 157 And we also have this schema:
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject (S) is a structurally "dummy" fourth term outside the Oedipal triangle, dependent on the signifiers at the locus of the Other, and that the imaginary triangle—anchored by the ego/specular image, the mother-father-child triad, and the phallus as third point—maps how the paternal metaphor transforms the first (symbolic) triad into a second (imaginary) one; the phallus is thus the central object with which the subject imaginarily identifies, irreducible to a mere part-object.
the subject will find himself dependent upon the three poles called ego-ideal, superego and reality.
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#111
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.523
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index chunk from Seminar V, listing page references for key Lacanian and psychoanalytic concepts without advancing a theoretical argument.
ego-ideal and 150, 155, 157, 178, 210, 241, 244, 247, 251, 271
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#112
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.519
**EXPLANATION OF THESCHEMAS** > **Chapter xxvm You Are the One You Hate**
Theoretical move: This passage is a non-substantive index section listing key terms, page references, and cross-references for Seminar V concepts; it contains no independent theoretical argument.
ego-ideal and 271-2
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#113
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.249
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the subject's constitution depends on whether he is inscribed as a "desired child" within the symbolic triad (mother's desire, paternal signifier, subject), and uses the case of André Gide to demonstrate how the failure of this inscription produces perversion—where the ego-ideal is formed through an unconscious pathway rather than a conscious one—before pivoting to a theory of comedy as the representation of the subject's relationship to his own signifieds, culminating in the appearance of the phallus on the comic scene.
what has been subtracted at the level of what becomes his ego-ideal, namely the desire of which he is the object and which he is unable to bear, he adopts for himself, he falls in love forever and for all eternity with this same caressed little boy he had no wish to be.
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#114
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.163
**FORECLOSURE OF THE NAME-OF -THE-FATHER** > **THE PATERNAL METAPHOR**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the standard "environmentalist" approach to paternal deficiency is structurally inadequate because it conflates the father's empirical presence/absence with his normativizing function in the complex; the proper analysis requires distinguishing the father's real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of intervention, particularly through the Oedipus complex's dual structure (direct and inverted) where castration operates first on the imaginary level before reaching the symbolic.
Already, earlier, we were getting to this - that the question has not been raised with respect to the ego-ideal.
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#115
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.217
FROM IMAGE TO **SIGNIFIER - IN PLEASURE AND IN REALITY**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the illusory object cannot be adequately theorized through the imaginary alone but only through its function as a signifying element within a signifying chain — the mirror stage installs a double movement (imaginary identification with the body-image vs. symbolic identification along the ego-ideal axis) whose structural schema is necessary to distinguish identification from idealization, illusion from image, and to account for perversion, fetishism, and psychosis without reducing them to instinctual or genetic regression.
What constitutes the limit of the series is this formation in E that we call the ego-ideal. This is what the subject identifies with when he goes in the direction of the symbolic.
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#116
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.246
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PHALLUS > **DESIRE AND JOUISSANCE**
Theoretical move: Lacan distinguishes desire from jouissance by showing that desire is fundamentally structured by signifiers (not reducible to imaginary relations or need), and uses Joan Riviere's case of 'womanliness as masquerade' to demonstrate that the subject's relation to the phallus — whether as theft, mask, or sign of being — reveals the constitutive splitting of the subject between existence and signifying representation, grounding the unconscious.
Desired child = ego-ideal
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#117
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.292
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the "psychologizing" regression in post-Freudian theory (culminating in Klein's "early Oedipus complex") that reduces castration to a partial, aggressive drive, and counter-proposes that castration must be understood in its irreducibly signifying character: as the structural relation between desire and the mark, prior to any psychological or genetic narrative.
I gave you an initial glimpse into the identification that produces the ego-ideal, insofar as the latter is the exit point, pivotal point and endpoint of the crisis of the Oedipus complex.
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#118
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.299
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **THE FORMULAS OF DESIRE**
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces three formulas of desire (articulating desire's relations to narcissistic identification, demand/the Other, and the phallus as signifier) while arguing that Freud's *Totem and Taboo* discloses the constitutive link between desire and the signifier — specifically that the murder of the father marks the emergence of signifiers from death, and that human desire is irreducible to adaptation because the subject enjoys desiring itself.
It's in relation to these insignias of the Other that the identification occurs whose product and outcome is the constitution of the big I, which is the ego-ideal, in the subject.
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#119
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.185
**THE THREE MOMENTS OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX (I)**
Theoretical move: Lacan schemas the Oedipus complex as three dialectical moments governed by the paternal metaphor: (1) the child identifies with the phallic object of the mother's desire, (2) the father intervenes imaginarily as depriver/castrator of the mother, and (3) the father reveals himself as *having* (not *being*) the phallus, enabling the boy's identification as ego-ideal and the decline of the complex—the entire movement being structurally a metaphor in which one signifier (the Name-of-the-Father) is pinned to another to produce a new signification.
This identification is called 'the ego-ideal'. It's inscribed on the symbolic triangle at the pole where the child is located
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#120
Seminar V · Formations of the Unconscious · Jacques Lacan · p.284
**THE GIRL AND THE PHALLUS** > **INSIGNIAS OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan formalizes a minimal three-term schema for secondary identification: a libidinal object is transformed into a signifier that anchors the ego-ideal, while desire undergoes substitution via a third term (the rival/father), with the phallus functioning as the universal "lowest common denominator" — the metonymic pivot through which desire must pass in any signifying economy, regardless of sex.
This object becomes a signifier in the subject, occupying the place that will henceforth be called the ego-ideal.
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#121
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.26
CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH
Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the Graph of Desire by differentiating desire from need and will through psychoanalytic categories (drive, fantasy), then grounds subjectivity in the signifying chain, demonstrating that the graph's two levels articulate the subject's progressive capture in language and the emergence of the Other as such.
what I have called the first or primal identification, I, occurs at the end of the intentional chain. This is the first realization of an ideal about which one cannot even say at this point in the schema that it involves an ego-ideal
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#122
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.236
THE LAUGHTER OF THE IMMORTAL GODS
Theoretical move: Through close reading of Sharpe's case, Lacan demonstrates that the patient's symptomatic objects (straps, car) are instances of objet petit a, while the real analytic impasse lies in the patient's structural impossibility of accepting the castrated Other—a deadlock Lacan locates in the analyst's own resistance to naming what the phallus as signifier does in the Other.
what is capital I, the ego-ideal? We can permit ourselves not to conclude just yet.
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#123
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.116
INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques Jones's concept of aphanisis as a failed equalization of male and female desire, then rehabilitates it as a structural question about the subject's existence beyond desire, showing that when the subject encounters objet petit a, the subject vanishes ($), and that displacement/metonymy functions as the mechanism by which desire is preserved precisely through the thwarting of satisfaction.
the path that is usually followed, the one that leads to the introjection of the father in the form of the ego-ideal.
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#124
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.165
THE FANTASY ABOUT THE BARKING DOG
Theoretical move: Lacan uses Ella Sharpe's clinical case to argue that interpreting a patient's symptoms (cough, dream, enuresis) at the level of imaginary rivalry and omnipotence misses the properly symbolic dimension: what is at stake is the omnipotence of discourse via the Other, not the subject's own omnipotence — and the cough must be read as a signifier (message) addressed to the Other, not a spontaneous affective release.
Masturbating dog = ego-ideal
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#125
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.122
INTRODUCING THE OBJECT OF DESIRE
Theoretical move: The passage traces the movement from the animal's excremental territoriality through language's complication of the subject/object relation (use→exchange value), to the dialectic of desire: identification with the father fails to resolve desire's impasse, so the most general "solution" offered to the barred subject is narcissism, which structures fantasy by transferring the subject's anxiety onto object a, yielding the formula of the ego-ideal as i(a)/$ ◇ a/I.
Why is he structured as an ego and as an ego-ideal? We can only glimpse this in its absolutely rigorous structural necessity as the return or echo of the affect that the subject delegated to the object, a.
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#126
Seminar VI · Desire and Its Interpretation · Jacques Lacan · p.31
CONSTRUCTING THE GRAPH
Theoretical move: Lacan constructs the second and third stages of the Graph of Desire by showing how the encounter with the Other's desire (Che vuoi?) introduces the principles of substitution (metaphor) and similarity (metonymy), situating desire in the gap between demand and being, and how fantasy ($ ◇ a) emerges as the subject's imaginary defense against Hilflosigkeit — the structural response to the opacity of the Other's desire.
a real image that is itself reflected, and that cannot be seen as reflected except from a certain position - namely, a symbolic position which is that of the ego-ideal.
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#127
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.106
**VII**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that sublimation must be understood as the imaginary colonization of the field of das Ding, where fantasy elements ($ ◇ a) overlay the subject at the very point of das Ding; the gap between the narcissistically structured object and das Ding is precisely where the problem of sublimation is situated, and this gap is historically refracted through the shift from ancient emphasis on the drive to modern emphasis on the object.
Ichlibido and Objektlibido are introduced by Freud in relation to the difference between Ich-ideal and Ideal-ich, between the mirage of the ego and the formation of an ideal.
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#128
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.242
**XIV** > **XVIII**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the world of goods structured around the ego ideal and ideal ego necessarily produces a catastrophic demand that exceeds it, and that only practices like the potlatch—the ritual destruction of goods—bear witness to the possibility of disciplining desire outside the dialectic of competition and conflict; this insight is linked to the contemporary threat of collective annihilation as a structural, not merely accidental, consequence of the discourse of science.
We will now define the ego ideal of the subject as representing the power to do good, which then opens up within itself the beyond that concerns us today.
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#129
Seminar VII · The Ethics of Psychoanalysis · Jacques Lacan · p.214
**XIV** > **XVI**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the Freudian discovery of desire—irreducible to need or reason—exposes the structural insufficiency of both Hegelian and Marxist accounts of human self-realization, and that jouissance, as the satisfaction of a drive (not a need), constitutes the inaccessible yet central problem of the ethics of psychoanalysis.
I would certainly have rectified certain points made concerning the relations of the hysteric to the ego ideal and the ideal ego, notably in the element of uncertainty in the linking of these two functions.
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#130
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.441
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XXVI - "A Dream of a Shadow Is Man"**
Theoretical move: This passage consists entirely of translator's endnotes for Seminar VIII, Chapter XXVI, providing philological clarifications, textual variants, bibliographic references, and explanations of Lacan's optical schema and identification formulas. It is non-substantive as theoretical argumentation, serving only as editorial apparatus.
non-narcissistic (or symbolic) identification, involving the ego-ideal, is not enveloping or all-encompassing, relying as it does on a single trait.
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#131
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.254
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > **THE SYMBOL Φ**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the phallus (Φ) functions as a privileged signifier that uniquely arrests the infinite deferral of the signifying chain, and that the subject's unnameable relation to this signifier of desire is what organizes both fantasy and the symptomatic effects of the castration complex — exemplified through a reading of Dora's hysteria as a game of substituting imaginary φ where the veiled Φ is sought.
This result is for me the point aimed at or the correlative point at which I ground myself as an ego-ideal. It is on the basis of this point that the question has importance to me.
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#132
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.367
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**
Theoretical move: Lacan uses his optical schema to argue that the emergence of the ego-ideal and ideal ego requires the intervention of the big Other (capital O) as a third term that exceeds the dyadic, radically imaginary and destructive conflict of the mirror stage, thereby grounding narcissistic development in a symbolic register that neither Hegel's dialectic nor the Jekels-Bergler introjection/projection model can adequately account for.
What is the function of the ego-ideal here? You will tell me that it is the Other, the Other with a capital O. But you nevertheless sense that the Other is only involved here as the locus on the basis of which the ego constantly refers — in its emotional [pathétique] swings — to the image that is offered up to it.
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#133
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.369
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**
Theoretical move: The passage performs two linked theoretical moves: (1) it distinguishes the *einziger Zug* (single trait) as a sign rather than a signifier, using it to differentiate Ego Ideal (symbolic introjection) from Ideal Ego (imaginary projection); and (2) it articulates love as structured by the unconditional dimension of demand, where love is "giving what you don't have," connecting poverty/lack structurally to desire, and wealth/jouissance structurally to the saint's position — thereby positioning the analyst's own ideal against the horizon of sainthood and jouissance.
The ego-ideal is a symbolic introjection, whereas the ideal ego is the source of an imaginary projection.
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#134
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.386
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **"A D R EA M OF A SHADOW IS M A N "**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the subject's exit from narcissistic captivity depends on the structuring function of the signifier in the field of the Other: the distinction between Ideal Ego and Ego Ideal, mapped through the optical schema, shows that it is only by traversing the dream-field of wandering signifiers that the subject can glimpse the "reality of desire" beyond the shadow of narcissistic cathexis.
I trace out the operationalizing of the Other insofar as he is the Other of the speaking subject, the Other insofar as through him, as the locus of speech, the impact of the signifier comes into play for every subject... We can pinpoint there the place of what will begin to function as an ego-ideal.
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#135
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.161
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA*
Theoretical move: Lacan defines the psychoanalytic object as *àgalma* — the partial object of desire that is incommensurable with ordinary objects of equivalence — and argues that this object, not identificatory or metaphysical constructs, is the true pivot of love, desire, and analytic practice, requiring a strict topology of subject, little other, and big Other to be properly situated.
subjectivity is constructed in the plurality or pluralism of levels of identification that we call the ego-ideal, the ideal ego, and - something that has also been identified - the desiring ego.
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#136
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.410
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's desire is structured around a fundamental mourning — the recognition that no object (objet petit a) is of greater value than any other — and that this insight, shared with Socrates, connects melancholia, fantasy, the ego-ideal, and the ethics of love into a single topological point where desire meets its limit.
This brings us to the heart of the relationship between capital I and little a, at a point of fantasy where the safety provided by the limit is always called into question
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#137
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.391
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **"A D R EA M OF A SHADOW IS M A N "**
Theoretical move: Lacan recasts Abraham's concept of "partial love for the object" (Partialliebe) to argue that identification with the ego-ideal operates through isolated signifying traits (einziger Zug), not global introjection, and that narcissistic cathexis of one's own genitals is the structural condition for the exclusion of the object's genitals — establishing the phallus as the pivot that organises the series of partial objects (objet petit a) within the imaginary field structured by the mirror stage and face-to-face erotic posture.
what characterizes identification inasmuch as it is an ego-ideal identification - it is an identification via isolated traits, each of which is unique and has a signifying structure.
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#138
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.344
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that the analyst's function cannot be theorized neutrally from outside the analytic group, because post-Freudian technique underwent a symptomatic "slippage" in which the ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) was quietly replaced by the ideal ego (ideales Ich) — a displacement that reflects the analyst's own subjective involvement and traces back to the 1920 turning point, where analytic discourse ceased to recognize itself as a discourse bearing on the discourse of the unconscious.
the necessity or gravitational pull that made the analyst's function converge with the analyst's own image of it... namely, the Ich-Ideal, translated as the 'ego-ideal' [idéal du moi].
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#139
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.385
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE**
Theoretical move: This transitional passage announces the next session's theoretical agenda: to clarify the topography of desire by distinguishing the ideal ego from the ego-ideal through the function of the *einziger Zug* (unary trait), thereby articulating the object's role in relation to narcissism.
the function of the einziger Zug, which fundamentally characterizes the ego-ideal
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#140
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.348
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: Lacan repositions psychoanalytic action as a necessary response to the unconscious/repressed, critiques Ego Psychology as a mass-formation obstacle to analytic efficacy, and begins dismantling the conflation of ideal ego and ego-ideal by grounding both in narcissism as rethought through the mirror stage — thereby clearing space for a renewed account of analytic action and the structure of fantasy.
the analytic community insofar as it is a mass organized by the analytic ego-ideal, such as it has in fact developed in the form of a certain number of mirages.
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#141
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.332
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **PENSÉE'S DESIRE** > **STRUCTURAL DECOM POSITION**
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that myth (via structuralist decomposition) and the concept of *Versagung* (primordial refusal grounded in the signifier) provide the only rigorous framework for psychoanalytic practice, displacing both normalization narratives and crude economic-topographic models; the Graph of Desire is presented as the minimal structural map of the necessary encounter between subject and signifier, while trauma is recast as an event's occupation of a pre-given structural place.
the conflict - designated topographically in the theory of narcissism - between the ego and the ego-ideal, on the one hand, and the id, on the other
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#142
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.407
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **THE RELATIONSHIP BETW EEN ANXIETY A N D DESIRE** > **M O U R N IN G THE LOSS OF THE ANALYST**
Theoretical move: The passage advances a structural account of desire's object by showing that the phallus functions as a summit organizing the scale of objects, that the subject of desire is nothing but an apostrophe inscribed in the Other's desire, and that the ego-ideal (as Einziger Zug) is what rivets the subject to the ideal ego — a structure that also explains the distinction between mourning and melancholia as processes of exhausting narcissistic trait-identifications one by one.
It is here that the function of capital I - the function of the signifier of the ego-ideal - comes in. The ego-ideal as a function preserves i(a), the ideal ego.
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#143
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.354
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **SLIPPAGE IN THE M EA N IN G OF THE IDEAL**
Theoretical move: The passage distinguishes the ideal ego (imaginary, narcissistic image of self-display) from the ego-ideal (the introjected paternal signifier that organizes narcissistic benefit from a specific point), arguing that the imaginary phallus (lowercase phi) slips between the two terms [S and a] in fantasy, and that the analyst occupies the place of the ego-ideal for the patient — a structural position that must remain morally intact precisely to make the patient's libidinal disorder possible.
The ego-ideal, which is closely related to the play and function of the ideal ego, is truly constituted by the fact that at the outset, if he has his little sports car, it is because he is from a fine family.
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#144
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.172
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > *ÂGALMA* > <span id="page-161-0"></span>**BETWEEN SOCRATES A N D ALCIBIADES**
Theoretical move: Lacan reads Socrates' refusal of Alcibiades through the structure of the metaphor of love: Socrates' 'kénosis' (constitutive emptiness/non-knowledge) prevents the substitution of erastés for erômenos, and his interpretation of Alcibiades' speech reveals that what Alcibiades truly seeks — in Socrates and then in Agathon — is the agalma (partial object), the supreme point at which the subject is abolished in fantasy, which Socrates both knows and is doomed to misrecognize by substituting a lure in its place.
the intrasubjective dialectic of the ego-ideal, ideal ego, and partial object
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#145
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.245
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **D E M A N D A N D DESIRE IN THE ORAL A N D A N A L STAGES** > <span id="page-232-0"></span>**PSYCHE A N D THE CASTRATION COMPLEX**
Theoretical move: The analyst's desire must take the form of "nescience qua nescience" — not ignorance but the structural position of holding lack without filling it — such that the only sign the analyst can give is the sign of the lack of a signifier, which alone opens the analysand to the unconscious; this is grounded in the phallus as signifier structuring the entire economy of desire through the tension between being and having.
the very image I used to articulate the dialectic of the relations between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal
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#146
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > <span id="page-411-0"></span>**Translator's Endnotes** > **Chapter XVII - The Symbol Φ**
Theoretical move: This is a translator's endnotes section providing textual variants, clarifications of French idioms, and cross-references to the Graph of Desire in the Écrits and other seminars; it contains no independent theoretical argumentation.
Regarding the ego-ideal, see the point labeled 1(A) in Graph 2 in Écrits, p. 808.
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#147
Seminar VIII · Transference · Jacques Lacan · p.360
**M EDICAL H A R M O N Y** > **CAPITAL I A N D LITTLE** *a* > **IDENTIFICATION VIA** *"E IN E IN Z IG E R Z U G* **"**
Theoretical move: Lacan critiques the Jekels-Bergler theory of narcissism and the ego-ideal by showing that their reliance on a "neutral energy" oscillating between Eros and Thanatos, and their attribution of object-creation to the death drive, result from a failure to distinguish the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real registers — a failure that his optical schema (mirror A, real image *i(a)*, and flowers *a*) is designed to correct and generalize.
the ego-ideal plays the role of the mainspring of narcissism that is introduced in Freud's original text, 'On Narcissism: An Introduction'
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#148
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.19
*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961*
Theoretical move: Lacan argues that the classical philosophical tradition falls into idealism by substituting the ego-ideal for the subject, and proposes instead to ground the subject's unknowing perspective rigorously in the inaugural identification to a single, concrete signifying trait — the unary trait — rather than any Plotinian ideal unity.
the structural necessity, which is the same as the one which I already articulated before you under the form of the ego-ideal
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#149
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.110
*Seminar 10*: *Wednesday 21 February 1962* > *Seminar 11*: *Wednesday 28 February 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan pivots from the unary trait's role in constituting the subject to the logic of privation, arguing that the "minus one" (the subject's non-identity with the unary trait) is the structural condition for lack in the Real, and that this founds the connection between the signifier, narcissism of small differences, and the sexual drive's privileged function in subjectivity.
this absolute difference of which I speak to you, this difference detached from all possible comparison - it is starting from this small difference, in so far as it is the same thing as the big I, the ego-ideal, that every narcissistic perspective can be accommodated
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#150
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.70
*Seminar 2: Wednesday 22 November 1961* > *Seminar 7*: *Wednesday 10 January 1962* > I am - I think.
Theoretical move: Lacan introduces imaginary numbers (√-1) as a formal analogy for the subject "before any nomination," arguing that replacing the unary trait (1) with the imaginary unit (i) in a continued-fraction series produces a periodic rather than convergent function — thereby modeling the subject's irreducible instability and its structural relation to the ego-ideal and the imaginary phallus, while connecting this back to the logical scansion of the three-hesitation structure of Logical Time.
the function of unity as a function of the radical difference in the determination of this ideal centre of the subject which is called the ego-ideal
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#151
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.289
*Seminar 24*: *Wednesday 13 June 1962*
Theoretical move: Lacan uses the Symposium's agalma — what Alcibiades seeks at the heart of Socrates — to argue that the object of desire is ultimately the Other's desire itself (the pure eron), and that the phallus functions as the punctual, organising point that connects the barred subject ($) to the object (o) in the fundamental fantasy, while also introducing the third Freudian mode of identification as constituted through desire at the locus of the big Other.
Freud's text does not leave things there, and does not leave things there in so far as already within the major works of his third topography, he shows us the relationship of the object, which here can only be the object of desire, to the constitution of the ideal itself
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#152
Seminar IX · Identification · Jacques Lacan · p.207
*Seminar 14*: *Wednesday 21 March 1962* > *Seminar 18*: *Wednesday 2 May 1962* > Lacan
Theoretical move: Lacan uses a critical commentary on Mme Aulagnier's presentation to advance his own theoretical positions: that the subject must be defined purely through its exclusion from the signifier (not as a person), that affect cannot be understood outside its relation to the signifier, that perversion must be rethought as the subject making himself object for the jouissance of a phallic god, and that anxiety is properly situated as a sensation of the desire of the Other at the level of the ideal ego rather than as a word/affect antinomy.
the importance of the function, not of the ego-ideal, but of the ideal ego as the place where there come to be formed properly ego-type identifications
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#153
Critique of Pure Reason · Immanuel Kant
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON > CHAPTER III. The Ideal of Pure Reason.
Theoretical move: Kant establishes a hierarchy—categories, ideas, ideals—in which the Ideal marks the furthest remove from objective reality, functioning not as a constitutive object but as a purely a priori regulative principle that provides reason with a standard for complete determination, serving as archetype and rule rather than achievable reality.
the ideal serves as an archetype for the perfect and complete determination of the copy. Thus the conduct of this wise and divine man serves us as a standard of action, with which we may compare and judge ourselves
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#154
Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists · Joan Copjec · p.168
The Unvennogender Other: Hysteria and DeDlocracy in ADlerica > The Modern Forms of Power
Theoretical move: Copjec argues that Foucault's theory of disciplinary power is fundamentally incomplete because it lacks a psychoanalytic account of jouissance: the "mild and provident" ideal father (Name of the Father) does not simply neutralize power but installs interdiction of jouissance as its operative principle, which drives the escalation of surveillance and ultimately precipitates the return of totalitarianism as the primal father's revenge — a structural trajectory Foucault cannot see because he expelled psychoanalysis from his framework.
The totalitarian leader's power 'comes from below'; his is only the power that the people confer on him—by placing him in the position of their ego ideal, as Freud says in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
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#155
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
III
Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the Ego Ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishing it sharply from sublimation, and identifies conscience as the psychic agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—an agency whose regressive form reappears in paranoid self-scrutiny delusions and whose normal operation underlies dream censorship.
We can postulate that the one individual has set up an ideal within himself against which he measures his actual ego... It is this ideal ego that is now the recipient of the self-love enjoyed during childhood by the real ego.
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#156
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
III
Theoretical move: Freud elaborates narcissism as the economic ground of self-feeling, arguing that the ego's libidinal economy—structured by the tension between primary narcissism, ego-ideal, and object-cathexes—determines both psychic health and the dynamics of love, repression, and social feeling (guilty conscience as displaced homosexual libido).
The development of the ego consists in an ever-increasing separation from one's primary narcissism, and gives rise to an intense struggle to retrieve it. This separation occurs through the displacement of libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without.
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#157
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and its Forms of Dependence
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego's peculiar severity derives from its dual origin—as the earliest identification (heir to the Oedipus complex) and as a reincarnation of archaic id-formations—and uses this structural account to explain clinical phenomena including negative therapeutic reaction, unconscious guilt, and the differential manifestation of guilt in obsessional neurosis, melancholia, and hysteria, ultimately linking the super-ego's cruelty to the death drive turned inward.
The normal, conscious, type of guilt-feeling (conscience) is easily understood: it has its basis in the tension between the ego and the ego-ideal; it is a manifestation of the fact that the ego has been condemned in some particular respect by the critical entity within it.
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#158
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego/ego-ideal is the structural heir to the Oedipus complex, formed through identification with the repressed paternal obstacle, and constitutes the psychical site of conscience, morality, and religion—thereby answering the charge that psychoanalysis neglects man's 'higher' nature by locating that higher presence in the ego-ideal's phylogenetically inherited structure.
The ego-ideal is thus heir to the Oedipus complex, and as such an expression of the id's most powerful impulses and most important libidinal experiences.
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#159
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and its Forms of Dependence
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's structural dependence on the superego reveals how sublimation and identification produce a de-mergence of drives, unleashing the death drive within the superego and making morality itself a lethal product of psychic catabolism; fear of death and consciential fear are thus retraced to castration fear as their core.
the more a person succeeds in controlling his aggression, the more intense becomes his ego-ideal's aggressive disposition towards his ego. It is tantamount to a displacement, to the ego-ideal turning on the person's ego.
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#160
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
Notes
Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism," critiquing Standard Edition mistranslations and clarifying key Freudian technical terms; it is primarily philological/bibliographic apparatus with limited direct theoretical work.
We can thus more readily understand the fact that paranoia is frequently caused by the ego being wounded, by gratification being refused within the domain of the ego-ideal.
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#161
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
Notes
Theoretical move: This passage is a notes/apparatus section of the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Freud's writings, providing editorial clarifications, translation corrections, and cross-references. The one substantive theoretical note (note 83) articulates Freud's position on unconscious guilt, its analytic treatment, and the limits of the analyst's therapeutic role.
there is a temptation here for the analyst to present himself to the patient in the role of a prophet, a redeemer, a saviour of souls
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#162
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's encounter with lost objects produces identification as a structural residue, and that the dissolution of the Oedipus complex specifically generates the super-ego/ego-ideal as a precipitate of those identifications — establishing the super-ego as an internal agency that actively opposes the rest of the ego and is constitutively linked to sublimation, narcissism, and bisexuality.
a separate level within the ego – a differentiation that has come about inside the ego itself – that may be termed the ego-ideal or super-ego.
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#163
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: This introductory essay argues that Freud's central theoretical contribution is the concept of erotic and political repetition compulsion — the psyche's conservative drive to re-enact infantile fantasies of perfect love and authority — and that love's pathological character is structurally continuous with transference-love, with the superego's temporary usurpation by the beloved marking the mechanism of falling in love.
the lover puts the beloved in the place of the Over-I. The lover becomes the standard for judgement. What the beloved finds admirable, or interesting, or just noteworthy, is splendid behaviour.
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#164
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freud's theory of Eros is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion rooted in the lost maternal object, narcissism, and submission to authority—such that erotic life, political life, and the compulsion to repeat are all expressions of the same libidinal economy governed by the super-ego and the drive to restore an originary, impossible object.
In love, the object after all takes the place of the super-ego.
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#165
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.91
3. *The Ethics of the Act* > *The Fraying of Social Ideals*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that social trauma and oppression fray the symbolic anchoring points (points de capiton) that suture the subject to collective ideals, and that the Lacanian act—by temporarily demolishing these quilting points—can break the repetition compulsion imposed by oppressive signifiers, opening a space for singular desire and counterhegemonic possibility beyond the normative symbolic order.
reconstitution of the functions of an ego ideal or of reestablishment of links to the 'pole of values' within the symbolic order
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#166
The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.155
6. *The Dignity of the Thing* > *Repetition as Creativity* > *Symbolic Ideals and Values*
Theoretical move: The passage argues that symbolic quilting points, when chosen critically, serve a constructive function by anchoring desire in collective meaning without arresting its movement—thus enabling sublimation rather than narcissistic closure—and that the ego ideal (symbolic) is theoretically superior to the ideal ego (imaginary) precisely because it opens onto collective structures rather than foreclosing personal limitation.
the ego ideal as what arises from our internalization of social values... the ego ideal, in contrast, allows us to transition from the deceptive universe of the mirror stage to collective structures of meaning production.
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#167
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.270
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Why One and One Make Four
Theoretical move: By mapping gestalt concepts (figure/ground) onto the Schema R and contrasting it with Schema L, Boothby argues that symbolic castration is the process of "demotivation" that opens the real between the imaginary axis (m-i) and the symbolically mediated axis (I-M), distinguishing the fuller picture of the Oedipus complex from the neurotic, analytic situation mapped by Schema L.
The ego ideal is precisely a function of identification that moves beyond the imaginary, it is a shaping of identification that is at once unimagable (it is not an imaginary figure), though it is also something differentiated from the archaic and formless ground of the subject (therefore not-ground).
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#168
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby · p.261
<span class="chnum ordinal">Chapter 5 </span><span id="ch5.xhtml_p241" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 241. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Figurations of the *Objet a* > Between the Look and the Gaze
Theoretical move: By identifying the gaze with objet petit a and locating it in a triadic, topological structure that pre-exists and constitutes the field of the visible, Boothby argues that the Lacanian gaze is not a competing look but the dispositional horizon of consciousness itself—the desire of the Other that frames all positional awareness—with distinct political and clinical consequences in mass psychology versus analytic transference.
it is at this point that a Lacanian analysis contributes significantly to Freud's theory of the ego ideal in mass psychology.
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#169
Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan · Richard Boothby
<span id="Index.xhtml_p323" class="pagebreak" aria-label=" page 323. " role="doc-pagebreak"></span>Index
Theoretical move: This is a partial index (letter "E") from Boothby's book; it is non-substantive bibliographic apparatus listing page references for concepts and proper names, with no theoretical argument advanced in the passage itself.
Ego ideal 269–71
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#170
The Orthodox Heretic and Other Impossible Tales · Peter Rollins · p.55
<span id="title.html_page_iii"></span>The Orthodox Heretic > <span id="introduction.html_page_ix"></span>INTRODUCTION > <span class="small">COMMENTARY</span>
Theoretical move: The passage argues that authentic faith is not secured by ideological self-image (ego-ideal) but is revealed precisely through the stripping away of religious belief-as-ideology, so that true conviction emerges from the subject's confrontation with lack and powerlessness rather than from identification with a flattering image of the self.
These individuals carefully construct a type of ego-ideal, a view of themselves with qualities such as intelligence, kindness, and conviction, which they convince themselves and others is a true reflection of who they really are.
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#171
The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk · Samuel McCormick · p.310
A Play of Props > **A Sociology of Associations**
Theoretical move: The passage argues that actor-network theory dissolves the modern self/society dichotomy by reconceiving individuality as assembled from 'extra-psychic' associations rather than atomic interiority, and then positions the conceptual history of chatter/idle talk/empty speech (from Kierkegaard through Heidegger to Lacan) as a pre-history of the communicative 'modes of circulation' that actor-network theory needs but has not yet theorized.
an imaginary order comprised of hyper-rationalized (and for this reason profoundly neurotic) attachments between specular images, egos, ego-ideals, ideal egos, superegos, and the like.
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#172
The Odd One In: On Comedy · Alenka Zupančič · p.43
part i
Theoretical move: Zupančič argues, via Hegel, that comedy is not the opposition of the concrete to the universal but the universal's own self-alienation and self-actualization as subject; true comedy produces a "short circuit" in which the ego-ideal is revealed as the comic partial object itself, enacting disidentification rather than identification.
the ego-ideal itself turns out to be the partial (comical) object, and ceases to be something with which we identify via the identification with one of the partial features of its reverse side. The ego-ideal directly is a human weakness
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#173
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: The introduction argues that Freudian erotic theory is fundamentally a theory of repetition compulsion: libidinal life is structured by the unattainable lost (maternal) object, narcissistic fascination, and the superego's demand for punishment, such that the compulsion to repeat past fixations makes genuine erotic liberation—and by extension political freedom—structurally impossible.
he is the omnipotent father resurrected… the roots of religion, and also of most forms of politics that revolve around the leader, might go back to the first investments in authority.
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#174
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and its Forms of Dependence
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's precarious position between id, super-ego, and external world is structured by a dynamic of drive de-mergence: sublimation and identification unleash destructive drives within the super-ego, turning morality itself into a product of the death drive's catabolism, while castration fear is identified as the nuclear core of all anxiety (consciential, fear of death, neurotic).
It is tantamount to a displacement, to the ego-ideal turning on the person's ego. But then even ordinary, normal morality is characterized by harsh restrictiveness and savage forbiddance.
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#175
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the super-ego/ego-ideal is the heir to the Oedipus complex, formed by internalizing the paternal prohibition and thus perpetuating both individual and phylogenetic inheritance within the psyche; this move simultaneously grounds religion, morality, and the social sense in the dynamics of identification and repression rather than in any transcendent 'higher nature'.
The ego-ideal is thus heir to the Oedipus complex, and as such an expression of the id's most powerful impulses and most important libidinal experiences.
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#176
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
III
Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the dynamic economy of narcissism by mapping the reciprocal flows between ego-libido and object-libido: self-feeling (self-esteem) rises and falls with narcissistic investment, the ego-ideal mediates this economy by imposing repression on object-choice, and the social/mass dimension of the ego-ideal is grounded in redirected homosexual libido and guilty conscience.
The development of the ego consists in an ever-increasing separation from one's primary narcissism, and gives rise to an intense struggle to retrieve it. This separation occurs through the displacement of libido onto an ego-ideal imposed from without.
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#177
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and the Super-Ego (the Ego-Ideal)
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the ego's identifications with lost objects—culminating in the Oedipus complex's resolution—produce a differentiated agency within the ego (the super-ego/ego-ideal), and that this mechanism of converting object-libido into narcissistic libido via identification is the general pathway for sublimation and character formation.
a separate level within the ego – a differentiation that has come about inside the ego itself – that may be termed the ego-ideal or super-ego.
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#178
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
Notes
Theoretical move: This is an editorial notes section providing translator's annotations, textual clarifications, and cross-references for Freud's texts (primarily *The Ego and the Id* and *Inhibition, Symptom, and Fear*); the most theoretically substantive note (83) elaborates on the technique for handling unconscious guilt-feeling, identification, the ego-ideal, and the limits of psychoanalytic therapy.
The outcome may also depend on whether the personality of the analyst is such as to enable the patient to substitute him for his ego-ideal, although there is a temptation here for the analyst to present himself to the patient in the role of a prophet, a redeemer, a saviour of souls.
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#179
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
Introduction
Theoretical move: The passage uses Falstaff and Rosalind as exemplary figures of a psychoanalytically-inflected imagination that resists both the regressive superego (Falstaff's demystification of paternal authority) and the oceanic id (Rosalind's complication of erotic reduction), arguing that Shakespearean imagination offers an alternative to Freud's resigned acceptance of civilizational constraint.
Falstaff sets about advertising himself as a better ideal for Hal than his own father.
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#180
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
Notes
Theoretical move: This passage consists of editorial and translator's notes to Freud's "On the Introduction of Narcissism," correcting Standard Edition mistranslations and clarifying key Freudian terms; it is primarily philological and bibliographic rather than theoretically substantive, though it touches on Narcissism, the Ego Ideal, libido cathexis, and the censorial agency (superego precursor).
We can thus more readily understand the fact that paranoia is frequently caused by the ego being wounded, by gratification being refused within the domain of the ego-ideal.
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#181
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
II
Theoretical move: Freud uses the distinction between narcissistic and imitative (anaclitic) object-choice to theorize gender difference in love-life, arguing that female libidinal development tends toward intensified narcissism rather than object-love, and that parental love reveals itself as a structural repetition/resurgence of the parents' own abandoned primary narcissism.
they thereafter remain capable of yearning for a male ideal, which really amounts to a perpetuation of the boy-like being that they themselves once were.
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#182
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
The Ego and its Forms of Dependence
Theoretical move: Freud argues that the superego's special severity derives from its dual origin—as the heir to the Oedipus complex and as a residue of the id's phylogenetic inheritance—and uses differential clinical presentations (negative therapeutic reaction, obsessional neurosis, melancholia, hysteria) to demonstrate how guilt-feeling, whether conscious or unconscious, operates as the superego's primary weapon against the ego, ultimately linking the superego's harshness to a harnessed death drive turned inward.
The normal, conscious, type of guilt-feeling (conscience) is easily understood: it has its basis in the tension between the ego and the ego-ideal
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#183
Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (alt. ed.) · Sigmund Freud
III
Theoretical move: Freud theorizes the ego-ideal as the structural heir to primary narcissism, distinguishes it sharply from sublimation, and then derives the superego/conscience as the agency that measures the actual ego against the ideal—thereby also accounting for paranoid self-scrutiny, dream censorship, and the role of narcissistic libido in self-feeling.
It is this ideal ego that is now the recipient of the self-love enjoyed during childhood by the real ego. The individual's narcissism appears to be transferred onto this new ideal ego
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#184
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: Symbolic identification (ego-ideal, I(O)) dominates imaginary identification (ideal ego, i(o)) as the mechanism of socio-symbolic interpellation, but this quilting always leaves a remainder — the gap of 'Che vuoi?' — which marks the irreducible split between demand and desire and prevents full closure of the subject's integration into the symbolic order.
in symbolic identification we identify ourselves with the other precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes resemblance
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#185
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage argues that misrecognition has a positive ontological dimension—it is not merely an obstacle to truth but the condition of possibility for both the subject's consistency and the existence of certain entities (e.g., the unconscious letter, enjoyment); this logic culminates in the claim that the Symptom as Real is an irreducible kernel that resists symbolization and cannot be dissolved by making meaning.
the great transatlantic liners … a kind of microcosm of the social structure, an image of society not as it really was but seen as society wanted to be seen … in brief the ego-ideal of society
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#186
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage uses Hegel's three-stage logic of reflection (positing, external, determinate) as a model for textual hermeneutics and subject-formation, arguing that the 'beautiful soul' figure exposes the Hegelian lesson that the real act is always formal and prior—the subject must retroactively posit its own presuppositions—which distinguishes Hegel's idealist dialectics from Marx's materialist one.
her real identification is with the formal structure of the intersubjective field… this structuring of the intersubjective space (the family network) is the point of her symbolic identification
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#187
The Sublime Object of Ideology · Slavoj Žižek
INTRODUCTION
Theoretical move: The passage advances a theory of the Graph of Desire's operation by showing that the point de capiton retroactively fixes meaning through the Master Signifier, and that this quilting operation grounds both ideology (as transferential illusion) and subjectivity (as the difference between imaginary identification with the ideal ego and symbolic identification with the ego-ideal/gaze of the Other).
symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love.
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#188
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.10
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Wotching from a Distance
Theoretical move: McGowan argues that mainstream cinema structurally produces a voyeuristic illusion of safe distance for the spectator, but this distance is always already undermined by the fact that the film's structure is organized around the spectator's desire—a condition Lynch's films uniquely make visible rather than disavow. The spectator's imaginary proximity is thus a mediated fiction that conceals their full enmeshment in the cinematic event.
This self-image implies an external look—what Freud calls an ego ideal—that apprehends it. The implicit onlooker gives meaning and structure to the private activity.
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#189
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.111
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > Diane's Wish Fulfillment
Theoretical move: Fantasy's structural function is to cover over the constitutive dissatisfaction of desire by reorganizing obstacles, repositioning objects, and delivering the objet petit a in a "pure form" free of pathological taint — a theoretical move McGowan demonstrates through a systematic reading of the two parts of *Mulholland Drive* as desire-world versus fantasy-world.
Coco remains a maternal figure, but she becomes wholly benevolent—an ego ideal, seeing Betty in the way that Betty wants to be seen.
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#190
The Impossible David Lynch · Todd McGowan · p.138
,'\ru'/,¡/ ¡)(" ,.: '\';11." \,,'" .1, ,,( T H E *impossible* /h,-Ft'llItllc *Form* LUCr FI~CH~k **DAVID LYN CH** > 9, Navigating Mulholland Orive , David Lynch's Panegyric to Hollywood > **INDEX**
Theoretical move: This is a book index — a non-substantive back-matter section listing proper names, film titles, and key theoretical concepts with page references. It contains no original theoretical argument.
ego ideal, 4, 206
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#191
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.12
**THE LACANIAN SUBJECT** > Pour Heloise
Theoretical move: Fink's preface argues that the Lacanian subject has two faces—fixated symptom and subjectivization—mirrored by two faces of the object (objet petit a as Other's desire and as letter/signifierness), and that this non-parallel, "Gödelian" structure grounds a theory of sexual difference and underwrites psychoanalysis as an autonomous discourse irreducible to science.
the imaginary other [ideal ego] and the Other as desire [ego ideal]
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#192
The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance · Bruce Fink · p.203
<span id="page-191-0"></span>*Glossary of Lacanian Symbols* \_\_\_\_\_\_\_ \_ > **The Lacanian Subject**
Theoretical move: This passage is a scholarly footnote/glossary section providing bibliographic references and clarificatory notes on Lacanian symbols and concepts; it is primarily apparatus rather than a substantive theoretical argument, though note 14 makes a genuine theoretical point about Lacan's notational distinctions between imaginary and symbolic registers of the subject.
the figurative (i.e., linguistically structured) images to the 'ego ideal.'
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#193
The Odd One In: On Comedy (alt. ed.) · Alenka Zupančič · p.43
part i
Theoretical move: Župančič reads Hegel's account of comedy as the site where substance undergoes its own alienation and thereby becomes subject, such that comedy is not the undermining of the universal by the concrete but the universal's own self-movement — a theoretical move that reframes the comic as producing concrete universality rather than merely exposing its limits.
the ego-ideal itself turns out to be the partial (comical) object, and ceases to be something with which we identify via the identification with one of the partial features of its reverse side.
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#194
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.376
The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile
Theoretical move: The passage argues that in contemporary global capitalism the apparent "chaos" of decentralized power is itself an ideological mask for unprecedented centralized control, and that the "speculative identity" of opposites (tolerance/intolerance, democracy/alienation, public/private) means that the very gaze that perceives the Other's defects is the source of those defects — culminating in the claim that democracy requires a minimum of alienation lest the empirical people become alienated from themselves in their Leader.
this 'true' identity itself, as a rule, forms itself through the identification with a foreign gaze which plays the role of the culture's Ego-Ideal
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#195
The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.20
The Tickling Object
Theoretical move: Žižek introduces the "parallax object" as the key to understanding the subject-object relation: the objet petit a is identified as the pure parallax object and cause of the parallax gap, a minimal difference that is itself an object, irreducible to any symbolic grasp — and this structure is shown to pervade narrative form (Fitzgerald), psychoanalytic experience, and the ontology of the subject's gaze.
it embodies the gaze of the social 'big Other,' the Ego-Ideal, for which Dick enacts the life of a happy husband who tries to charm everybody around him