Ideal Ego and Ego-Ideal in Lacan’s Seminar I

Jacques Lacan’s Seminar I (1954) draws heavily on the distinction between “ideal ego” and “ego-ideal,” taken from Sigmund Freud’s 1914 work On Narcissism . Lacan identifies these phrases with his own Imaginary and Symbolic registers, which Jacques-Alain Miller understandably places at the center of Seminar I. Against one interpretation of Lacan, this article contends that the Imaginary and the Symbolic cannot generate the Real because they presuppose it. On the basis of Freud’s critique of Jung, a three-level model of our relation to objects is also developed: (1) literal/scientific, (2) aesthetic/performative/militant, and (3) unconscious.