ABSTRACT
The imaginary represents the child’s earliest entry into social life. Through an intense, mutually defining relation with the mother, the child gradually understands that it is distinct from her, and has an identity of its own, an identity which is fundamentally alienated. The child is constituted as a libidinal subject and confined to the limits of its body through the establishment of the ego. Its identity is thus always incomplete, dependent on the other. The other is thus not simply an external, independent other, but the internal condition of identity, the core of the self.
