ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the articulation between the ego Ideal and the Ideal ego considering how Jacques Lacan elaborated these notions in relation to the notion of the other. Sigmund Freud says that the ego ideal is composed by "cultural and ethical representations", the fundamental cause of repression. Lacan says that the problem is not there, that that is "civilization and its discontents". Both Freud and Lacan propose that the analytic cure must go beyond ideals. The subject embraces the Ego Ideal primary identification, which gives it a certain consistency in the signifier, and at that moment, the fact that it has to 'have emerged' from nothing is founded. The inversion in the graph of desire has a temporal structure, and Lacan assigns it the temporal metaphor of the 'future anterior'. In French, future anterior expresses anteriority in relation with a future to come.
