ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan described his contribution to the psychoanalytic movement with a short formula: that of a “return to Freud”. The therapeutic process was now supposed to change reciprocal relations between different instances, and to put the ego once again into the centre of subjectivity. The new stress on the decisive role of the ego resulted in the “strengthening of the ego” doctrine of the cure. The ego of the mirror stage, starting from approximately the sixth month, is a polemic against the idea of a strong and all-round ego, figuring as a centre of human subjectivity. Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage is a very serious endeavour to keep together, in their conceptual as well as practical intertwining, the ego, the body, and the gaze, along with his new definition of “the ideal ego” and of identification. The ego that is produced in this “moment” is a counterpart to the “fragmented body”.
