If, as Lichtenstein suggests, we are to regard human identity as emergent in the symbiotic relation of mother and child, we might then regard individuation, which ends this relationship in reality, as that which: (1) situates identity in a structure of subject and object, presence and absence, desire and prohibition; (2) temporally locates the origin of the unconscious and of unconscious fantasy; and (3) creates an infrastructure underlying subsequent psychosexual development, including the Oedipus complex.