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Lacan's emphasis has been on the speaking subject coming to self-realization in the analytic relationship through words. When this subject speaks about himself, however, he becomes an object to himself. This objectification and mediation of the subject in language results in reification, fixing in a rigid posture the dynamic subject. It is this rigid, reified, objectified self that Lacan calls the ego.
It is the ego's peculiar relationship to language that makes communication so difficult. In his 1951 essay, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” Lacan wrote:
What we have been able to observe is the privileged way in which a person expresses himself as the ego; it is precisely this—Verneinung, or denial.
We have learned to be quite sure that when someone says “It is not so” it is because it is so; that when he says “I do not mean” he does mean … we are … convinced that our researches justify the epigram of the philosopher who said that speech was given to man to hide his thoughts; our view is that the essential function of the ego is very nearly [a] systematic refusal to recognize reality … , pp. 11-12).
What is the origin of this ego, according to Lacan? It lies in a particular period of development he dubs “the mirror phase,” occurring somewhere between the child's 8th and 18th month. Up to this point the infant's experience is marked by fragmentation, motor turbulence, incoordination, and helplessness. Pointing to the anatomical incompleteness characterizing man's specific prematurity at birth, Lacan places heavy emphasis on the ontological status of a béance, an abyss, gap, lack, or dehiscence marking the human being from birth, which sets up an unrealizable yearning for completion and which dispels any talk of a preformed, preadapted, or harmonious relationship of man to his environment. The infant finds an imaginary fulfillment