be the case. I believe Lacan is obliged to adopt this position since, here, he is still
attempting to reconcile his philosophically indebted theory of the Imaginary with
a plausible psychological explanation of the child’s chronological “stages” of psy-
chic development: for instance, he has to defend his dialectical claims against the
empirically evident fact that a child seems to be able to distinguish himself from
his siblings well before reaching the age of five (when, according to psychoanaly-
sis, the Oedipus complex is usually resolved). It is therefore not surprising that in
his later theories of identification, Lacan will always consider the discussion and,
more specifically, the temporalization of pre-Oedipal phenomena as senseless if
they are not retroactively understood on the basis of the Oedipus complexqua per-
manent symbolic structure of the subject. More generally, it is important to note
how, despite its marginal thematization in Lacan’s early works, desire clearly con-
stitutes the primary force underlying all the subject’s imaginary dialectical move-
ments. This is why Lacan speaks of a “see-saw of desire”^54 made of successive
projections and introjections.1.4 Consciousness, the Unconscious, and the
ComplexesOne last dialectical movement still awaits explanation in Lacan’s theory of the
subject’s imaginary psychic development. It is indeed clear that the subject’s in-
trojection of the ego as the primary (alienating) identification (Ur-Ich) has to
follow—if not chronologically, at least logically—a primordially unconscious
projection/representation of the (other’s) body image as such. Imagosmust some-
how be “produced” by the subject: as a matter of fact, Lacan defines them as “un-
conscious representations.”^55 It might be useful to observe here that in his early
work Lacan seems to understand the unconscious in terms of intentionality (even
though he never fully develops this). This is why, whenever he contends with
Freud’s statement according to which the ego should be considered as a synthe-
sizer of the “perception-consciousness” system, he is implicitly suggesting that
such a system should instead be understood primarily in unconscious, inten-
tional terms. Referring to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception,Lacan pro-
poses that one of the primal tasks of psychoanalysis is phenomenologically to
“consider all [unconscious] experience lived before any objectification as well
as before any reflexive analysis that mixes objectification with experience.”^56
Lacan rethinks phenomenological intentionality in terms of un-conscious,anti-
objectifying experience.^57 In other words, the un-conscious cannot be limited to
what is excluded from self-consciousness, and is consequently somehow de-
pendent on it: on the contrary, psychic activity is in generalun-conscious and onlythe subject of the imaginary (other)