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The narcissistic imaginary register which Lacan had elaborated in such detail in his early work is now shown to rest on a symbolic foundation: ''the relation to the image will be structured by language''. (My relation with myself is constructed "from the outside." I learn who I am because others tell me.) Images are caught up in a complex symbolic web which manoeuvres them, combines them and organizes their relations.
=====EditEgo Ideal and Ideal Ego=====Hence, Lacan's differentiation of ''ego ideal'' and ''ideal ego'', two terms which we can find at some points in the work of Freud. In Lacan's formulation of 1953, ''the ideal ego is the iamge you assume and the ego ideal is the symbolic point which gives you a place and supplies the point from which you are looked at''. If you drive a car fast, it might be because you assume the iamge of some race driver. You identify with him, and this would involve the ideal ego. But the real question is, ''who is it that you are identifying with this racing driver for''? (Who you drive fast, who do you think is watching you?) This is the dimension of the [[ego ideal]]. CLinically, pointing out to a patient an ideal ego identification usually has little effect: to dislodge it, an appeal must be made to the symbolic dimension, to the register of the ego ideal.
=====Structural Linguistics=====
What characterizes the symbolic register here is something very particular. Thinkers influences by developments in linguistics had the idea that any [[structure]] is a [[linguistic]] one if it has the simple quality of being based on a system of differences. ''A word is a word because it is different from other words'': "cat" has its value because it is different from "mat", "fat" and "cot", for example. ''It takes on its value because it is an element in a system of differences''.
Thus ''the central property of a linguistic system is discontinuity'', the existence of a series of differential elements. Discontinuity means gaps: there is a space between elements. This discontinuity is set in opposition by Lacan to the imaginary register which strives to avoid the dimension of lack or absence. This endeavor is of course inauthentic, since the imaginary itself is based on a serious and troubling form of discontinuity, ''the gap between the child's uncoordinated body and the envelope of the whole image which it assumes''.
=====The Unconscious and Language=====
If the ego is imaginary, the unconscious for Lacan is structured like a language; that is, it is constituted by a series of chains of signifying elements. Like an infernal translating machine, it turns words into symptoms, it inscribes signifiers into the flesh or turns them into tormenting thoughts or compulsions. ''A symptom may be literally a word trapped in the body''. Remember that all that children really know about their internal organs is what their parents tell them. The inside of their body is thus made up of words. Doctors are familiar with patients who complain of pains when a biological cause is clearly absent. This does not mean that the pain is false: it is exactly the same pain, perhaps even a greater one, as if it were caused by some real physical determinant. (I suffer from the idea that I associate with the idea of a particular organ.) To relieve the pain, the repressed ideas need to be linked to the rest of the [[signifying chain]]. They have to undergo a new translation.
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