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[[Lacan]] thus dismisses all attempts to draw empirical evidence for the sequence of psychosexual stages by means of "the so-called direct observation of the child,"<ref>{{E}} 242</ref> and places the emphasis on the reconstruction of such stages in the [[analysis]] of adults.
"It is by starting with the experience of the adult that we must grapple, retrospectively, nachtr‰glich, with the supposedly original experiences."<ref>{{SlS1}} p.217</ref>
In 1961, the pregenital stages are conceived by [[Lacan]] as forms of [[demand]].
On the one hand, psycholinguistics has discovered a natural order of development, in which the infant progresses through a sequence of biologically predetermined stages (babbling, followed by phoneme acquisition, then isolated words, and then sentences of increasing complexity).
[[Lacan]], however, is not interested in this chronological sequence, since it only deals with "the emergence, properly speaking, of a phenomenon."<ref>{{SlS1}} p.179</ref>
What interests [[Lacan]] is not the phenomena (external appearance) of [[language]] but the way [[language]] positions the [[subject]] in a [[symbolic]] [[structure]].
Thus the transition to the symbolic is always a question of creation ex nihilo, a radical discontinuity between one order and another, and never a question of a gradual evolution.
The last term is particularly distasteful for Lacan, who warns his students to 'beware of that register of thought known as evolutionism,' (S7, 213), and prefers to describe psychic change in terms of metaphors of creation ex nihilo.<ref>{{S7}} p.213</ref>
Lacan's opposition to notions of development and evolution are not based on an opposition to the notion of psychic change in itself.
It follows that questions of exactly when the [[ego]] is constituted, or when the [[child]] enters the [[Oedipus complex]], which have led to so much controversy between other [[school]]s of [[psychoanalysis]], are of little interest to [[Lacan]].
While [[Lacan]] admits that the "ego is constituted at a specific moment in the history of the subject,"<ref>{{SlS1}} p.l15</ref> and that there is a moment when the [[Oedipus complex]] is formed, he is not interested in the question of exactly when those moments occur.
The question of when the [[child]] makes his entry into the [[symbolic]] [[order]] is irrelevant to [[psychoanalysis]].
