  For Lacan, the ego is a “knot of imaginary servitude” (Lacan 2006 [1970], 80) and thus the site of the subject's stagnancy and inertia. The mirror stage also forms the basis of Lacan's critique of ego psychology; whereas the latter takes strengthening the ego to be the aim of analytic practice, Lacan takes the aspirations of the ego to be a “lure” (Lacan 2006 [1970], 78) of self-possession, an armor that rigidifies the subject and resists freedom and movement, a defensive structure that provides an alienating identity. With this theory of the ego, Lacan presents a subject at odds with itself, non-self-identical, in “primordial Discord” (Lacan 2006 [1970], 78), torn between unity and anarchy, organization and chaos, integration and fragmentation. The withdrawal of the self from itself proceeds from the reflexivity of representational practices of language. The ego as object is trapped in oppositional relationships, including with itself, and cannot therefore be equated with the subject as speaking being who, in the use of words, signifiers that are differentially related to one another, is capable of more complex plays of presence and absence; language, unlike perception (I perceive an object or I don't), can evoke simultaneously the presence and the absence of the thing (I can represent objects that are not present).