  This symbolic dimension of human relations must be clearly distinguished from the imaginary as the domain of the ego. The imaginary order is most fundamentally and plainly elucidated in Lacan's essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” where he elaborates Freud's insights in The Ego and the Id, taking up the idea that the ego is first and foremost a bodily ego formed through the “projection of a surface” (Freud 1968 [1923], 27), a visual representation of an external veneer or façade. Lacan concurs, writing that consciousness occurs “each time … there's a surface such that it can produce what is called an image” (Lacan 1991b [1978], 49). The mirror stage commences, pre-Oedipally, when the infant is around 6 months old. The infant at this age is literally infans, without speech and moreover, without bodily coordination or motor control. Born prematurely, at a point prior to any adequate capacity for self-care, the infant is wholly instinctually inept. By identifying itself with an image, a coherent unity that contrasts to its own fragmented and dispersed bodily existence, the infant forms a preliminary self, one animated by an illusion but an illusion that allows it to anticipate its own future organization.