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In his work of the early 1950s, Lacan saw the image as the central source of resistance in psychoanalytic treatment. ''The ego is made up of privileged images and the task of analysis is to dissolve them''. They must be integrated in speech and the symbolic network, rather than remaining stagnant and inert, blocking the dialectical progression of speech. (The initial step in analysis is to reveal not what the patient is saying, but from where they are speaking - to reveal where their imaginary alienation is situated. Understanding what someone is saying must come after this.)
''When the patient says "I", the analyst should be mistrustful''! "I" must be separated from the "[[ego]]". The "I" of [[speech]] might seem to refer to the person sitting in front of you, but this is not the same thing as the [[ego]], the site of the [[imaginary]] [[identification]]. (When a patient says "I", the analyst shouldn't be fooled!) ''It is necessary to see from where he is speaking'', perhaps the place of a sibling, a friend or a parent who has been identified with at an unconscious level. =====EditEgo and Subject=====[[Lacan]] introduced the distinction between the [[ego]] and what he called the [[subject]]. ''The [[ego]] is [[imaginary]], whereas the [[subject]] is linked by [[Lacan]] to the [[symbolic]]''. It is a fundamentally [[split]] or divided entity: split by the [[law]]s of [[language]] to which it is subordinate, and split to the extent that it does not know what it wants. This divided subject does not have any one representation, but emerges rather at moment of discontinuity: for example, in a slip of the tongue or a bungled action.
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