In keeping with those historians of psychoanalysis who describe its development as an effort to uncover ever more primitive sources of psychic cause, Lacan located the sources of narcissism and identification in earlier stages and more concrete places than did Freud. As early as his 1932 dissertation Lacan argued that Freud's failure to understand the concrete tendencies of the ego, including its concrete genesis, meant that its individual specificity could only elude him throughout the whole of his life. But this does not make of Lacan a Kleinian. Nor is he a surrealist—painting an ego collage— as certain critics have recently claimed. By reconceptualizing narcissism and identification, Lacan arrived at a new understanding of how the ego is formed, thereby validating Freud's conviction that the ego is a late development by comparison with narcissism. Lacan dispensed with the empiricist, positivistic, developmental theories wherein knowledge is acquired through observation and experience, theories by which psychology even today retains the concept of a self-sustaining consciousness of self. By realigning Freud's various concepts of narcissism, identification, drive, and ego, Lacan could argue that the ego is not a synthesizing agent. In so doing, he demonstrated that neonate identification with the objects of the world produces the narcissistic constellation we call the ego. But he maintained that such identification does not come about in a linear (two-person) operation. Rather, co-simultaneous identification with three different kinds of material organizes the ego: with the drives (the real), with images (the imaginary), and with language itself in its representation of objects (the symbolic). "There are not," however, "three dimensions in language," Lacan points out. "Language is always flattened out." Moreover, one does not identify with "objects"—images, words, persons, bodily organs—because they are full and present to themselves. One identifies with "objects" because one lacks innate being.
