ondition of existence and progressively refines the status of its existence. The big picture is that the refinement is a nisus toward consciousness, or self-awareness, although every step of the way is problematized (it turns out that consciousness becomes problematized as well, but that belongs to another feature of Lacan's theory).
Initially, the condition of the I's existence is basically that it is all potential and no accomplishment, as far as consciousness is concerned, which explains Lacan's use of the word primordial. In this condition, which Lacan calls a stage, the self has popped out of the womb and into presumably nurturant maternal arms, being entirely dependent on the mother and not having differentiated itself as a being distinct from Mama. Though the infant is completely self-absorbed, he has no sense of self and lacks the capacity for differentiation. At the primordial stage, the self is not sufficiently conscious of its own existence to recognize the uniqueness of either its own or its mother's being.
That condition changes with the onset of a dialectical structure of experience. When the self is positioned dialectically, or has its self-presentation (faut de mieux thesis) arrayed distinct from and more or less in psychic opposition to the other's (mother's) self (antithesis) it may become aware that it is like the other and that each is a discrete object-in-the-world. However, by Lacan's dialectical logic, the eventual synthesis of the dialectical encounter will take shape as the developing self's departure from the primordial, then increasingly felt, attachment to the other. Because the self is still at this early stage physically dependent on the mother, it retains attachment to her. At that point, no ego has appeared, and no psychological splitting has yet occurred. Indeed, the result of the initial dialectical encounter is to increase the attachment of self to the other, with the difference that the self is ...