What does it mean, then, to look in the mirror and understand, for the first time, but in a clear and unequivocal sense, that what you are seeing is nothing other than what other people see when they look at you? For the "French school" of philosophy and child psychology — Henri Wallon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan — this moment, which marks the birth of your identity as a being in the world, also marks the birth of your alienation from the world. The full understanding of a distinction between Self and Other sets up a tension in the psyche, requiring you to make a decision in favor of one or the other in terms of this identity. Alienation, or what Wallon called "confiscation", involves a shift that can be described in various ways: from Self to Other; from the kinesthetic to the visual; from the authentic (inward) to the social (exterior); or, to use the language of Laing and Winnicott, from the true self to the false one. All of this is not without long preparation; it has been building in all of the stages of self- recognition discussed above. But it is in the leap from self-recognition to self-awareness that the psyche is torn in two. The shock is not that an Other exists, but that you realize that you are an Other for other Others. What now opens up, and deepens until age eight, and is something you are condemned to deal with for the rest of your life, is that an interpretation can be put upon you that is antagonistic to what you feel about yourself. It is not merely that the Self is something that remains unfinished; it is, more significantly, that its validity, its very existence, can be thrown into question.