'ego formation' is correct and usable in written English.
It is most commonly used in psychology and philosophy to refer to the development of a person's sense of self-worth or self-identity. For example, "The psychoanalyst's study of ego formation helps her patients better understand their identity and feelings of self-worth."
In particular, the Imaginary is central to Lacan's account(s) of ego-formation (as per the mirror stage see 2.2 below).
Kristeva offers the examples of bodily fluids, sweat, blood, pus, milk, as non-objects that are banished in the course of ego-formation.
In them, the tenuous processes of ego-formation risk collapse; faced with difficulty clarifying the boundaries of the self, the subject reverts to ambivalent aggressivity.
The subsequent and recurring retreat from object-cathexis (investment of instinctual energy in an object) to identification (withdrawal of that energy into the self), is the primary mechanism of ego-formation, taking the lost object into oneself.
The semiotic corresponds to the diffuse drive energy of auto-erotism and Kristeva takes up Freud's challenge to assess the psychical action of ego-formation that enables primary narcissism, which she attributes to a primary identification with the imaginary father.
The danger of a too strong or too weak symbolic order is that it encourages a return to abjection or melancholia, to the point prior to ego-formation, to a dissolution of the borders that maintain social life and creative subjectivity, contributing to the ego's collapse into an empty abyssal void and discouraging semiotic creativity.
Just as the father retains dominance in political life after his death, so he dominates psychic life even prior to the ego's formation.
In order to stay focused on the feminist deployment of the psychoanalytic theoretical apparatus, I will concentrate first on Lacan's understanding of the intersection of language and law in the symbolic order, and then on his account of the ego's formation in the imaginary order.
To that end, the Jets will rely on Ryan to guide an enormous amount of egos into formation.
