In this paper I develop several ideas about the self, the other, and their characterizations that have received preliminary formulation in several of my previous publications, particularly those on life history (1977, 1980), transference and countertransference (1981), dialogue (1987a), and the relationship between self and desire (1982). In these papers I adopted a radically dialectical approach to the self. I argued that self-awareness arises when the ego--my most primitive pre-reflexive term--views himself, herself, or more accurately (since gender attributions require minimal self-reflection) itself (understood in a pre-gender way) from the vantage point of the other. Unlike Hegel (1977), George Herbert Mead (1964), and Jean-Paul Sartre (1956, 1964), however, I maintained that the dialectical movement is continuous; that the characterizations, or the typifications, of the other are subject (a) to conventional constraints embedded in language (understood broadly, as in the German Sprache), (b) to desire (itself articulated through and constrained by language), and (c) the resistance of the other, resistance being understood in phenomenological terms as the most elementary criterion of the real. I maintain further that the arrests of the dialectical process through desired characterizations and typifications of the other (and therefore the self) mask, ideologically as it were, the continuous movement of self and other constitution. Put simply: one casts the other (subject to conventional constraints and resistance) in order to cast oneself. And, I hasten to add, one casts oneself in order to cast the other. The movement is complexly circular, and any description of it whether expressed in narrative form (as in Hegel's tale of the master and the slave or Sartre's of Jean Genet) or theoretically (as in Mead's, Sartre's or, for that matter, Lacan's [1966] formulations) insofar as their description has to begin somewhere, suggests a determinable beginning to the movement and a realityto the arrests. In other words, exposition confirms the ideological masking of circularity and the play of desire and language with resistance--the real.

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