Ideas of the origin of the self, or the ego, in mirroring or the mirror stage or some sort of relational transference or interpellation can never explain or indicate the origin of the self only its formation or identification relative to an already existing worlding. In other words the self is not created but reduced out of something more vast and out of conformity with the evolving limits of a world. This is easy to see by conducting the thought experiment of passing through these events backwards. If after making out your image in a mirror or the mirror of your mother's eyes you gain a sense of yourself then what were you just prior to that? Weren't you even more of a self without anything that could be identified even in the most rudimentary or preliminary way as such? Weren't you more truly a self as everything than as something? Of course the word or concept of self is used entirely in the posterior sense, but meaning does not coincide with use and at least a trace of the prior state is indelibly attached to the word.