Augustine in contexts: Lacan's repetition of a scene from the confessions

Jacques Lacan never seems to exhaust the full significance of a brief scenario from Saint Augustine's Confessions: 'I have myself seen jealousy in a baby and know what it means. He was not old enough to talk, but, whenever he saw his foster-brother at the breast, he would grow pale with envy' (Bk. 1, Ch. 7). References to the anecdote appear in Lacan's writings from The Family Complexes (1938) to Encore (1973). He repeatedly asserts its exemplary representation of the emergence of human consciousness. But why Augustine's 'Vide ego ...' elicited and sustained his attention over so many years presents a riddle. My examination of the privileged status of this scenario of sibling jealousy takes several factors into account: the specific content of the passage, its wider context in the Confessions, and its contextualization in Lacan's writings. Moreover, in addition to the theoretical relevance of Augustine's exemplum, it may also read as a substantive screen memory that, for Lacan, resonates with diverse personal significances.