Caught in the image that others have of him, the child tries to enact, to act out this image, to become it, in order to elicit parental approval. He/ she learns to perform for that audience called his parents.
Of course, we can never wholly be sure that we have correctly understood this image that others entertain of us, that we have answered the question ‘what do they want from me? What do they want me to be?” the image that others have of the child is therefore a experienced as a kind of interrogation which the child must endure and answer.
Sartre, Family Idiot:
“Others can reach him through speech; they affirm in him alien phrases that designate him from the outside [such a good boy, so bright, so promising, that boy will come to nothing] and implant themselves in his head; he cannot make them his own…”
“.. the little boy is crushed by the weight of strange phrases that designate him, is informed by these phrases that in the eyes of others he has an other reality, which they take for his true reality. For them he is a person with fixed characteristics. He tries to be this person, to act it out.. expressing his desires and his pain in a certain style he thinks is expected of him.. in the object he is for others he recognizes an ontological primacy over the subject he is for himself. He (the child) thinks he really is this unknown being his parents have discovered.. he tries to represent it, not only to flatter them but to open himself to his objective reality, so that this reality, evoked by his miming and beseeching gestures, should slip into him and fill him with its density. In sum, he tries to incarnate his other self, to lend his living and suffering body to this collection of abstract determinations. But he recognizes that he will never be for himself what he is, perhaps, for others” He can never coincide with the ‘Gustave’ he is for others