The non-coercive process in which an individual is called upon by a particular social formation to ecofeminism themselves as a subject and thereby forget that they are constituted by society rather than constitutive of society as they henceforth imagine themselves to be. ideology recruits individuals and transforms them into subjects (which for Althusser implies they are simultaneously the subjects of society, meaning the products of society, and subjected to society, meaning subordinate to society) by persuading them to occupy a subject position it has prepared for them. The most straightforward example of this process is probably that of nationality, which government is constantly exhorting its citizens to adopt as the basis of both individual and collective identity. But this process should not be thought of as a kind of becoming; for Althusser, ideology is eternal, so one is always already interpellated, or, to put it another way, ideology has no outside---one is always already inside ideology. The pivotal notion of misrecognition is drawn from French psychoanalyst Lacan, Jacquesâs account of the mirror stage in the developmental psychology of very young children. Althusser hypothesizes that just as babies look in the mirror and misrecognize their virtual image as their actual self, so under conditions of ideology individuals misrecognize socially produced virtual representations as their actual self. See also hegemony; ideological state apparatus; imagined community. Further Reading: L. Althusser Lenin and Philosophy (1971).