Object a and the Symbolic Dimension of Subjectivity

From Bruce Fink's The Lacanian Subject (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1995), p. 94:

"We could account for the lost object in yet another way. The breast is not, during the first experience of satisfaction, constituted as an object at all, much less as an object that is not part of the infant's body and that is largely beyond the infant's control. It is only constituted after the fact, after numerous vain attempts by the infant to repeat the first experience of satisfaction when the mother is not present of refuses to nurse the child. It is the absence of the breast, and thus the failure to achieve satisfaction, that leads to its constitution as an object as such, an object separate from and not controlled by the child. Once constituted (i.e., symbolized, though the child may as yet still be unable to speak in any way intelligible to others), the child can never again refind the breast as experienced the first time around: as not separate from his or her lips, tongue and mouth, or from his or her self. Once the object is constituted, the "primal state" wherein there is no distinction between infant and breast, or between subject and object (for the subject only comes into being when the lacking breast is constituted as object, and qua relation to that object), can never be re-experienced, and thus the satisfaction provided the first time can never be repeated. A kind of innocence is lost forever, and the actual breasts found thereafter are never quite it. Object (a) is the leftover of that process of constituting an object, the scrap that evades the grasp of symbolization. It is a reminder that there is something else, something perhaps lost, perhaps yet to be found."