Following Jacques Lacan’s description of the mirror stage in childhood development, in which an infant mistakes its mirror image for itself, Louis Althusser developed the concept of interpellation. In this, society constantly makes its subjects adopt a particular identity: citizen, consumer, wife, religious follower, etc. The ideological state apparatuses in society, which belong to the private domain, and include family, religion, and culture, and the repressive state apparatuses, which belong to the public domain, such as the police and the military, spread the dominant ideology of the society. Interpellation is the process by which ideology, embodied in such apparatuses, constitutes the identities of individuals in social interactions.
