This paper aims at reexamining James Joyce`s troubled relationship with Ireland, one that is characteristically marked by ambivalence or paradox. Many scholars have tended to see it in terms of the creative tension between Joyce as a modernist aspiring to artistic universality, and Joyce as a native subject preoccupied with parochial identity. Such a tendency has mythically constructed Joyce as a metropolitan modernist. In countering this canonical formulation, this essay recontexualizes the question in terms of the psychological dynamics of national identification, by using Slavoj Zizek`s conceptualization of the nation as the "Nation-Thing." To illustrate these dynamics, this paper uses the Stephen Dedalus of Ulysses. Even though Joyce cannot be directly identified with Stephen, the latter`s ambivalent relationship with Ireland may well, in a number of ways, mirror that of Joyce. Through a close reading of first three chapters of Ulysses, this paper argues, after Zizek, that Stephen`s relationship with Ireland, or his national identification, is sustained by a relationship toward "the Nation qua Thing." Here, the Nation-Thing-as a non-discursive entity like Lacan`s "the Real"-exists outside language or the symbolic order, yet our access to it is only through a certain set of discursive practices, that is, a community`s "way of life" such as traditions, rituals and myths. This paradoxical nature of the Nation-Thing-oscillating between absence and presence-would enable us to explore the dynamics of national identification without reducing the nation into a purely discursive artifact, and thereby to give a historical and psychological justification to Joyce/Stephen`s ambivalent relationship with Ireland.