Lacan: The Mirror Stage

The idea of the "mirror stage" is an important early component in Lacans critical reinterpretation of the work of Freud. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants (baby) pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt (noun Psychology an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts) of the infant's emerging(appear) perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually (continually) strive (make great effort) throughout his or her life. For Lacan, the mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. As the so-called "individual" matures and enters into social relations through language, this "other" will be elaborated within social and linguistic frameworks that will give each subject's personality (and his or her neuroses and other psychic disturbances) its particular characteristics. Lacans ideas about the formation of the "I" developed over time in conjunction with his other elaborations of Freudian theory. He presented a paper on the mirror stage on August 3, 1936, at a conference of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad.(It is to this conference that Lacan is referring in the first sentence of the essay). Thirteen years later, on July 17, 1949, at a conference of the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Zurich, Lacan delivered another version of the mirror stage paper that later in the same year appeared in print in the Revue Francais de Psychanalyse. The essay was reprinted in the French publication of Ecrits in 1966. Jean Roussel prepared the first translation into English, which appeared in New Left Review 51 (September/October 1968): 63-77. This publication in English is significant, as it contributed to the introduction of Lacanian theory, and specifically the model of the mirror stage, into leftist intellectual circles in Britain at the time when cultural studies was emerging

as a field. A new English translation by Alan Sheridan heads Ecrits: A Selection, which was published in 1977.

The conception of the mirror stage. . . 1 In the opening paragraph of the essay Lacan makes reference to his presentation on the mirror stage at the (congress). The concept continues to be important for psychoanalysis, Lacan argues, because it accounts for characteristics of the central focus of psychoanalytic practice--the "I" which presents itself to the analyst (and, of course, the "I" of the analyst as well). In the Freudian model of the psyche, which Lacan, as a Freudian, takes as a point of departure for his ideas, the "ego" is not fully self-aware or in control of itself; the ego's perception of itself and of the world is shaped, in part, by the desires and fears arising from the id and from the injunctions imposed by the superego. Lacan's concept of the mirror stage tries to dramatize how the ego itself becomes divided. At the outset, it is important to grasp two points.

Lacan's version of psychoanalysis takes for granted that the human mind is not a unified whole, governed by reason--represented here by the reference to Descartes's Cogito--but that any self-knowledge is to some degree an illusion. Lacan frequently finds ways to contort Descartes's famous line "I think, therefore I am" (cogito ergo sum). He was also a harsh critic of American-style ego-psychology, which attempts to help the patient develop a strong ego, and which, in Lacan's view, compels the subject to conform to social conventions. The mirror stage is not only a passing phase of human psychological development but also a model for the relationship between the "I" and its image of itself. In a 1954 seminar, Lacan stresses the ongoing nature of the mirror stage (Seminar I 74).

2 The fact that human beings, unlike animals, recognize themselves in the reflected images of their bodies forms the basis for Lacan's speculations on

the role of the image in the development of the human psyche. Lacan discusses this idea further in another 1954 seminar (Seminar I170). In the field of developmental psychology, one's awareness of one's own position within the physical world and the ability to imagine that position in relation to other physical objects is called "situational apperception". 3 An animal, even one as intelligent as a chimpanzee, will quickly lose interest in its reflection. A human infant, however, takes delight in relationship between her own movements and the movements of the image in the mirror. Long before the child can articulate the thought "that's me," her sense of being situated in the world (in Heidegger's terms, her sense of "being a being") develops when a image of her physical self establishes itself in her psyche in relation to the images of other elements of the world. This image doesn't necessarily have to be put in place by way of an experience with an actual mirror; other experiences--the attention of the mother to the child, for example--can give rise to the image of the self as a separate entity. 4 Lacan gives six months as the earliest age at which the experiences he categorizes into the mirror stage can occur. He describes the infant's fascination with her image in some detail, emphasizes the child's tendency to strain forward, as if to get closer to the reflection. This physical straining will become emblematic of the psychological strain of the individual later in life. 5 Eighteen months serves as the cut-off point for the mirror stage; when children begin to acquire language and form social bonds with others, the mirror stage, as a developmental phase, comes to an end, but the dynamic relationship between the subject and his image remains a perpetual force in subject's psychic life. It is a libidinal relationship--the psyche invests libido in the image of itself, along the lines suggested by Freud in On Narcissism: An Introduction. Having an image of oneself is part of human reality--what Lacan calls an "ontological structure of the human world." We are always, in a sense, "someone else" insofar as the image is perceived as separate from us. 6 By introducing the idea of identification,, Lacan develops his mirror stage

model as a process in which the infant does not simply "match up" what he sees in the mirror with his experience of his own existence, but is rather transformed by the vision of his image, which he "takes on," both as a representation of himself and as a goal to which he strives. Lacan makes an allusion to Judeo-Christian theology here: Genesis describes humans as made in the image of God--in the imago Dei--and this idea has informed both Jewish and Christian philosophy. Augustine, for example, suggests that humans must strive to restore the divine image in themselves. Lacan's mirror stage can be understood as an ironic version of this theology: to be human is to be the creation of one's own image. 7 It is important to note that during the year or so of the developmental mirror stage the child is physically helpless, unable to move about easily on his own, unable to feed or to care for himself. To some extent, the child experiences his body as incomplete, even fragmented. The image in the mirror, however, is the image of a whole body, a singular, complete entity. The child's encounter with an image that does not in fact correspond to his experience lays the foundation for what Lacan calls the "exemplary function" of the mirror stage. Throughout life, the image of ourselves that we hold in our minds fails to correspond completely with our actual physical, historical, emotional being. The child will go on to elaborate a complex "self-image" based on his relations with other people as well as on the conventions of language, which will give him the ability to name himself and to refer to himself with the pronoun "I". The difference between the projected image of himself and his actual self, however, will continue disrupt his experience of his own existence in various ways. 8 Lacan associates the image with Freud's ego-ideal, calling it the Ideal-I. The "usual register" refers to the position of the ego in the Freudian model of the psyche. The formation of this projected image of a self is important to the development of secondary identifications--libidinal investments in other people, things, and ideas (see Freud's "On Narcissism" for an introduction to this process of libidinal investment). The primary identification is with the image itself, and Lacan's main concern here is to show that this identification is "fictional," that the Ideal-I will never fully conform to the subject's actual experience of existence. Lacan uses a geometrical analogy to illustrate this lack of convergence: an asymptotic line runs close to a curve but never meets

it. (insert illustration). Even before the subject enters consciously into social reality, even before any of the conventional ideas of "striving for goals" or "achieving" are established for the socialized individual, the "I" is set up as internally disunited, permanently incomplete. 9 So what is this Ideal-I like? Returning to his earlier emphasis on the helplessness of the human infant, Lacan again stresses that the mirror image, though in one sense an "accurate" representation of the infant's body, is at the same time different from the infant's impressions of her own existence. The fact that a reflection is reversed, for example, indicates that reflected images never exactly correspond to their originals. The "wholeness" of the reflected body is an important element of this lack of correspondence. The reflection represents to the infant a fixed and stable form--the German word Gestalt means form--that anticipates the relative self-control and stability the child will achieve as she grows older. In this respect, the image represents all the potentialities of the "I" it establishes in the child's psyche. But the image is utimately a different thing, separate from the child; its potential can never be completely realized. The image that crystalizes the "I" is "pregnant" with the ambivalent characteristics of the human sense of self. The last sentence of this paragraph indicates how this combination of the image's stability and unattainability shapes the lives of adult humans, largely in negative ways, resulting in limiting self-concepts, anxieties, disappointments, and unfulfilling accommodations to the circumstances of life. 10 Lacan observes that different mental states, such as dreams, hallucinations, projections, and the associations that emerge from the speech of the analysand in the session, all involve the presence of a mental image of the subject's own body. He suggests that the mind needs this image to organize the visible world--the subject must be able to visualize herself in relation to the objects around her. 11 Lacan turns to biology for support for his claims about the internalization of an image of the self, although he observes that biology would not accept the psychodynamic principles on which he is basing his argument. He offers two fairly clear examples:

female pigeons reach sexual maturity only in the presence of other members of their species; a female pigeon in isolation will mature if she sees her own reflection in a mirror. at a particular development stage, a type of locust will make the transition from one form to another if it sees movements similiar to those made by members of its species.

Lacan links these observations from biology with aesthetics, suggesting a connection between certain animals' tendencies to respond to visual forms that resemble them (homeomorphic identification) and ideas about beauty that are shaped in part by notions of scale and symmetry derived from the dimensions of the human body. 12 The phenomenon of animal mimicry (physical appearances or behaviors that resemble those of other animals or elements of the environment for protection; heteromorphic identification). also offers insights into the role of visual identification in development. Lacan suggests that psychological accounts of such physical transformations are no less valid than biological explanations that draw on the theory of evolution. He refers to the work of Roger Callois, a radical sociologist who associated with George Bataille, Michel Leiris, and other theorists in an effort to reformulate approaches to analyzing society. Lacan is particularly interested here in how psychic events such as identification are connected to physical reality--the body and the physical environment the body occupies. The acquisition of a unified (though ultimately unstable) sense of selfhood is bound up with a mastery of the physical, and eventually social space that the self imagines itself to occupy. I myself have shown in the social dialectic. . . 13 In "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis"--the essay that follows "The MIrror Stage" in the English translation of Ecrits--Lacan develops some of the implications of his concept of the mirror stage. It is important to understand that the mirror stage establishes a relationship beteen the subject and the image--the Ideal-I--and not an equivalence or unity of the two. Throughout the subject's life, the experience of the physical sensations and emotional impulses arising from the organic body remains something different from the

subject's "I" enshrined in the image of the self. In the words of the French poet Rimbaud, to whom Lacan alludes in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" (Ecrits 23), "I is an other." The mirror stage lays the foundation for what Lacan calls "paranoiac knowledge" (Ecrits 17). All humans are paranoid insofar as we are haunted by the sense of an "other" who influences our thoughts and actions. We need the image of ourselves in order to establish relationships with other people and in order to negotiate the physical and social reality of our world--in our imaginary map of the world, our "I" is the "dot" that indicates our location. This need arises from the fact that as infants we cannot fend for ourselves, and this sense of "organic insufficiency" persists throughout our lives. In this respect, we are also "haunted" by nature, by the physical vulnerability and mortality against which our self-concepts, relationships, and myriad strategies of personal care and defense must ultimately fail to protect us. 14 As the "dot" on our mental map of reality, the image of our "I" serves as a bridge between the internal world--the German word is Innenwelt--and external reality--the Umwelt, which also translates to "environment". 15 Unlike many animals, who soon after birth are able to move about and find food on their own, human beings are born "prematurely". Our development into relatively independent individuals is at once a physiological process of maturation in which we gain coordination and strength, but it is also a psychical process which confers on us the internal images which we use to orient ourselves in our reality. In Lacan's view, this psychical development does not so much overcome our initial helplessnesss as it gives us ways to cope with what Lacan calls the "dehiscence at the heart of the organism" which persists throughout our existence. The word "dehiscence" has particular applications in the fields of botany and physiology: it means to gape open or to splay, as when a seed pod bursts or when an ovary ruptures to release the egg. Significantly, these are stages in developmental processes, and for Lacan the term is not strictly metaphorical, but refers to the primordial nature of the human subject as physically uncoordinated and psychically split.

16 Lacan again turns to the domain of biology to claim that the human brain contains an organic component that serves to register the human organism's image of itself--a mirror inside the mind. This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic. . . 17 To understand Lacan's claim that the mirror stage projects the individual into history, we might return to his statement in paragraph 8 that the mirror stage points the development of the ego in a "fictional direction". "Fictional" here can be taken in two senses. If our lives are in any sense "stories," if we experience our existence as an eventful progression through time, each of us needs to become a "character" who will play the role of the protagonist of our autobiography. Lacan argues that this character is fictional, that is, it is fabricated in the mirror stage when the infant's reflected image presents itself as means of overcoming the infant's sensations of bodily fragmentation and powerlessness. By calling the image of a whole, unified body "orthopaedic," Lacan suggests that the "I" formed in the mirror stage functions like a brace (such as the kind used to treat scoliosis) that seeks to hold the unruly forces animating the subject into a stable position. In bringing into being the "I" who will play the protagonist in the subject's life story, forming a link between the subject's psyche and the world outside, the mirror stage lays the groundwork for the cultural formation of identity, which is why the mirror-stage model has become important to certain strands of Marxism, gender theory, theories of sexuality, and cultural studies. Louis Althusser, for example, draws heavily upon Lacan's model for his theory of the interpellation of the subject by the ideological state apparatuses. The social dimension of the formation of "identity"--a term Lacan himself rarely uses, perhaps because it implies a unity and self-identity that are not concurrent the radically provisional nature of the "I" in his model--is inaugurated in the Oedipal complex, where other subjects (the mother- and father-figures) intervene into the dynamic that forms the "I." At this point, the four-part schema Lacan calls the "inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications" can be applied to the subject's psychic life.

18 The provisional, fictional "I" serves at once as a kind of orthopaedic brace that holds the unruly, fragmenting organic drives into a coherent whole and as a defense against the impulses arising from these drives, which never "go away," but occupy the psychic register Freud calls the id. A great deal of classical psychoanalytic theory is devoted to accounting for how the id continues to assert itself in the life of the subject. As Freud often did, Lacan turns to visual art for examples of psychic operations, suggesting here that the fantasmagorical images of bodies in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch correspond to manifestations of unconscious drives in the mental and physical symptoms of schizophrenia and hysteria. 19 As does Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy,, Lacan assumes a connection between artistic production and dream-states, noting that dreams frequently contain images of fortresses or enclosures that divide the landscape into interior and exterior spaces. The adventures the dreamer plays out in these spaces symbolize the dynamic, combative relationship between the ego and the id. Lacan also notes that metaphors based on the imagery of fortification are common in the speech of patients suffering from obsessional neuroses. 20 In a passage that has important implications for literary criticism, Lacan emphasizes that these symbols are not the products of the creative imaginations of individuals, but rather that they are manifestations of the basic mental organization of human beings in human culture--that is, in human systems of signification. Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues, can supply the theoretical "grid" of concepts with which to analyze specific instances of such symbolization as they are presented in the speech of individual patients, relating them to fundamental functions in the development and operations of the psyche. Viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, the literary text represents a particular organization of signs in relation to fundamental structures of psychic life. The author cannot be considered an "absolute subject" who is the origin of the linguistic structures of the text, but as structure him- or herself within the dynamic of psychic drives and sociolinguistic conventions.

21 Within his own field of psychoanalytic practice, Lacan hopes that his theory will be used to determine where something has "gone wrong" in the process of the formation of the "I" of his patients, giving rise to mental illness. Following Freud, Lacan suggests throughout his work that mental illnesses are variations on the same psychic structures that produce "normal" mental states. Referring to the work of Freud's daughter Anna, this passage suggests that certain disorders such as hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and paranoia can be linked to particular stages within the formation of the "I". A critical juncture in this process--the point at which much can "go wrong"--is the transition out of the mirror stage, which takes place in the Oedipal complex when when the "specular I" gives way to the "social I" and the initial identification of the infant with her Ideal-I becomes inflected by cultural norms, conventions, and expectations. This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end. . . 22 At the end of the mirror stage--again, it's important to understand that the mirror stage "ends" only in its status as a phase of psychic development, but continues as a structural element of psychic life--the initial relationship between the infant and her Ideal-I becomes the foundation for the child's social relationships and for the child's self-image as a social being. To illustrate the dialectical nature of this relationship, Lacan turns to a type of behavior in young children observed by the child psychologist Charlotte Baut;hler: young children may cry in pain when they see another child injure himself; a child who hits another child may complain of having been hit. Lacan gives a fuller description of this transitivism, using these examples, in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" (Ecrits 19). While this form of transitivism does not persist in older children, the child's "I," even when it is established as a separate entity distinct from others, will continue to be dependent upon others for its stability and coherence. In addition to transitivism, Lacan views jealousy in pre-verbal infants--early instances of sibling rivalry, for example--as another indication of how the child's experience of selfhood is bound up with the presence of others. In "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," he quotes a passage from Augustine's Confessions to support this point (Ecrits 20).

23 For Lacan, we are "who we are" only in relation to other people. Our aims and desires are shaped by the desires of others, in interpersonal terms and in terms of social expectations and prohibitions. Our knowledge of the world comes to us by way of other people; the language we learn to speak prexists us, and to a great degree our thoughts conform to preestablished concepts and linguistic structures. As we assimilate to these social conventions, the pressures of our instinctual drives--sexuality, for example--appear to us as threats, as "dangers." Those of us who were raised in the Christian tradition might recall anxiety about "sin," which can serve as an example of a socially elaborated defense against instinctual impulses that are viewed as harmful to the integrity of the self (the "soul.") The prohibition of incest in the Oedipal complex--accompanied by the threat of castration for the male child-- is the classical example in Freudian psychoanalysis of the intervention of cultural norms into the child's sexual impulses. 24 Freud's theory of object libido, which is directed outward toward persons and things, and the libido that is invested in the ego (what Freud calls neuroses. Incidents of psychosis occur when the fortification breaks down and the subject can no longer distinguish the internal from the external world, when the external world captates the ego. Insofar as the ego maintains itself in a dialectical, contingent relationship with the id and with the world outside, forms of neurosis and madness are hard for humans to avoid. What psychoanalysis reveals, Lacan suggests, is the madness of everyday life, the interminable psychic distress that characterizes the human mind. 30 Lacan repeats this thought in a manner consistent with Freud's perspective on psychoanalytic theory: the psychoanalyst's observations of the experiences of neurotic and psychotic patients afford insight into the operations of the "normal" mind. These insights, moreover, indicate that there is in fact no "normal" mind--the socially elaborated idea of "normality" is, in fact, one of the mconnaissances of the ego and, as an unattainable characteristic of the Ideal-I, serves as spur for aggresssion and neurosis. Lacan again decries the routine, deadening rationalization of modern social life.

31 Like anthropology, a discipline to which Lacan frequently refers (especially the work of the structural anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss), psychoanalysis occupies the no-man's-land between physical nature and the "culture" that human beings create for themselves out of material and mental structures. Just as he earlier claims the superiority of psychoanalysis over existential philosophy, here he suggests that his field takes precedence over anthropology. Focusing as it does on the human subject and the nature of subjectivity as an amalgam of corporeality, mental imagery, and language, psychoanalysis is in the best position to understand human culture. Caught up in libidinal bonds with its own image and with other human beings, the ego's life, and the collective life of the culture in which the ego participates, is dominated by desire, which Lacan here calls "love." Here, this love refers in particular to the transference relationship between the patient and the analyst, one of the fundamental elements of psychoanalytic therapy. The figure of the knot hints at the fascination with mathematical knot theory that plays a significant role late in Lacan's career. 32 Returning to the idea that even the most altruistic person--the good Samaritan--is aggressively trying to assuage narcissistic disappointments, Lacan issues a challenge to psychoanalysts. Rather than viewing psychoanalysis as an altruistic "helping profession," Lacan suggests that it consists in a kind of philosophical exercise for both analyst and analysand, the goal of which is not necessarily to "feel better" but to have a better grasp of the human condition. 33 The essay ends on a note of apparent (and uncharacteristic) humility, but Lacan's modest statements about the limitations of psychoanalysis can be read as an aggressive challenge to those analysts whom Lacan feels are degrading the Freudian tradition through simplifications of the theory and naive, feel-good approaches to the practice. He further develops these criticisms almost a decade later in a report on "The Direction of the Treatment and Principles of its Power" (Ecrits 226). Because it places me in a situation that activates the desires and aggressions generated by the split in my ego, therapy can guide me toward a confrontation with the basic truth of my existence: in analysis, I confront my fundamental lack of being, what Lacan elsewhere calls the manque--tre (the want-to-be), the insatiable

desire that is spurred, ultimately, by the fact of death. (There are loud echoes of Heidegger's analysis of Being in this formulation.) Lacan frequently compares psychoanalysis to a mystery religion in which, at a certain point in the ritual, a secret truth is revealed. The psychoanalytic session can bring me to the point where I realize that to be human is to be subject to a desire that cannot be fulfilled. What is striking about Lacan's vision of analysis is that he does not suggest that I accommodate myself to this disappointment, that I "make do" with the norms imposed by society and culture, but rather that I find a way to be less disabled by the dialectic of desire that structures my being. It is difficult to sum up the aims of Lacanian psychoanalysis, but we might say that the patient "comes to terms with desire." The exercise of performing a close reading of the ambiguities of the words in this expression, and of assessing its inadequacy, will be a better introduction to Lacanian theory than any summation I might offer here.

utility of the short session, his reflections on time and consciousness throughout his work suggest that the abrupt interruption of a session might in some cases contribute to the patient's insight. Lacan served as president of the Socit Psychanalytic de Paris, but in the same year resigned from the SPP to join the newly founded Socit Franais de Psychanalyse. Lacan's unconventional approach to training analysts continued to cause problems for the SFP in its effort to seek the endorsement of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In 1964, Lacan founded the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, which endured until Lacan announced its dissolution in 1980, one year before his death in 1981.

The Live Of Jacque Lacan

Jacques Lacan was born in Paris on April 13, 1901. He studied medicine, specializing in psychiatry, and received his doctorate in psychiatry in 1932. He began to train as a psychoanalyst sometime around 1934. During the thirties, he associated with the surrealists in Paris, and throughout his life, he maintained friendships with writers and artists such as Raymond Queneau, Georges Bataille, and Salvador Dali. For a short time he was Pablo Picassos private physician. In 1951 Lacan began to hold seminars on psychoanalytic theory in his own home; the first of his public seminars, at St. Anne, started on November 18, 1953, and throughout the following decades Lacan's seminars became one of the focal points for intellectual life in Paris. His ideas were the cause of much controversy in the professional psychoanalytic community. Particularly disturbing for traditional analysts was his practice of the "short session": whereas the standard analytic session lasts about fifty minutes, Lacan varied the length of his sessions, sometimes reducing the time drastically. Although he never theorized in print about the