Talk:Mirror stage
The mirror stage was the subject of Lacan's first official contribution to psychoanalytic theory, when he propounded the concept to the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936 (the original 1936 paper was never published, but a rewritten version appeared in 1949).
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"The mirror stage as formative of the function fo the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience" is an essay about the formation of identity, the moment of constitution of the self.
Lacan begins his account with the first months of the infant's life. The infant is relatively ucoordinated, helpless and dependent. Btween the age of six and eighteen months the infant become s aware, through seeings its image in the mirror, of its own body as a totality. The human infant seems to go through an initial stage of confusing the image with reality, and may try to grasp hold of the iamge behind the mirror, or seize hold of the support adult.
Then comes the discovery of the existence of an image with its own properties.
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The first significant stage of infant development which Lacan discusses is the mirror stage. Taking place between the ages of six and eighteen months, the mirror stage is not merely a developmental stage which is left behind once it has been traversed, but "represents a fundamental [and enduring] aspect of the structure of subjectivity" (Evans 115). Starting with the notion that "there is a real specific prematurity of birth in man" (Ecrits 4), Lacan holds that the lack of motor control observed in human infants is countered by an advanced degree of visual ability. The disjunction between this underdeveloped motor control and advanced visual ability attains a formative status when the infant first beholds his or her own image, whether in a mirror or in the imitative actions of another person (Evans 190). Confronted with his or her own mirror image, the infant recognises it as his or her own. That is, at this point, the infant human undergoes a process of radical recognition whereby he or she projects the contents of his or her own consciousness onto the specular image with which he or she is confronted.9 In the infant’s budding consciousness, this projection results in a doubling whereby the specular image is perceived as recognising the infant in return. The infant recognises the image, but also perceives that the specular image recognises him or her – it opens up a new conceptual territory in its role as an entity that is both self and other at the same time. The traumatic aspect of this recognition comes from the infant’s recognition of the organic wholeness of the specular image, which stands in glaring contrast to the perceived fragmentation of his or her own body due to his or her underdeveloped motor ability. He or she recognises the specular image as his or her own, but simultaneously recognises a fundamental incompatibility, one which seems to indicate a wholeness in the specular image which is as yet unavailable to the individual: "this Gestalt […] symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination" (Ecrits 2).
This dual recognition produces two results, both of which are aspects of the same reaction. The first of these is that the infant admires the wholeness of the specular image and desires identification with that image. This is the formation of the ideal ego, which may loosely be conceived of as the unarticulated thought, "I want to be that (in which I perceive an ideal version of myself)." The more detrimental aspect of this dual recognition is linked to this desire insofar as the urge to unite with the image is also a rivalrous urge to dominate and assimilate it. In this regard, the wholeness of the image is perceived as threatening because it points to the fragmented condition of the infant’s body. Part of the infant’s desire to ascend to the same degree of organic wholeness perceived in the specular image is thus an aggressive tendency to become that image by consuming it, by emptying its content into himself or herself; i.e. by mastering it.10 To resolve the aggression this tension provokes, the infant identifies with the image, suppressing any awareness of its difference and producing the imaginary formation known as the ego (the always illusory and deceptive image one has of one’s self which is). This advent of the ego "situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual" (Ecrits 2). With the advent of the ego the individual enters the imaginary order and undertakes the lifelong series of identifications between ego and imaginary object (i.e. the imaginary attributes of a given object) which constitute the dynamic sense of "self."
The pre-eminent consequence of this accession to the imaginary order is that of the relationship between the newly formed ego and the specular image. Both in terms of the initiation into the imaginary order and the overall integrity of the RSI nexus, it is nearly impossible to overestimate the force of this identification: "The imaginary exerts a captivating power over the subject, founded in the almost hypnotic effect of the specular image" (Evans 83). The primary impact of this hypnotic effect is that it generates (in the very process of producing the ego) a process of alienation and méconnaissance (misrecognition) that will both facilitate the individual’s accession to the symbolic order and plague him or her with a sense of incompleteness throughout life: "This moment in which the mirror-stage comes to an end inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart and the drama of primordial jealousy … the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations" (Ecrits 5). In identifying with a specular external image (which is then internalised as the ideal ego), the infant undertakes a paradoxical process that is both irreversible and unsustainable. The conception of the self (ego) as identical with, yet threatened by and aggressive toward, the other (specular image) is at bottom alienation pure and simple; seeing him or herself as the other and other as self makes the very notion of selfhood one typified by a perpetual oscillation between projection and assimilation. The self and other are thus two sides of the same process, at the heart of which is alienation; they are mutually dependent on each other for their definitions, imaginatively existing while in reality merely ex-sisting: "The ego and the counterpart form the prototypical dual relationship, and are interchangeable. This relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification with the little other means that the ego, and the imaginary order itself, are both sites of a radical alienation" (Evans 82). As Lacan says, although in an inversion of terms which reveals the mutually constitutive relationship of alienation to the imaginary, "alienation is constitutive of the imaginary order" (qtd. in Evans 82). Alienation, the ability to think the self as other and the other as self is thus the defining feature of the I, the basis for the fantasy of selfhood.
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The mirror stage is described in Lacan's essay, "The Mirror Stage as formative in the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience", the first of his Écrits, which remains one of his seminal papers. Some have crudely put this as the point at which the child 'recognises' him- or herself in the mirror image, but this is unfaithful to what Lacan has in mind and also confuses his terminology. Lacan's emphasis here is on the process of identification with an outside image or entity induced through, as he puts it, "insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic – and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development" (Lacan, Écrits (rvd. edn., 2002), 'The mirror stage', p. 5).
It is significant that this process of identification is the first step towards the manufacture of the subject because all that follows it - the transition into the Imaginary and the Symbolic order - is based on this misrecognition (méconnaissance): this is the process that Lacan detects as manifesting itself at every subsequent identification with another person, identity (not to be confused with 'identification') or suchlike throughout the subject's life. This is the start of a lifelong process of identifying the self in terms of the Other. What is also occasionally overlooked is the experiential basis of Lacan's early paper. As one writer has observed: "To evidence concerning the role of the other in childhood – the situation known as "transitivism," for instance, where the child will impute his own actions to another – Lacan adds evidence from animal biology, where it has been experimentally shown that a perceptual relationship to another of the same species is necessary in the normal maturing process. Without the visual presence of others, the maturing process is delayed, although it can be restored to a more nearly normal tempo by placing a mirror in the animal’s cage." (Anthony Wilden, "Lacan and the discourse of the Other" in Lacan, The Language of the Self: the Function of Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 159 – 160.)
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Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I" (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is 'decentred'. The key observation of Lacan’s essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognising their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this 'jubilation' as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a 'body in bits and pieces', unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers. The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan's reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the 'organic’ or 'natural' development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis", is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: 'I hit him!', and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy …).
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The young child's identification with his own image (what Lacan terms the "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego"), a stage that occurs anywhere from 6-18 months of age. For Lacan, this act marks the primordial recognition of one's self as "I," although at a point before entrance into language and the symbolic order. This stage's misrecognition or méconnaissance (seeing an ideal-I where there is a fragmented, chaotic body) subsequently "characterizes the ego in all its structures" (Écrits 6). In particular, this creation of an ideal version of the self gives pre-verbal impetus to the creation of narcissistic phantasies in the fully developed subject. That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, et cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves. The mirror stage establishes what Lacan terms the "imaginary order" and, through the imaginary, continues to assert its influence on the subject even after the subject enters the symbolic order. See the Lacan Module on Psychosexual Development.
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Jacques Lacan tells of the mirror stage in his essay "The Mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," which was published in English in Écrits: A Selection, first by Alan Sheridan in 1977, and more recently by Bruce Fink in 2002. Lacan first delivered this essay as a talk at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich on July 17 1949. In Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, the "mirror stage" (le stade du miroir) is the point in an infant's life when he may recognize his "self" in a mirror, and thus achieves consciousness of himself.
When the child sees itself in the mirror, often propped up by another person or mechanical device and is able to associate the image with itself, it retroactively posits that before this autonomy that it now perceives, its body was in "bits and pieces." At the moment of perceiving bodily autonomy, Jane Gallop says there is jubilation, but it is short lived. As soon as the infant can posit that prior to this moment it was in "bits and pieces," it recognizes the danger of regressing to this earlier stage.
The potential relation between facets of the mirror stage and our relation to character archetypes has been explored in depth by theorists of entertainment media.
See also
[[Category:Development] [[Category:Imaginary] [[Category:Terms] [[Category:Concepts] [[Category:Psychoanalysis] [[Category:Jacques Lacan]
