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This early essay (1949) identifies the point at which the "I" (ego) begins to formulate itself as a socially constructed agent. In Lacan's terminology, the mirror stage is the hinge between the *Imaginary and the *Symbolic (concepts we'll discuss further in class). These concepts are used frequently in contemporary literary criticism and theory. As usual, cuts and explanation that I make are in square brackets; the paragraphs have been numbered for ease of reference.
In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor uncoordination of the neo-natal months. The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness [of humans[ and likewise the presence of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fact of a real <i>specific prematurity of birth</i> in man.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that this is in fact recognized as such by embryologists, by the term <i>foetalization</i> [. . . . ]
This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The <i>mirror stage</i> is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from 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. Thus, to break out of the circle of the <i>Innenwelt</i> into the <i>Umwelt</i> generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.
This fragmented body - which terms I have also introduced into our system of theoretical references - usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions - the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch <img src="bosch1.jpg"> has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent (p. 5) from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man [. . .] (For more coool stuff But this form is even tangibly revealed at the organic level, in the lines of 'fragilization' that define the anatomy of Boschphantasy, go to <a href="http://athena.english.vtas exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms of hysteria.edu/%7Ebaugh/bosch/index.html">this site</a>)
Correlatively, the formation of the <i>I</i> is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium - its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lefty, remote inner castle whose form (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way. Similarly, on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arises spontaneously, as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to designate the mechanisms of obsessional neurosis - inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement.
