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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.
== def ==
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).
