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By [[Jacques Lacan]]

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The conception of the mirror stage that I introduced [. . .] has since become more or less established in the practice of the French [psychoanalytic] group. However, I think it worthwhile to bring it again to your attention, especially today, for the light it sheds on the formation of the <i>I</i> as we experience it in psychoanalysis. It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the <i>Cogito</i> [reference is to the tradition stemming from Descartes : I think, therefore I am etc.]

That a <i>Gestalt</i> should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognizes that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex: so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual [pigeon] within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror. Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.

But the fact of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identification, in as much as they raise the problem of the signification of space for the living organism - psychological concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly supreme law of adaptation. [. . .]

I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the <i>imago</i>, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the <i>Innenwelt</i> [interior world] and the <i>Umwelt</i> [exterior world].

It establishes in the defenses of the ego a genetic order [. . . ] and situates (as against a frequently expressed prejudice) hysterical repression and its returns at a more archaic stage than obsessional inversion and its isolating processes, and the latter in turn as preliminary to paranoiac alienation, which dates from the deflection of the specular I into the social I.

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 (so well brought out by the school of Charlotte Bühler in the phenomenon of infantile transitivism), the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.

For such a task, we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressivity that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.

[[Category:Works by Jacques Lacan]]