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The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I

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By [[Jacques Lacan]]
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==Introduction==
The conception of the [[mirror]]-[[phase]] which I introduced at our last congress, thirteen years ago, has since become more or less established in the [[practice]] of the [[French]] group; I [[think]] it nevertheless worthwhile to bring it again to your attention, especially today, for the light that it sheds on the [[formation]] of the I as we [[experience]] it in [[psychoanalysis]].<ref>''Translator's note'': '<i>I</i>' is used here and throughout to translate [[Lacan]]'s '<i>je</i>', in 'le <i>je</i>', 'la [[fonction]] du <i>je</i>', etc. '<i>Ego</i>' translates 'le <i>moi</i>' and is used in the normal [[sense]] of [[psychoanalytic]] [[literature]]. On '<i>je</i>', see Note 2 below.</ref> It is an experience which leads us to oppose any [[philosophy]] directly issuing from the ''[[Cogito]]''.
This early essay (1949) identifies the Some of you may perhaps [[remember]] our starting point in a feature of [[human]] [[behaviour]] illuminated by a fact of comparative [[psychology]]. The human offspring, at which an age when he is for a [[time]], however short, outdone by the "I" (ego) begins to formulate itself chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own [[image]] in a socially constructed agentmirror. In LacanThis [[recognition]] manifests itself in the illuminatory [[mimicry]] of the ''AhaErlebnis''s terminology, which Köhler sees as 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 usualexpression of situational apperception, cuts and explanation that I make are in square brackets; an essential [[moment]] of the paragraphs have been numbered for ease act of referenceintelligence.
This act, far from exhausting itself, as with the chimpanzee, once the image has been mastered and found empty, in the [[child]] immediately rebounds in a series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relations of the assumed movements of the image to the reflected [[environment]], and of this [[virtual]] [[complex]] to the [[reality]] it reduplicates the child's own [[body]], and the persons or even things in his proximity.
This [[event]] can take [[place]], as we have known since Baldwin, from the age of six months, and its [[repetition]] has often compelled us to ponder over the startling [[spectacle]] of the nurseling in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and narrowly confined as he is within some support, human or artificial (what, in [[France]], we call a ''trotte-bébé''), he nevertheless surmounts, in a flutter of jubilant [[activity]], the obstructions of his support in [[order]] to fix his attitude in a more or less leaning-forward [[position]], and bring back an instantaneous aspect of the image to hold it in his [[gaze]].
The conception of For us, this activity retains the mirror stage that I introduced [. . .[meaning]] has since become more or less established in we have given it up to the practice age of the French eighteen months. This meaning discloses a [[psychoanalyticlibidinal]] group. Howeverdynamism, I think it worthwhile to bring it again to your attentionwhich has hitherto remained problematic, especially today, for the light it sheds on the formation of the <i>I</i> as we experience it in psychoanalysis. It is well as an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from [[ontological]] [[structure]] of the <i>Cogito</i> human [[world]] which accords with our reflections on [[paranoiac]] [reference is to the tradition stemming from Descartes : I think, therefore I am etc[knowledge]].]
We have only to [[understand]] the mirror-phase ''as an [[identification]]'', in the [[full]] sense which [[analysis]] gives to the term: namely, the transformation which takes place in the [[subject]] when he assumes an image -whose [[predestination]] to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytical [[theory]], of the old term ''[[imago]]''.
Some This jubilant assumption of you may recall that this conception originated in a feature of human behavior illuminated his mirror-image by a fact of comparative psychology. The childthe little man, at the ''[[infans]]'' [[stage]], still sunk in his motor incapacity and nurseling dependency, would seem to exhibit in an age when he exemplary [[situation]] the [[symbolic]] [[matrix]] in which the I is for precipitated in a timeprimordial [[form]], however shortbefore it is objectified in the [[dialectic]] of identification with the [[other]], outdone by and before [[language]] restores to it, in the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence[[universal]], can nevertheless already recognize its function as such his own image in a mirrorsubject. [. . .]
This form would have to be called the ''[[Ideal]]-I''<ref>Throughout this article we leave in its peculiarity the [[translation]] we have adopted for [[Freud]]'s <i>Ideal-Ich</i> (i.e. '<i>je-idéal</i>'), without further comment, save that we have not maintained it since.</ref>, if we wanted to restore it to a familiar scheme, in the sense that it will also be the root-stock for secondary identifications, among which we place the functions of libidinal normalization. But the important point is that this form situates the [[instance]] of the ''ego'', before its [[social]] determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the [[individual]] alone, or rather, which will rejoin the [[development]] of the subject only asymptotically, whatever the success of the [[dialectical]] syntheses by which he must resolve as ''I'' his discordance with his own reality.
This act, far from exhausting itself, ==The Body as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates --the child's own body, and the persons and things around him. Gestalt==
The fact is that the [[total]] form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the [[maturation]] of his [[power]] is given to him only as ''[[Gestalt]]'', that is to say in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size that fixes it and a symmetry that inverts it which are in [[conflict]] with the turbulence of the motions which the subject feels animating him. Thus, this ''Gestalt'' -- whose pregnancy should be regarded as linked to the [[species]], though its motor style remains unrecognizable -- by these twin aspects of its [[appearance]], symbolizes the [[mental]] permanence of the ''I'', at the same time as it prefigures its [[alienating]] destination; it is pregnant with the correspondences which unite the ''I'' with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms which dominate him, or finally, with the [[automaton]] in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his fabrication tends to find completion.
This event can take place Indeed, where ''imagos'' are concerned -- whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in [[. . .outline]] from in our daily experience and the age penumbra of six monthssymbolic efficacity<ref>Cf. Claude Lévi-[[Strauss]], ''[[Structural]] [[Anthropology]]'', and its repetition has often made me reflect upon [[London]] [[1968]], Chapter X.</ref> -- the mirror-image would seem to be the startling spectacle threshold of the infant in front of [[visible]] world, if we go by the mirror. Unable as yet to walkdisposition which the ''imago of our own body'' presents in [[hallucinations]] or [[dreams]], whether it concerns its individual features, or even to stand upits infirmities, and held tightly as he is by some support, human or artificial its [[object]]-projections; or if we notice the [[role]] of the mirror [. . .[apparatus]], he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter the appearances of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and''[[double]]'', fixing his attitude I a slightly leaning-forward positionin which [[psychic]] realities, in order to hold it in his gazehowever heterogeneous, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image[[manifest]] themselves.
That a ''Gestalt'' should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of [[biological]] experimentation which is itself so [[alien]] to the [[idea]] of psychic [[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 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 the exposure of 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 which would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as formative and [[erotogenic]].
For meBut facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identification, this activity retains inasmuch as they raise the meaning I have given it up problem of the [[significance]] 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 age supposedly supreme law of eighteen months[[adaptation]]. This meaning discloses a libidinal dynamism, which has hitherto remained problematicLet us only [[recall]] how Roger [[Caillois]] (who was then very young, as well and still fresh from his breach with the sociological [[school]] of his [[training]]) illuminated the subject by using the term '<i>legendary psychasthenia</i>' to classify morphological mimicry as an ontological structure of the human world that accords [[obsession]] with my reflections on paranoiac knowledgespace in its derealizing effect.
We have ourselves shown in the social dialectic which [[structures]] human knowledge as paranoiac<ref>See Jacques Lacan, ''Écrits, [[Paris]] 1966'', pp. 111, 180.</ref> why human knowledge has greater [[autonomy]] than [[animal]] knowledge in relation to the field of force of [[desire]], but also why it is determined in the direction of that '[[lack]] of reality' which [[surrealist]] [[dissatisfaction]] denounces in it. These reflections lead us to recognize in the spatial ensnarement exhibited in the mirror-phase, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an [[organic]] insufficiency in his [[natural]] reality -- in so far, that is, as we attach any meaning to the [[word]] '[[nature]]'.
We have only are therefore led to understand [[regard]] the function of the mirror stage <i>-phase as an identification</i>, in a [[particular]] case of the full sense that analysis gives to function of the term: namely''imago'', which is to establish a relation of the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image organism to its reality - whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the useor, in analytic theoryas they say, of the ancient term <i>imago</i> ''Innenwelt'' to the ''[[this is also a term from Jungian psychologyUmwelt]]''.
In man, however, this relation to nature is impaired by a kind of dehiscence of the organism in the womb, a primordial Discord betrayed by the [[signs]] of discomfort and motor inco-ordination of the neonatal months. The [[objective]] [[notion]] of the [[anatomical]] [[incompleteness]] of the pyramidal [[system]] and likewise the [[presence]] of certain humoral residues of the [[maternal]] organism confirm the view we have formulated as the fact of a [[real]] ''specific [[prematurity]] of [[birth]]'' in man.
This jubilant assumption of his specular image Let us note, incidentally, that this is a fact fully recognized by embryologists, by the child at the <i>infans</i>stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependenceterm ''foetalization'', would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which determines the <i>I</i> is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in prevalence of the dialectic so-called superior apparatus of identification with the otherneurax, and before language restores to it, in especially of the universalcortex, its function which [[psycho]]-surgical operations lead us to regard as subjectthe intra-organic mirror.
This development is lived as a [[temporal]] dialectic which decisively projects the formation of the individual into [[history]]; the ''mirror-phase'' is a drama whose [[internal]] impulse rushes from insufficiency to [[anticipation]] and which manufactures for the subject, captive to the [[lure]] of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies from a [[fragmented body]]-image to a form of its [[totality]] which we shall call orthopaedic -and to the assumption, finally, of the armour of an alienating [[identity]], which will stamp with the rigidity of its structure the [[whole]] of the subject's mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of the ''Innenwelt'' into the ''Umwelt'' generates the endless quadrature of the inventorying of the ego.
This form would have to be called the Ideal-I [. . .]. But the important point is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as <i>I</i> his discordance with his own reality. ==The Fragmented Body==
The fact is that This fragmented body, the total form term for which I have introduced into our [[theoretical]] [[frame]] of reference, regularly manifests itself in dreams when the body by which movement of the subject anticipates in analysis encounters a mirage the maturation certain level of his power is given to him only as <i>Gestalt</i> [an image of a whole[aggressive]], that is to say, disintegration in an exteriority the individual. It then appears in which this the form is certainly more constituent than constitutedof disjointed limbs, but or of those organs figured in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size that fixes it exoscopy, growing wings and in a symmetry taking up arms for intestinal persecutions -- the very same that inverts itthe visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him. Thus painting, this <i>Gestalt</i> -- whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with they climbed, in the speciesfifteenth century, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable - by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes to the mental permanence [[imaginary]] zenith of the <i>I</i>modern man, but this form is even tangibly revealed at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with organic level, in the correspondences that unite the <i>I</i> with the statue in lines of 'fragilization' which man projects himself, with define the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automation in whichanatomy of [[phantasy]], as exhibited in an ambiguous relation, the world schizoid and spasmodic [[symptoms]] of his own making tends to find completion[[hysteria]].
Correlatively, the formation of the ''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 haughty and remote inner castle, which, in its shape (sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario), symbolizes the ''id'' in startling fashion. Similarly, on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the [[metaphor]] of which arises spontaneously, and as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to describe the mechanisms of [[obsessional]] [[neurosis]] -- [[inversion]], [[isolation]], reduplication, cancellation and [[displacement]].
But were we to build on this merely [[subjective]] data, and should this be detached from the experiential condition which would make us derive it from a language [[. . . Ttechnique]]he mirror-image , our theoretical enterprise would seem remain exposed to be the threshold charge of projecting itself into the visible world, if unthinkable of an absolute subject. That is why we go by have to find in the mirror disposition that the <i>imago of one's own body</i> presents in hallucinations or dreams [. . .[present]] or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus hypothesis, grounded in the appearances a conjunction of the <i>double</i>objective data, in which the psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifestedguiding grid for a ''method of symbolic reduction''.
It establishes in the ''defences of the ego'' a genetic order, in accordance with the [[wish]] formulated by Miss [[Anna Freud]], in the first part of her great [[work]], 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 mirror ''I'' into the social ''I''.
That a <i>Gestalt</i> should be capable of formative effects This moment in which the organism is attested mirror-phase comes to an end inaugurates, 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 identification with the maturation ''imago'' of the gonad of fellow and the female pigeon that it should see another member drama of its species, of either sex: primordial [[jealousy]] (so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely well high-lighted by placing the individual [pigeon] within reach school of the field of reflection of a mirror. Similarly, Charlotte Bühler in the case phenomenon of the migratory locust[[infantile]] ''[[transitivism]]''), the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to dialectic which will henceforth link the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close I 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 erogenicsocially elaborated situations.
It is this moment that decisively shakes the whole of human knowledge in the mediatization by the desire of the other, constitutes its [[objects]] in an abstract equivalence by virtue of the competition of the other, and makes the ''I'' into that system for which every [[instinctual]] thrust constitutes a [[danger]], even though it should correspond to a natural maturation -- the very normalization of this maturation [[being]] henceforth dependent, in man, on a [[cultural]] go-between, as exemplified, in the case of the [[sexual]] object, by the [[Oedipus]] complex.
But In the fact light of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases this conception, the term primary [[narcissism]], by which analytical [[doctrine]] denotes the libidinal investment characteristic of heteromorphic identificationthat moment, reveals in as much as they raise those who invented it the problem most profound [[awareness]] of semantic latencies. But it also illuminates the signification [[dynamic]] opposition of space for the living organism - psychological concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts that [[libido]] to sexual libido, which they tried to reduce them define when they invoked destructive and, indeed, [[death]] [[instincts]], in order to explain the supposedly supreme law evident connection between [[narcissistic]] libido and the alienating function of adaptation. the ''I'', the [[aggressiveness]] which it releases in any relation to the other, albeit that of the most Samaritan aid. . .]
==Existentialism==
I am led, therefore, to regard the function of They were encountering that existential negativity whose reality is so warmly advocated by the mirror-stage as a particular case contemporary philosophy 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] being and the <i>Umwelt</i> [exterior world]nothingness.
But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only within the confines of a [[self]]-sufficiency of [[consciousness]], which, as one of its premisses, [[links]] to the constitutive mis-recognitions of the ego, the [[illusion]] of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. This flight of fancy, for all that it draws, to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience, culminates in the pretension to provide an [[existential psychoanalysis]].
In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at At the heart climax of the organism, historical attempt of a primordial Discord betrayed by [[society]] to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the signs of uneasiness utilitarian one, and motor uncoordination in the anguish of the neo-natal months. The objective notion individual confronting the concentrational form of the anatomical incompleteness social bond which seems to arise to crown this attempt, [[existentialism]] must be judged by the account it gives of humansthe subjective dilemmas which it has indeed given rise to: the [[ and likewise freedom]] which never claims more authenticity than when it is within the presence of certain humoral residues walls of a prison; the maternal organism confirm [[demand]] for commitment, expressing the view I have formulated as the fact [[impotence]] of a real <i>specific prematurity pure consciousness to [[master]] any situation; the voyeuristic-[[sadistic]] [[idealization]] of birth</i> the sexual [[relationship]]; the [[personality]] which realizes itself only in man[[suicide]]; the awareness of the other which can be [[satisfied]] only by [[Hegelian]] [[murder]].
These propositions are denied by all our experience, inasmuch as it teaches us not to regard the ego as centred on the ''[[perception]]-consciousness system'', or as organized by the 'reality [[principle]]' -- a principle which is the expression of a scientistic prejudice most hostile to the dialectic of knowledge. Our experience shows that we should start instead from the ''function of [[misrecognition]]'' which characterizes the ego in all its structures, so markedly articulated by Miss Anna Freud. For, if the ''[[Verneinung]]'' represents the patent form of that function, its effects will, for the most part, remain [[latent]], so long as they are not illuminated by a light reflected in the plane of fatality, where the ''id'' is revealed.
It is worth notingWe can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the [[formations]] of the ''I'', incidentally, that this is in fact recognized and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis -- even as such the ensnarement of the subject by embryologiststhe situation which gives us the most general [[formula]] for [[madness]], not only the madness which lies behind the walls of asylums, by but also the madness which deafens the term <i>foetalization</i> [world with its sound and fury. . . . ]
The sufferings of neurosis and [[psychosis]] are for us the school of the passions of the soul, just as the scourge of the psychoanalytic scales, when we compute the tilt of their [[threat]] to entire communities, gives us the [[index]] of the deadening of the passions of the city.
This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation At this junction of the individual into history. The <i>mirror stage</i> is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - nature and [[culture]] 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, lastlyis so persistently scanned by modern anthropology, to the assumption of the armour psychoanalysis alone recognizes this [[knot]] of an alienating identity, imaginary servitude which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. Thus[[love]] must always undo again, to break out of the circle of the <i>Innenwelt</i> into the <i>Umwelt</i> generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verificationsor sever.
For such a task we place no reliance on altruistic [[feeling]], we who lay bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.
In the recourse of subject to subject which we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the [[patient]] to the ecstatic [[limit]] of the 'Thou art that', wherein is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins.
This fragmented body ( 1949 - 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 from the fifteenth century to the imaginary zenith of modern man [. . .] (For more coool stuff of Bosch, go to <a href="http://athena.english.vt.edu/%7Ebaugh/bosch/index.html">this site</a>''translated'' by Jean Roussel)
==Notes==
<references/>
* [http://www.ny-liability-insurance.com/ Liability Insurance NY]
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. ==See Also==  But if we were to build on these subjective givens alone - however little we free them from the condition of experience that makes us see them as partaking of the nature of a linguistic technique - our theoretical attempts would remain exposed to the charge of projecting themselves into the unthinkable of an absolute subject. This is why I have sought in the present hypothesis, grounded in a conjunction of objective data, the guiding grid for a method of symbolic reduction.   It establishes in the defenses of the ego a genetic order * [[. . . Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je]] 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 * [[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.  It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of the other, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation of others, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes a danger, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation - the very normalization of this maturation being henceforth dependent, in man, on a cultural mediation as exemplified, in the case of the sexual object, by the Oedipus complex.  [. . .] We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the I, and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis - just as the captation of the subject by the situation gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness that deafens the world with its sound and fury.  The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.   At this junction of nature and culture, so persistently examined by modern anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.  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.  In the recourse of subject to subject that we preserver, psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the "Thous art that." in which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey beings. ==External Links==http://www-class.unl.edu/ahis498b/parts/week5/mirror.htmlhttp://www.english.uiowa.edu/courses/boos/questions/lacan.htmhttp://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~mfrangos/gluck/lacan2.html]
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* "[[Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du je, telle qu’elle nous est révélée, dans l’expérience psychanalytique]]." ''[[Écrits]]''. Paris: Seuil, 1966: 93-100 ["[[The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience]]." Trans. [[Alan Sheridan]]. ''[[Écrits: A Selection]]''. London: Tavistock, 1977; New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977: 1-7].
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