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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 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]].
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]]''.
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.
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.
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]].
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 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.
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''.
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.
==Existentialism==
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]].
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.
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.
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.
==Notes==
<references/>
* [http://www.ny-liability-insurance.com/ Liability Insurance NY]
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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].