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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 actevent can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, far from exhausting itself, as in the case age of the monkeysix months, once the image and its repetition has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in often compelled us to ponder over the case startling spectacle of the child nurseling in a series front of gestures 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 which France, we call a ''trotte-bébé''), he experiences nevertheless surmounts, in play a flutter of jubilant activity, the relation between the movements assumed obstructions of his support in order to fix his attitude in the image and the reflected environmenta more or less leaning-forward position, and between this virtual complex and bring back an instantaneous aspect of the reality image to hold it reduplicates --the child's own body, and the persons and things around himin his gaze.
This jubilant assumption of his specular image by form would have to be called the child at ''Ideal-I''<ref>Throughout this article we leave in its peculiarity the translation we have adopted for Freud's <i>infansIdeal-Ich</i>stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the (i.e. '<i>Ije-idéal</i> is precipitated in '), without further comment, save that we have not maintained it since.</ref>, if we wanted to restore it to a primordial formfamiliar scheme, before 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 objectified in that this form situates the dialectic instance of identification with the other''ego'', and before language restores to itits social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the universalindividual alone, or rather, its function which will rejoin the development of the subject only asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve as subject''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 <i>''Gestalt</i> [an image of a whole]'', 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 in a symmetry that inverts it, which are in contrast conflict with the turbulent movements that turbulence of the motions which the subject feels are animating him. Thus, this <i>''Gestalt</i> '' -- whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with linked to the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable unrecognizable -- by these two twin aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the <i>''I</i>'', at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that which unite the <i>''I</i> '' with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that which dominate him, or finally, with the automation automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own making fabrication tends to find completion.
That a <i>''Gestalt</i> '' should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that which is itself so alien to the idea of psychical 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 [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 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 that which would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenicerotogenic.
But the fact facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identification, in as much inasmuch as they raise the problem of the signification 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 supposedly supreme law of adaptation. [. . Let us only recall how Roger Caillois (who was then very young, 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 obsession with space in its derealizing effect.]
This fragmented body - development is lived as a temporal dialectic which terms I have also introduced into our system decisively projects the formation of theoretical references - usually manifests itself in dreams when the movement of individual into history; the analysis encounters ''mirror-phase'' is a certain level of aggressive disintegration in drama whose internal impulse rushes from insufficiency to anticipation and which manufactures for the individual. It then appears in subject, captive to the form lure of disjointed limbsspatial identification, or the succession of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings phantasies from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality which we shall call orthopaedic -and taking up arms for intestinal persecutions - to the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixedassumption, for all timefinally, in paintingof the armour of an alienating identity, in their ascent (p. 5) from which will stamp with the fifteenth century to rigidity of its structure the imaginary zenith whole of modern manthe subject's mental development. But this form is even tangibly revealed at the organic levelThus, in to break out of the lines circle of the ''Innenwelt''fragilizationinto the ' that define 'Umwelt'' generates the anatomy endless quadrature of phantasy, as exhibited in the schizoid and spasmodic symptoms inventorying of hysteriathe ego.
It is this moment that decisively tips establishes in the whole ''defences of human knowledge into mediatization through the desire of ego'' a genetic order, in accordance with the otherwish formulated by Miss Anna Freud, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence by the co-operation first part of othersher great work, and turns the I into that apparatus for which every instinctual thrust constitutes situates (as against a frequently expressed prejudice) hysterical repression and its returns at a dangermore archaic stage than obsessional inversion and its isolating processes, even though it should correspond to a natural maturation - and the very normalization of this maturation being henceforth dependent, latter in man, on a cultural mediation turn as exemplifiedpreliminary to paranoiac alienation, in which dates from the case deflection of the sexual object, by mirror ''I'' into the Oedipus complexsocial ''I''.
They were encountering that existential negativity whose reality is so warmly advocated by the contemporary philosophy of being and 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. At the climax of the historical attempt of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in the anguish of the individual confronting the concentrational form of the social bond which seems to arise to crown this attempt, existentialism must be judged by the account it gives of the subjective dilemmas which it has indeed given rise to: the freedom which never claims more authenticity than when it is within the walls of a prison; the demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; the voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of the sexual relationship; the personality which realizes itself only in 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. We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of the ''I'', and find there the most extensive definition of neurosis -- even as the ensnarement of the subject by the situation which gives us the most general formula for madness, not only the madness which lies behind the walls of asylums, but also the madness which deafens the 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. At this junction of nature and culture which is so persistently scanned by modern anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude which love must always undo again, or 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 that which we preserverpreserve, psychoanalysis may can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the "Thous 'Thou art that" in which ', 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 beingsbegins. ( 1949 -- ''translated'' by Jean Roussel) ==Notes==<references/>
[[Category:Works by Jacques Lacan]]