Homer, Sean. Critical Thinkers: Jacques Lacan, New York: Routledge, 2004.
The mirror phase occurs roughly between the ages of six and 18 months and corresponds to Freud’s stage of primary narcissism. That is the stage of human development when the subject is in love with the image of themselves and their own bodies and which precedes the love of others (see Thurschwell 2000: ch. 5). Between the ages of six and 18 months the infant begins to recognize his/her image in the mirror (this does not mean a literal mirror but rather any reflective surface, for example the mother’s face) and this is usually accompanied by pleasure. The child is fascinated with its image and tries to control and play with it. Although the child initially confuses its image with reality, he/she soon recognizes that the image has its own properties, finally accepting that the image is their own image – a reflection of themselves. During the mirror stage, then, the child for the first time becomes aware, through seeing its image in the mirror, that his/her body has a total form. The infant can also govern the movements of this image through the movements of its own body and thus experiences pleasure. 25
This sense of completeness and mastery, however, is in contrast to the child’s experience of its own body, over which it does not yet have full motor control. While the infant still feels his/her body to be in parts, as fragmented and not yet unified, it is the image that provides him/her with a sense of unification and wholeness. The mirror image, therefore, anticipates the mastery of the infant’s own body and stands in contrast to the feelings of fragmentation the infant experiences. 25
What is important at this point is that the infant identifies with this mirror image. The image is him/herself. This identification is crucial, as without it – and without the anticipation of mastery that it establishes – the infant would never get to the stage of perceiving him/herself as a complete or whole being.
At the same time, however, the image is alienating in the sense that it becomes confused with the self. The image actually comes to take the place of the self. Therefore, the sense of a unified self is acquired at the price of this self being an-other, that is, our mirror image.
Lacan describes it like this:
Sheridan’s Translation:
The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for all 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 infants entire mental development. (1977a “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” in Écrits [1949]: 4)
Fink’s Translation:
[T]he mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation — and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality — and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. 6
For Lacan, the ego emerges at this moment of alienation and fascination with one’s own image. The ego is both formed by and takes its form from the organizing and constituting properties of the image. The ego is the effect of images; it is, in short, an imaginary function.
Lacan is arguing here against Ego psychology and its tendency to prioritize the ego over unconscious processes as well as to equate the ego with the self. Lacan insists that the ego is based on an illusory image of wholeness and mastery and it is the function of the ego to maintain this illusion of coherence and mastery. The function of the ego is, in other words, one of mis-recognition; of refusing to accept the truth of fragmentation and alienation.
According to Lacan, from the moment the image of unity is posited in opposition to the experience of fragmentation, the subject is established as a rival to itself. A conflict is produced between the infant’s fragmented sense of self and the imaginary autonomy out of which the ego is born.
The same rivalry established between the subject and him/herself is also established in future relations between the subject and others. As Benvenuto and Kennedy put it, ‘the primary conflict between identification with, and primordial rivalry with, the other’s image, begins a dialectical process that links the ego to more complex social situations’ (1986: 58).
To exist one has to be recognized by an-other. But this means that our image, which is equal to ourselves, is mediated by the gaze of the other. The other, then, becomes the guarantor of ourselves. We are at once dependent on the other as the guarantor of our own existence and a bitter rival to that same other. 26
Critics of Lacan’s mirror stage argue that he in fact has things completely the wrong way round. In order for the subject to identify with an image in the mirror and then to mis-recognize themselves, they must first have a sense of themselves as a self. If the Lacanian subject is an alienated subject then this presupposes a ‘non-alienated’ subject in the first instance, otherwise there is nothing that one can meaningfully be said to be alienated from.
Hence, the idea of a primary lack or absence is based upon the presupposition of a primary presence or unity. Lack in this sense is secondary and not primary. Anthony Elliott argues that the very terms of Lacan’s mirror stage are all wrong: mirror reflection, lack and absence are not pre-existing phenomena but the work of the subject and the imaginary (see Elliott 1998: ch. 4).
Lacan’s use of the term alienation is rather different from that of his critics though. Through the mirror stage the infant imagines that it achieves mastery over its own body but in a place outside of itself. Alienation, in Lacan, is precisely this ‘lack of being’ through which the infant’s realization (in both senses of the term: forming a distinct concept in the mind and becoming real) lies in an-other place. In this sense, the subject is not alienated from something or from itself but rather alienation is constitutive of the subject – the subject is alienated in its very being.
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Jean Laplanche and J-B Pontalis Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith The Language of Psycho-Analysis
According to Jacques Lacan, a phase in the constitution of the human individual located between the ages of six and eighteen months. Though still in a state of powerlessness and motor incoordination, the infant anticipates on an imaginary plane the apprehension and mastery of its bodily unity. This imaginary unification comes about by means of identification with the image of the counterpart as total Gestalt; it is exemplified concretely by the experience in which the child perceives its own reflection in a mirror. The mirror phase is said to constitute the matrix and first outline of what is to become the ego.
The idea of the mirror phase was one of Lacan’s earliest contributions, first proposed at the 1936 Marienbad International Congress of Psycho-Analysts.
The concept is grounded upon a number of empirical data:
a. Data taken from child psychology and comparative psychology concerning the infant’s behaviour when confronted with its reflection in a mirror. Lacan draws attention to ‘the triumphant assumption of the image, with the accompanying jubilant mimicry and the playful complacency with which the specular identification is controlled.’
b. Data derived from animal ethology, which demonstrates how certain results of maturation and biological organisation are attained solely by the visual perception of the counterpart.
According to Lacan, the import of the mirror phase in human development , is attributable to the prematurity of birth, as evidenced by the anatomically incomplete pyramidal system and the motor incoordination of the first months of life.
I. As far as the structure of the subject is concerned, the mirror phase is said to represent a genetic moment: the setting up of the first roughcast of the ego. What happens is that the infant perceives in the image of its counterpart—or in its own mirror image—a form (Gestalt) in which it anticipates a bodily unity, which it still objectively lacks (whence its ‘jubilation’): in other words, it identifies with this image. This primordial experience is basic to the imaginary nature of the ego, which is constituted right from the start as an ‘ideal ego’ and as the ‘root of the secondary identifications’ (1b). It is obvious that from this point of view the subject cannot be equated with the ego, since the latter is an imaginary agency in which the subject tends to become alienated.
II. For Lacan, in so far as the intersubjective relationship bears the mark of the mirror phase, it is an imaginary, dual relationship inevitably characterised by an aggressive tension in which the ego is constituted as another and the other as an alter ego (see ‘Imaginary’).
III. This approach might be compared to Freud’s own views on the transition from auto-erotism—which precedes the formation of an ego — to narcissism proper: what Lacan calls the phantasy of the ‘body-in-pieces’ (le corps morcele) would thus correspond to the former stage, while the mirror stage would correspond to the onset of primary narcissism.
There is one important difference, however: Lacan sees the mirror phase as responsible, retroactively, for the emergence of the phantasy of the body-in-pieces. This type of dialectical relation may be observed in the course of psycho-analytic treatment, where anxiety about fragmentation can at times be seen to arise as a consequence of loss of narcissistic identification, and vice versa.