Bailly, Lionel. Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: One World, 2009.
… Lacan’s subject … depends on the user accepting that there are elements of one’s identity of which one is unconscious; anyone who thinks that one’s identity is only what one wishes to say about oneself (‘I am Irish, I am an independent career woman’, etc.) is talking about what Lacan would have called the ego. Lacan’s Subject is composed of and revealed by signifiers, which it utters without knowing what they mean.
As developmental psychologies Henri Wallon pointed out, the human baby is very premature at birth compared with other animals, including the higher primates, from birth up until maybe eighteen or more months, the infant is unable to stand up, walk, or handle objects with dexterity, and the sense of ‘self’ and ‘wholeness’ that is allowed by mature proprioception (perception of the whole body within its environment) is absent. However, this human baby – immature, helpless, perceiving itself only in a fragmented way – is, at some point between the ages of six and eighteen months, going to see an image in the mirror, and realise that it is itself. This will be the first time the baby discovers itself as a unitary being, and this discovery is the source of an intense feeling of joy and excitement, which is usually shared with the adult present; the infant, having made this discovery, turns back to look at it smother, for example, and shares with her its pride and surprise. This founding act, leading to the formation of the ego and the perception of the Subject, is attended by powerful emotion. 29
Lacan said: ‘we have to understand the mirror stage as an identification … the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image’. The baby’s discovery of self is an intellectual act; it involves the translation of an image into an idea – the idea of ‘me’ or ‘self’; hence, human identity is based on a primary act of intellect. But this is not a restatement of Descartes’s cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am. Indeed, Lacan was completely opposed to ‘any philosophy issuing directly from the cogito’: for him, the opposite was true – I think, therefore I am not, or I am fully a subject only when I am not thinking – the very act of thinking about oneself nullifies the Subject. 30
While identifying itself in the mirror, the child also identifies with something from which it is separated: it is as an ‘other’ that the Subject identifies and experiences itself first. The founding act of identity is therefore not just emotional and intellectual, it is also schismatic, separating the Subject from itself into an object. For Lacan, the Mirror Stage is ‘the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to it being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject’. At the Mirror Stage, the intellectual perception of oneself is an alienating experience and the beginning of a series of untruths; but it is a necessary alienation that allows the Subject access to the symbolic realm. 30
Méconnaissance is a French word encompassing non-recognition of and obliviousness to something; it is sometimes translated as ‘misrecognition’ – a translation I find goes wide of the mark. ‘Misrecognition’ suggests that something has been recognised, only wrongly. In my preferred translation of obliviousness or non-recognition, the subject is completely blind to the object. One of Lacan’s most important maxims is that human beings are very largely oblivious of their own Subject; the ego is what a person says of him/herself; the Subject is the unrecognised self that is speaking. Psychoanalysis is about accompanying the patient towards his/her subjective truth, or towards the point where the objective ‘me’ and the subjective ‘I’ can be united. 35
As the child’s language develops, it begins to attach ideas to the objectified self, which is to become the ego or ‘le moi’: the ideas it attaches are often produced by a denial of reality, denegation, or wishful thinking. The three year old who cries, ‘Race you, Daddy! I’m winning!’ is showing his/her desire to win, in the face of an easily observed reality – that Daddy’s legs are four times longer and much faster. The father is likely, for his part, to let the child win – precisely because he wishes to help the development of the child’s image of itself as a winner, he is, in fact, aiding and abetting the fiction of his child’s ego (in this case a necessary defence against the anxiety of being so small and helpless). And this fiction is maintained and nurtured throughout one’s life; denegation too helps: ‘I’ve got no problem with so-and-so’ is almost always a contradiction of the truth; but it helps the speaker maintain his/her fiction that she/he is easygoing/unaffected by the so-and-so in question. 36
The factitious, ‘created’ nature of the ego is behind Lacan’s opposition to ‘any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogitio’: the cogito of Cartesian thinking relies mostly on the status of consciousness – the status in which the ego believes itself most to be in control. But for Lacan, the real ‘I’ is the Subject – I in ‘I am’ – and this is necessarily hidden by conscious thought about itself. At the Mirror Stage, one may think of the Subject as the part that ‘invents’ the stories about its image-self or ego, affixing to it signifiers as it acquires language: girl, blonde, pretty, likes chocolate, hates pink, good at drawing, etc.; but it also represses as many signifiers as it selects, and in doing so, tries to hide something of itself. Indeed, the Subject can only come into being when it is not thinking, because the very act of any thinking that involves its ego creates a smokescreen behind which it disappears. 36