Baron, Paula. “Enter the Imaginarium: The Mirror, the Object and the Feminist Project” Australian Feminist Law Journal 43 2011
In terms of individual development, the child is born into the Real, a brief period characterized by a lack of differentiation and therefore a lack of subjectivity. At arond 18 months of age, the child experiences the ‘mirror stage’ which provides entry into the Imaginary.
This mirror stage is the point at which the child recognizes his or her reflection in the mirror. The child’s entry into the Symbolic occurs later, as a result of the Oedipal process. In this latter stage, the intervention of a third party into the mother-child dyad ushers the child into the social world of law and language, the child sacrificing sensual need (the Real) and egotistical demand (the Imaginary) for the laws and values if its culture. This developmental path has been described as the subject’s passage from a ‘Being-in-Itself ‘(the Real) to a ‘Being-for-Itself’ (the Imaginary) to a ‘Being-for-Others’ (the Symbolic).
In Lacanian theory, the Symbolic is the privileged site for overcoming the disabling effects of the Imaginary and the disruptions of the Real. “What we do as humans is structured by reflected images that lure our desire and reinforce our egos, but we remain grounded in a symbolic network that pervasively supports our speech, ritual and even our perception of the world, and we from time to time come to the edge and touch upon the nameless, the Real that is always there but usually mediated by language.”
The Imaginary is thus inescapable and necessary, yet for Lacan, it is ‘always trouble’: illusory, deceptive and inherently seductive. The Imaginary ‘constantly exercises its seductions or temptations, inviting one to “fill in” the unavoidable “gaps” in one’s self and world descriptions or conceptions through recourse to all manner of imaginary fullness’.
We have seen that mirroring is key to the individual’s entry into the Imaginary in Lacanian theory. The child’s recognition of her reflection is at once her first experience of unity and wholeness and a fundamental alienation in her being.
The mirror stage, according to Lacan, gives rise to consciousness, the ego, illusions of coherence, self-sufficiency, unity and the idea of a body:
[In the mirror stage] the child, who experiences herself as a fragmented, incoherent collection of desires and memories, happens upon an image of herself in a looking glass’ or reflective surface. This image stimulates the idea of an entity entirely independent of others: the Imago. As the child grows older, the imago in turn, becomes invested with all sorts of expectations from without….This primary identification with the mirror image and the consequent imago is a mistake….because …the subject is necessarily divided, split between the familiar Ego, which posits independence, and the Id, the locus of unconscious desire. (Lacan Book III The Psychoses, 1955-56 p. 43)
For Lacan, the ego is nothing in and of itself, but rather a ‘series of identifications, equivalancies, and oppositions’. As noted in the quote above, there is a split between the chaos and vulnerability of the individual’s embodied first-person experience and the ideal of the third-person surface perspective. This split can never be reconciled, leading to the individual’s frustration (which is turned upon the self or projected on to others). Because the Imaginary has an inherently binary logic (self and other), it functions to create sameness and ‘a struggle for recognition that requires the destruction or enslavement of others so as to maintain one’s own identity’.
The Imaginary is thus characterized by rivalry, jealousy, aggression and competition. It is the Symbolic which assures peace by imposing distributive justice: this is mine, that is yours.
The Imaginary in Lacanian theory is inherently narcissistic and isolating: Whereas in the symbolic we experience the power of the social order over us, in the Imaginary.. .we feel isolated within the shell that the ego seems to provide’.
This rise of the Imaginary has been theorized by McGowan, following Zizek, as a symptom of the transformation to the so-called ‘Society of Enjoyment’. This is a complex notion that highlights the relationship between the Imaginary and the Symbolic in Lacan’s work. According to Lacan, entry to the Symbolic takes place through the exercise of the paternal function, sometimes called the Name-of-the-Father. This is the intervention of the third party in the mother-child dyad which, as was noted above, ushers the child into the Symbolic, subjecting his drives to the social order, law and language.
The paternal function was so named because, in Lacan’s time, this intervention was commonly achieved by the father in a nuclear family structure, but the function can be successfully achieved by someone (indeed, something) else.
Lacan also theorized that, in the movement to the nuclear family, there was a conflation of the Symbolic father with the reality of the (often wanting) father. The father was thus conceived as having a dual character: the ‘good’ father, who prohibited enjoyment; and the ‘obscene’ father who mandated enjoyment. In McGowan’s view, the transformation to the Society of Enjoyment is the result of the decline of the paternal function, that is, the loss of the ideal, prohibiting father and the concomitant rise of the primal, obscene fathers.