Mirror stage
Lacan's article "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I" (1936, 1949) lays out the parameters of a doctrine that he never foreswore, and which has subsequently become something of a post-structuralist mantra: namely, that human identity is 'decentred'. The key observation of Lacan’s essay concerns the behaviour of infants between the ages of 6 and 18 months. At this age, Lacan notes, children become capable of recognising their mirror image. This is not a dispassionate experience, either. It is a recognition that brings the child great pleasure. For Lacan, we can only explain this 'jubilation' as a testimony to how, in the recognition of its mirror-image, the child is having its first anticipation of itself as a unified and separate individual. Before this time, Lacan contends (drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic observation), the child is little more than a 'body in bits and pieces', unable to clearly separate I and Other, and wholly dependant for its survival (for a length of time unique in the animal kingdom) upon its first nurturers. The implications of this observation on the mirror stage, in Lacan's reckoning, are far-reaching. They turn around the fact that, if it holds, then the genesis of individuals' sense of individuation can in no way be held to issue from the 'organic’ or 'natural' development of any inner wealth supposed to be innate within them. The I is an Other from the ground up, for Lacan (echoing and developing a conception of the ego already mapped out in Freud's Ego and Id). The truth of this dictum, as Lacan comments in "Aggressivity and Psychoanalysis", is evident in infantile transitivity: that phenomenon wherein one infant hit by another yet proclaims: 'I hit him!', and visa-versa. It is more simply registered in the fact that it remains a permanent possibility of adult human experience for us to speak and think of ourselves in the second or third person. What is decisive in these phenomena, according to Lacan, is that the ego is at base an object: an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world. Identification with the ego, Lacan accordingly maintains, is what underlies the unavoidable component of aggressivity in human behaviour especially evident amongst infants, and which Freud recognised in his Three Essays on Sexuality when he stressed the primordial ambivalence of children towards their love object(s) (in the oral phase, to love is to devour; in the anal phase, it is to master or destroy …).
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The young child's identification with his own image (what Lacan terms the "Ideal-I" or "ideal ego"), a stage that occurs anywhere from 6-18 months of age. For Lacan, this act marks the primordial recognition of one's self as "I," although at a point before entrance into language and the symbolic order. This stage's misrecognition or méconnaissance (seeing an ideal-I where there is a fragmented, chaotic body) subsequently "characterizes the ego in all its structures" (Écrits 6). In particular, this creation of an ideal version of the self gives pre-verbal impetus to the creation of narcissistic phantasies in the fully developed subject. That fantasy image of oneself can be filled in by others who we may want to emulate in our adult lives (role models, et cetera), anyone that we set up as a mirror for ourselves. The mirror stage establishes what Lacan terms the "imaginary order" and, through the imaginary, continues to assert its influence on the subject even after the subject enters the symbolic order. See the Lacan Module on Psychosexual Development.
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Jacques Lacan tells of the mirror stage in his essay "The Mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," which was published in English in Écrits: A Selection, first by Alan Sheridan in 1977, and more recently by Bruce Fink in 2002. Lacan first delivered this essay as a talk at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich on July 17 1949. In Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, the "mirror stage" (le stade du miroir) is the point in an infant's life when he may recognize his "self" in a mirror, and thus achieves consciousness of himself.
When the child sees itself in the mirror, often propped up by another person or mechanical device and is able to associate the image with itself, it retroactively posits that before this autonomy that it now perceives, its body was in "bits and pieces." At the moment of perceiving bodily autonomy, Jane Gallop says there is jubilation, but it is short lived. As soon as the infant can posit that prior to this moment it was in "bits and pieces," it recognizes the danger of regressing to this earlier stage.
The potential relation between facets of the mirror stage and our relation to character archetypes has been explored in depth by theorists of entertainment media.
