Lacan

Intro

What is I? You? Me? Persona? Identity?

When you think of yourself, do you think of yourself as a whole, unified person?

Most important psychonalalysis since Freud theorized in 1936 that what we think of our own identity is actually
imaginary, a construct behind which the real subject resides

Lacan called the development of this identity, the Mirror Stage

The first time an infant sees itself in the mirror literally or figuratively is the moment that the child
developed a sense of the self

The I or the individual identity before this, the child doesn't think of himself as an individual at all but
simply exists as a unified subject indefinable

The authenticity and reality of being a whole subject is lost when the child first understands itself as
having an identity

- This is what causes the split between what Freud called the Id (unconscious self) and the Ego
(the formation of the self that we think of as an I)
- In doing this, the I becomes another
- Ego becomes something altogether apart from the authentic and whole subject that the child
experienced before.
This new idea of ourselves is developed through the use of language but Lacan insists that it means that
we are detached and largely oblivious to our real selves

When infants start to develop this new identity, ego can be ordered in a way that helps the person make
sense of themselves and can protect them against the inconsistencies and desires that the Id
experiences

This relationship between the subject as a whole and what the child learns to perceive as an identity is a
relationship between the imaginary and the real

The mirror gives the illusion that the identity and character is whole when in reality the desires and
inconsistencies of life experienced by the subject before the mirror stage are what’s authentic and real

Psychoanalysis was about helping the patient recover and become more in touch with the authentic self

The ego does a good job of repressing or organizing a necessary identity that tries to make sense and
live in the world and this can usually be understood through the language that we use
- For example – when we say to someone on a Monday “I’m still recovering from the weekend”, are
we always telling them that because we think they want to know or is it because we want them to
know why we’re tired and not our normal selves? Is it because this is an accepted line of
conversation?
- How often do you genuinely give someone that info because you think that they want it?
Lacan called the Identity the small other and says that it’s constituted from the big other (laws, social
norms, language, entertainment of the world at large) and it starts to be developed even before we were
born by the conversations, situations, ideas of the parents

The child, after the mirror stage, starts to differentiate between the small and the big other realizing that
the mother is a small other, like itself, separate and apart from the big other of the world at large.
At first, Lacan posited the mirror stage as being just a moment in the infant’s life

By the 50s, he came to regard the stage as a permanent part of human psychology and became the
cornerstone of his psychonalaysis