Jacques lacan – the mirror stage as formative of the I

Summary:
Lacan's conception of the mirror stage has been called his most
famous and significant contribution to the field of psychoanalysis.
It's also essential reading for anyone interested in Lacan due to the
prevalence of the mirror stage's concepts found throughout his
entire oeuvre.
This particular rendition of the mirror stage was "delivered at the
16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zürich, July 17,
1949". It is short in length, but quite dense and difficult. I'll attempt
to summarize the mirror stage's main features below.
Primarily concerned with identity, subjectivity and fantasy, Lacan
claims the mirror stage takes place between the ages of six to
eighteen months when an infant recognizes its self in connection
with the image of the specular self. The result is a fantasized,
fictional self that is unified and made whole via the image in the
mirror, or “the transformation that takes place in the subject when
he assumes an image.”
Due to the self and the specular self not being identical, there is a
discontinuity between the two that is psychically alienating. This gap
or lack of a unified sense of self, Lacan argues, is where desire
stems from—a desire to become whole again. The mirror stage in
this sense paradoxically contributes to the “decentering” and
unification of the subject through a continuous process of repetition.
The following sentence sums this idea up best:
“The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated
from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufacturse fo 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 subject’s entire mental development.”
It’s also important to note that Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage
shares affinities with Freud’s conception of identification and
narcissism—the latter contributing to the formation of the ego.
The Mirror Stage as formative of the
function of the Eye as Revealed in the
Psychoanalytic Experience by Jacques
Lacan
Among the psychoanalyst in the recent years, Lacan has had the
greatest influence in literary theory. He reinterprets Freud in the
light of structural linguistics and he is perhaps best known in
theoretical circles for his pronouncement that the “unconscious is
structured like a language."
For Lacan, the unconscious of mind is structured like Saussure's
language system of operation as paradigmatic and syntagmatic or
like Jakobson's metaphoric and metonymic. He goes against
Freud's controversial idea about biological drives. He asserts that
the development of an identity of a subject is a social construct not
biological.
There are stages of human development according to Lacan. They
are:
The mirror stage
The imaginary stage
The symbolic stage
In the mirror stage, the child discovers his own image, which
becomes other to the self, thereby establishing subjectivity. In this
stage, there is no split in personality. The baby treats mother as
mirror and identity itself with her. But in reality the image of mother
is ‘other’. As a result, when the language intervenes, the child
knows that the identification was false.
However, the child's reconstruction of ego to be one with mother
continues thereafter. As the baby develops, the love to the mother
increases and the father is seen as threatening to its desire. The
subject (identity) has the split into two conscious and unconscious
where our ego is decentered. It is also called the imaginary stage
because there is an imaginary identification with mother. Mirror
stage is also called the imaginary stage or mirror stage is also a
part of imaginary stage. In this stage, firstly, child feels its image
coherent. It feels united with the mother's body. Secondly, the child
feels that the image does not belong to itself. The image has
separate existence. So, the sense of harmony and alienation goes
on simultaneously during the imaginary phase.
Lacan claims that the sense of unification and the sense of
alienation do not remain only in the mirror stage. This sort of double
sense remains throughout our life. This mirror stage is also called
pre- linguistic stage where child first identifies himself with mother
and at the same time it identifies itself to be alienated from mother
too.
Lacan defines “other” to be other to the subject (ego). This “other”
exists prior to subject entry in to language and after the access to
the language, there is the split. This splitting result to the symbolic
stage and the aporia is created. In this stage man moves
linguistically in to the chain of signifiers and this is never ending
process.
The presence of father in the form of language threatens the child's
unification with the mother. There results the gap between signifier
and signified or subject and object. The language creates
unconscious level in child's mind. Obviously, there now occurs the
gap between I (self) and we (self + other). All the prohibited things
remain in the unconscious level by language.
In real stage language is terribly insufficient because of which the
stage transfers beyond the approach of symbolic stage. Due to the
inadequacy of signifying system, the desired object is never
possible to acquire. The signifiers slide over signified, which is like
jellyfish. Signifiers seek for signified, which is previous harmony but
again signifier emerges eventually after one signified is fulfilled.
There is always mismatch between language and desire. One can
unite with mother only at the cost of death so, desire is never
fulfilled. There are multiple signified and desires and so the duality
remains forever.