The mirror stage lacan full text pdf

According to Lacan, from the moment the image of unity is posited in opposition to the experience of fragmentation, the subject is established as a rival to itself. To exist one has to be recognized by an-other. But this means that our image, which is equal to ourselves, is mediated by the gaze of the other. The other, then, becomes the guarantor of ourselves.

We are at once dependent on the other as the guarantor of our own existence and a bitter rival to that same other. In order for the subject to identify with an image in the mirror and then to mis-recognize themselves, they must first have a sense of themselves as a self.

Hence, the idea of a primary lack or absence is based upon the presupposition of a primary presence or unity. Lack in this sense is secondary and not primary.

Through the mirror stage the infant imagines that it achieves mastery over its own body but in a place outside of itself. In this sense, the subject is not alienated from something or from itself but rather alienation is constitutive of the subject — the subject is alienated in its very being. This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

This form would have to be called the Ideal-I. The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject anticipates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as Gestalt [an image of a whole], that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in a contrasting size that fixes it and in a symmetry that inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels are animating him.

Thus, this Gestalt -- whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable - by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that.

Indeed, for he imagos-whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efficacity 2 -the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one's own body presents in hallucinations or dreams, whether it concerns its individual features, or even its infirmities, or its object-projections; or if we observe the role of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the double, in which the psychical realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested.

That a Gestalt should be capable of formative effects in the organism is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate its results in these terms.

It nevertheless recognizes that it is a necessary condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it should see another member of its species, of either sex: so sufficient in itself is this condition that the desired effect may be obtained merely by placing the individual [pigeon] within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.

Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style sufficiently close to that characteristic of the species. Such facts are inscribed in an order of homeomorphic identification that would itself fall within the larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.

But the fact of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases of heteromorphic identification, in as much as they raise the problem of the signification of space for the living organism - psychological concepts hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these matters than ridiculous attempts to reduce them to the supposedly supreme law of adaptation.

We have only to recall how Roger Caillois who was then very young, and still fresh from his breach with the sociological school in which he was trained illuminated the subject by using the term 'legendary psychasthenia' to classify morphological mimicry as an obsession with space in its derealizing effect.

These reflections lead me to recognize in the spatial capitation manifested in the mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality-in so far as any meaning can be given to the word 'nature'. I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by the signs of uneasiness and motor uncoordination of the neo-natal months.

The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness and likewise the presence of certain humoral residues of the maternal organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fact of a real specific prematurity of birth in man. It is worth noting, incidentally, that this is in fact recognized as such by embryologists, by the term foetalization, which determines the prevalence of the so-called superior apparatus of the neurax, and especially of the cortex, which psycho-surgical operations lead us to regard as the intra-organic mirror.

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for 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.

Lacan also notes that metaphors based on the imagery of fortification are common in the speech of patients suffering from obsessional neuroses. Psychoanalysis, Lacan argues, can supply the theoretical "grid" of concepts with which to analyze specific instances of such symbolization as they are presented in the speech of individual patients, relating them to fundamental functions in the development and operations of the psyche.

Viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, the literary text represents a particular organization of signs in relation to fundamental structures of psychic life. The author cannot be considered an "absolute subject" who is the origin of the linguistic structures of the text, but as structure him- or herself within the dynamic of psychic drives and socio-linguistic conventions. Following Freud, Lacan suggests throughout his work that mental illnesses are variations on the same psychic structures that produce "normal" mental states.