English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Comments on Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror Stage" (1949) Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Rather than try to explain every phrase in our selection by Lacan, I will offer some general observations. (Note 1) Rejecting Cartesianism as a model for the self--i.e. rejecting the notion that there can be a stable sense of identity pre-existing language, Lacan deals with each human's movement through three critical stages: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. At base, an infant moves from a prelinguistic state towards entrance into the symbolic order, into language. In early infancy, a child is immersed in the Real--a state in which the infant cannot distinguish between its own body and the people and things outside its body. This infant has needs, of course, but they can all be satisfied by something concrete--a bottle, the mother's breast, etc. Next comes entrance into the still prelinguistic Imaginary, which Lacan associates with "the Mirror Stage" and the period just afterwards. The baby sees itself in a mirror or reflective surface, and begins experimenting with its image spatially and temporally, moving its limbs around and seeing how and when the image in the mirror responds. What the baby identifies with, of course, is not really him or herself--it identifies with an image. This experience begins the shift into or towards the Imaginary, at which point a dualistic sense of selfhood begins to occur. The self begins to take hold in the Mirror Stage, but the most important thing to note here is how it does that: the "self" is a product of identification with something fictional, with an image, an other. From this point forward, there will be no return to the undifferentiation of the Real; the human subject begins to follow a fictional direction even as it appears to stabilize into a "sense of self." One further observation along those lines is that according to Lacan, as I read him, the "Gestalt" (Note 2) quality of the image with which the baby identifies generates an illusion of fixity and stability over against what Lacan calls the "turbulent movements" (406) felt within as the body's animating forces. Drawing upon other comments in Lacan's selection, we can say that this process of ego-formation involves a kind of alienation; acts of "making-other" establish one's sense of identity. (Note 3) At base, the ego is founded upon an act of misrecognition, or, to use Lacan's French term, meconaissance. Lacan invokes some interestingly biologistic notions (see page 406-07) in making his case about the development of identity: he implies that the relation between an infant and "nature" (a term he hesitates to use) is inadequate and unsettling from the outset. Our earliest movements are marked with insufficiency with regard to our environment--we are, after all, implies Lacan, a premature species, one that gives birth to young that need a great deal of care if they are to survive the period of infancy. (By contrast, many animals are born able to function almost immediately in their harsh natural environment.) Our early insufficiency leads us to experience the Mirror Stage as the anticipation of an integrated, sufficient self--though presumably this anticipation is never fulfilled since our path is, after all, toward the Symbolic or linguistic order; there is no return to some anterior state prior to language, like the Real. Once established within the Symbolic or Representational Order, human identity or selfhood proceeds along the lines set forth by structural linguistics--the self is perpetuated in a way similar to the movement of signification as de Saussure would describe it, except that in Lacan the emphasis is more on the movement of the signifier than on stable connection to the other half of the sign, the signified. Overall, the "self" is an unstable and slippery affair, modeled on an image that is already an other, and as with many of the theorists we have read, the stable identity we generally posit for the individual amounts to an essentialist fiction propped up by powerful social imperatives. Freudian psychoanalysis is committed to returning the patient to normalcy, to a relatively adequate relation between the individual and society. In Freud's excellent phrase, a normal life is one in which a person can love, work, and play. Lacan pursues a similarly positive objective within his different conceptual framework: though there is no return to absolute normalcy or anterior "truth" in Lacan, the aim is nonetheless to make the subject see where he or she "stands" (note the inadequacy of the term) in the representational system. We have no access to the Real, associated in Lacan with the Law of the Father (i.e. enforced separation from the mother) and the Phallus; the Real is, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, "that which resists desire." Language is the mediator between the self and others and, presumably, the only arena for satisfaction once we enter the Symbolic or Representational Order. The "I" is not a biological or essential self, and we cannot make it become what it never was. The "I" is in fact a symbolic construct, and it occupies a shifting position within the Representational Order. Ultimately, then, the goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to instill in the patient a lived experience of this irrecoverable split between the symbolic position "I" and any notion of a prior, essential self. (Note 4) Notes Note 1. If you should decide to read further in Lacan, it is a good idea to have on hand a book like Dylan Evans' An introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1995. For more standard Freudian works, The Language of Psycho-Analysis would be excellent. (J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1974.) Note 2. The psychoanalytic term "Gestalt" refers to a whole not reducible to the sum of its parts. In its fuller sense, the term refers to Gestalt Theory, on which see these two websites: The Max Wertheimer Page and the Gestalt Theory Association. Note 3. Lacan's suggestion that the self's relation to others is fundamentally aggressive and hostile links him to Freud, who went so far as to posit a "Death Drive" underlying the human psyche. Interested readers may refer to Freud's 1939 book Civilization and its Discontents, and to my brief essay on that work, "The Death Drive in Cultural Criticism." Note 4. For the comments on Lacan in the final paragraph, I have drawn upon my notes of an excellent lecture given at UC Irvine by Prof. Michael Clark. Clark's interpretation makes it possible to see the positive side of Lacanian theory rather than just the complications that arise with Lacan's infusion of structural linguistics into Freud's more or less biology-based theories.
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