English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Questions on Jacques Lacan's "The Mirror Stage" (1949) Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 1. According to Lacan on 405, what is the very first thing that a baby does upon seeing its own image in a mirror? 2. What kind of identification does the baby come away with from its mirror experience, according to Lacan on 406? If the baby's identification doesn't yet produce a full adult-like sense of "self," what does it produce? 3. On 407, how does Lacan describe the relation between humans and "nature"? What is "the function of the imago"? 4. At 407, column 2, what kind of "drama" does Lacan say the mirror stage amounts to? Try to describe the movement into adult selfhood presaged by the mirror stage. 5. According to Lacan on 409, why shouldn't we anchor our understanding of the ego or self to Freud's notion of the "reality principle"? (Freud had written that the ego or rational self mediates between the non-rational id--that squirming bag of appetites at the core of our being--and the everlasting NO! of the superego or conscience.) What, then, should be our starting point in understanding the child's development? *The reading selection is from Davis, Robert Con and Ronald Schleifer. Contemporary Literary Criticism: Literary and Cultural Studies. Fourth edition. New York: Longman, 1998. 405-09.
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