Mirror stage

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Jacques Lacan tells of the mirror stage in his essay "The Mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience," which was published in English in Écrits: A Selection, first by Alan Sheridan in 1977, and more recently by Bruce Fink in 2002. The ideas Lacan expresses are seen as both an extension and reinterpretation of Freud's earlier work. He first delivered this essay as a talk at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis in Zurich on July 17, 1949. In Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, the "mirror stage" (le stade du miroir) is the point in an infant's life when it may recognize its "self" in a mirror, and thus achieves consciousness of itself.

When the child sees itself in the mirror, often propped up by another person or mechanical device and is able to associate the image with itself, it retroactively posits that before this autonomy that it now perceives, its body was in "bits and pieces." The dependency upon another is crucial, for just as a mirror reflects an object according to its incidence, Lacan argues that this consciousness is formed in a "trigonometric" manner, dependent, but not contingent, upon the nature of this "first encounter". At the moment of perceiving bodily autonomy, Jane Gallop says there is jubilation, but it is short lived, before "post-infantile angst” sets in. As soon as the infant can posit that prior to this moment it was in "bits and pieces," it recognizes the very real danger of regressing to this earlier stage.

The potential relation between facets of the mirror stage and our relation to character archetypes has been explored in depth by theorists of entertainment media—namely literature, film (Laura Mulvey) and computer games (Mathias Fuchs), for example by discussing the manner in which games, and to some extent other media as well, present a "virtual mirror", in which the child perceives herself according to the manner of (re)presentation determined by the media.

Émile Jalley showed that Lacan owed his concept of the mirror stage to the work of psychologist Henri Wallon, who was in turn inspired by Freud.^[1]