Lacan “The Mirror Stage”

Lacan: “The Mirror Stage” The theory of the mirror stage is Lacan's famous theory. He believes that mirror stage is important in terms of people’s personality.The mirror image, which is the reflection of oneself in the mirror, is one of the methods of studying children's self-consciousness in the children's psychology. A child can identify the differences between himself and the reflection in the mirror: the image in the mirror is the reflection of himself. In Lacan's view, Pre-mirror stage means that in the early several months after a infant's birth, the infant has no sense of itself as an independent entity and no distinction between self and others, between baby and mother. "The child lives in a situation of a 'symbolic' relation with its mother's body which blurs any sharp boundary between the two" (Eagleton,1983:164). There is no self for the child and the baby is in the state of confusion of himself and others. But all this begins to change in the mirror stage, which usually occurs. Mirror stage is extremely important for the infant to change in the mirror stage, which usually occurs between the age of six to eighteen months. The infant will gimps at a mirror and finds that the reflection of himself in the mirror is not a real self as himself in the reality. H e can’t still identify himself from the image in the mirror. In post-mirror stage the child finds out that the reflection of himself in the mirror is himself . With the help of the mirror, the child begins to know himself. Mirror stage is a critic al period in children’s self-development. The child cannot understand any parts of his own body because one can not identity which is the mirror or the reality. When he recognize himself as wholeness in real world he will get to know the reality. When he touch the image in the mirror he finds image doesn’t exist. In this way the child knows the world. We can see that child’s image in the mirror is only the reflection of his own body, and the image is only an imaginary. From this we can see children’s self-recognition is only a hallucination, the imaginary order called by Lacan. By identifying from this image, the infant makes a profound shift from actual experience of fragmentation to an idealization of experience. The mirror stage focus on the independence of image, identity and identification. “Just as man and woman are already created but do not enter the human condition until expelled from Eden, so the child, although already born, does not become a self until the mirror stage”(Gallop, 85). Lacan’s t heory about self-formation is negative and critical. According to Freud, the human child is fused with the mother. It is the pre-Oedipal stage. But Freud’s theory pay much attention to the boy’s development of identity within the theory of masculinity. He believed that Self and identity is not inborn. Jacques Lacan develops a reinterpretation of the entire psychoanalytic theory. Many of his works can be seen as a direct or indirect adaption of key Freudian texts, and “what Lacan seeks to do in his Ec rits is to reinterpret Freud in the light of structuralist and post-structuralist theories of discourse”(Eagleton, 164).