Mirror stage

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. Lacan first delivered this essay as a talk at the 16 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 they may recognize their "self" in a mirror.

Children before the age of three generally do not recognize their own mirror image as being that of themselves. Thus, Lacan theorized, seeing one's "self" in a mirror is a critical point of development in constructing one's own self image. It is in this moment that it becomes possible for the child to have ego-development. Note, though, that in contrast to humanistic or ego-centered psychology, Lacanian theory declares that it is in the moment of the formation of the "ego" that our pathological fates are sealed. It is the reflexive ability that is garnered by a child's identification of itself with the gestalt of its mirror image which allows it to self-evaluate and self-interpret that is the underlying condition for the possibility of all of the transitivity and aggressivity that characterizes human life.

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." At the moment of perceiving bodily autonomy, Jane Gallop says there is jubilation, but it is short lived. As soon as the infant can posit that prior to this moment it was in "bits and pieces" it recognizes the 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 readings of Lacan's Mirror Stage Essay, see Jane Gallop (1985) Reading Lacan, chapter 3: "Where to Begin?"