This blog spends a lot of time talking about the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. His theories cannot be understood without an understanding of the psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. This article will briefly introduce you to his concept of the "Mirror Stage".
Lacan saw himself, in contrast to American psychoanalytical theory based in Behaviorism, as taking on Freud's project: taking the individual human psyche as a whole entity which has both conscious and unconscious elements. The job of the analyst is to assist the analysand in becoming aware of those unconscious elements that plague them in an effort to help develop their self-understanding. In American psychoanalysis, the effort is more to cure certain symptoms: an ends-oriented practice. For Lacan, the "birth of the Subject" is the goal - to help the patient navigate the layered, subtle, and complex layers of its subjectivity. An obvious place to start, then, is in an investigation into the formation of the ego and the perception of the Subject in an infant. Lacan calls this "the Mirror Stage."
Between six and eight months of age, an infant will manage to recognize itself in the mirror. For Lacan, this marks an extraordinary moment in the baby's life. He writes, "we have to understand the mirror stage as an identification... the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image." That is, the Mirror Stage marks a moment where the idea of "me" or "self" enters the baby's intellect. It is an intellectual act.
Descartes famously wrote, "I think, therefore I am". This intellectual act is referred to as the Cogito. While it will be tempting to equate the Cogito and the Mirror Stage, it's important to note the difference between the two. For Lacan, the opposite is true: "I think, therefore I am not." Why? It is because this first moment of self-identification, while foundational to subjectivity, is illusory: the baby recognizes itself through a false image - a replication, a reflection on glass. Its right arm is the image's left, its left arm is the image's right. Also, in identifying itself in the mirror, the child is essentially identifying itself with something separate from it: "I" exist there - I can point to "Me". Lacanian Lionel Bailly writes that "The founding act of identity is therefore not just emotional and intellectual, it is also schismatic, separating the Subject from itself into an object" (30). The experience is therefore alienating. The "I" is lost in the act and replaced by an object, an image.
Before recognizing itself in the mirror, the child already had a number of 'mirrors' through which it understood itself. The mother, for instance, serves as a mirror - it couldn't recognize itself in a mirror, after all, if it wasn't able to recognize a human being, which it has come to know through the mother. But the mother has her own will, she doesn't always do as the child would like and the child recognizes its impotence in controlling her. The child already intuits that the mother is not itself. It is external. When the baby recognizes itself in a mirror, it already has an intuitive understanding of the unreality of this external image, and yet during the mirror stage it also makes the intellectual and emotional leap to say, "while this is not me, it is yet me." Bailly writes, "From the beginning, the child's identity (or Subject) is both "what I am" and "what others and I see of me" - the image is oneself and simultaneously not oneself, and no sooner has there been this splitting, than there is a merging and confusion of subject and object - an 'adoption' by the Subject of its objectified image" (31).
When a baby sees itself in a mirror, typically a parent will accompany such a recognition with a naming of the image: "That's Tommy!" Another objective term used by children once acquiring language will be "Me": "That's Me!" The "I" becomes mysterious and often times children will avoid the "I" term and say things like "Me hungry" or "Tommy's ball!" or they will avoid naming the "I" by avoiding pronouns altogether: "not tired!" (Bailly 34-35). This phenomenon marks the way that the Subject's first act of self-recognition "has been overlaid by the object-image: it is only through the object-image that the child can speak of itself; and yet simultaneously, it is that unrecognized Subject who is speaking" (35). The unrecognized Subject is, of course, the "I" which is entirely subjective and can't be brought under an objective concept, nor pointed to. Lacan argues, therefore, that Subjectivity is brought forth through a 'misrecognition'. Lacan argues that human beings are oblivious of their own Subject. If we bring in Freudian terms, 'their own Subject' would refer, then, to the unconscious: therefore the reversal of the Cogito: I think, therefore I am not because when I think, the Subjective 'I' is forgotten and replaced with the objective 'me'. Thought erases the "I".
Our sense of self, then, is fictional. It is 'Imaginary' (another important Lacanian term we will not get into here). We start to build a narrative around this fictional self. The work of psychoanalysis is to help resolve its discordance with the subjective 'I'. So often the ideas we attach to the 'me' are in denial of reality. We attach ideas to the 'me' that are mere wishful thinking. We say, for instance, "I am over so and so - I don't care about him - he no longer affects me" and this lays in direct contrast with the truth: he occupies my thoughts and I am emotional whenever I talk about him, even when I talk about the ways he does not affect me any longer. He come up a lot in my thoughts, my words and in conversations with friends and family. Our expression: "I am over so and so", then, are used to help define an external 'me' - the 'me' we are aware of, the 'me' to which we can relate. the 'me' we'd like to be - a 'me' rid of any care for Him. They have nothing to do with 'I' - the 'I' I have never seen, the 'I' to which I have no mediated relation (no mirror to help guide my understanding). Such musings create a notable dis-chord between 'me' and 'I', so visible to others, but completely unintelligible to the Subject. Bailly writes, "At the Mirror Stage, one may think of the Subject as the part that 'invents' the stories about its image-self or ego, affixing to it signifiers as it acquires language: girl, blonde, pretty, likes chocolate, hates pink, good at drawing, etc.; but it also represses as many signifiers as it selects, and in doing so, tries to hide something of itself. Indeed, the Subject can only come into being when it is not thinking, because the very act of any thinking that involves its ego creates a smokescreen behind which it disappears" (36).
I hope this discussion is thought-provoking and helpful. Happy New Year!
Bailly, Lionel. Lacan. England: Oneworld Publishing, 2009.
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