The mirror stage

I wrote a paper a few years back on the concept of the identity as signified by what it is not rather than what it is. We know how to categorize ourselves because we have developed a sense of self, what we like, only learned by knowing what we don’t like, in short. Didn’t know then that I was reiterating years of Saussure and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Do you ever impress yourself? For a brief, shinning moment this morning I truly astounded myself. I’ve never read anything by Lacan, until this morning, and knowing that I came to the same, even though not as eloquently put, conclusion in regard to the self vs. self-realization…wow, no verb would work here.

But…Lacan takes it a little farther and analyzes preoedipal infants in order to determine the exact time frame of the misrecognition of the ego, which occurs during the mirror stage. Now he impressed me. An infant has no concept of his own capabilities, features, self, but only the whole image he sees around him. In the mirror stage, for the first time the infant is presented with an image of himself which he learns to accept as his “self, his identity, when for all sane purpose, it is a misrecognition of an image of the self, distorted and incomplete, in comparison to the real self, which we are never capable of fully understanding due to the dimensions of a miror as a means of physical recognition, or misrecognition in keeping with Lacan.

So that is why you’ll never see yourself as others do…I’ve figured it out. Where’s my Nobel Prize?

I don’t know why I felt the need to share that…”Who knows where thoughts come from? They just do.”