This offspring was begot without a Mother. 
Charles de Montesquieu, Epigraph to The Spirit of Laws 
 To live without mirrors is to live without the self. 
Margaret Atwood, "Marrying the Hangman" 
 
 

The publication history of "The Mirror Stage" is a curious and convoluted one. It involves a dramatic reversal of fortunes for Lacan: from loss to recovery and restitution, from near oblivion to worldwide renown. I therefore begin with a narrative of beginnings that is also a tale of two difficulties: the commonplace difficulty of beginning, of starting out and making one's own mark and the difficulty, peculiar to "The Mirror Stage," of finding out where the beginning began.¹ From the description of these professionally and textually obscure origins (sections I-II), I turn to the work of Henri Wallon, a major resource for Lacan's theory of the onset of subjectivity through reflexive recognition (sections III-VII). Even though more or less sequentially presented, these several points of origin are closely intertwined. 

I 

In the summer of 1936, Lacan presented a paper entitled "Le stade du miroir" at the fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress held at Marienbad under the chairmanship of Ernest Jones.² It was his debut address at a congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). During Lacan's presentation, an incident took place that, in retrospect, presaged his troubled relations with that governing organization. Ten minutes into the address, Lacan was cut off by Jones. At the chairman's behest, the unknown delegate from France did not complete his lecture. It was possibly Lacan's initiatory experience of what would become the controversial hallmark of his own analytic technique--that is, a very short session.

Ten years later, in "Propos sur la causalitÈ psychique" (Remarks on Psychic Causality), Lacan gave a highly ironic account of this incident just before discussing his theory of the mirror stage. This prefatory account, which includes an exact notation of the moment he was interrupted--"au quatriËme top de la dixiËme minute"--recurred thirty years after the event, in 1966, with the inclusion of his "Remarks" in Šcrits (184-85). Evidently, Jones's intervention still continued to reverberate. The immediate result, however, was that the "original" essay never appeared in print. Although it is indexed under the English title, "The Looking-Glass Phase," in the report published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis of January 1937, all there is under the entry is the title itself, with no text or abstract.³ Lacan publicly accounted for this empty entry many years later. In a footnote to "Of Our Antecedents," an introduction to the early works collected in Šcrits, Lacan writes that he "neglected to deliver" his text for publication in the congress proceedings. He neglected or forgot little else connected with the Marienbad affair. The same footnote also gives the exact place and date (31 July 1936) of his own lecture's aborted delivery and reaffirms that the mirror stage constitutes, in Lacan's view, the "pivot" of his contribution to the psychoanalytic field (Šcrits, 67 n. 1).

The inaugural version of Lacan's famous essay thus has the distinction of not being delivered on two separate occasions. Twice diverted from its destination, it did nonetheless arrive. It appeared in 1938 and the late 1940s in installments that are not only temporally but theoretically distinct from one another. A comparison of the "Le complexe de l'instrustion" section of Les complexes familiaux with Lacan's later texts on the mirror stage brings out the evolution in his thinking. As indicated in the preceding chapters, these alterations include: the reduction from three family complexes to a two-phase theory of specular and Oedipal identifications; the shift from a primarily genetic (developmental) emphasis to a structural (deferred action) view of psychical temporality; and the recasting of the maternal role. Thus elaborating the mirror stage as "an ontological structure of the human world" (Šcrits, 94 / 2), Lacan departs from both his own earlier positions and established psychoanalytic theory.

After Les complexes familiaux appeared in volume 8 of the EncyclopÈdie franÁaise, World War II and the German occupation of France intervened. Lacan did not publish any new work until 1945. Thirteen years following the memorable intervention at Marienbad, Lacan presented an uninterrupted communication at the sixteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Zurich on 17 July 1949. "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" was published in the October-December 1949 issue of the Revue franÁaise de psychanalyse and subsequently reprinted in Šcrits. In addition to "The Mirror Stage" essay itself, Lacan provided summaries of his theory in three papers written during this period: "Remarks on Psychic Causality" (1946), "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" (1948), and "Some Reflections on the Ego" (1953).

However, the conceptual changes introduced after 1945 did not prevent Lacan from drawing a close connection between the pre- and postwar versions of his essay. In "Remarks on Psychic Causality," just before summarizing the concept of specular recognition ("l'assomption triomphante de l'image"), he directs the reader to his encyclopedia article. "I did not give my paper to the congress proceedings," Lacan explains, "and you may find the essential in a few lines in my article on the family that appeared in 1938" (Šcrits 185). The cue-word in this context is "essential": it signals not merely that the unpublished lecture of 1936 has been preserved but also that the content remains unchanged. No significant disparities exist between what "appeared in 1938" and what Lacan is about to present in 1946. The final state of "The Mirror Stage" was already present in the past. 

II 

It is no longer necessary to seek the "essential" in the pages of the EncyclopÈdie. In recent years the convoluted publication history of "Le stade du miroir" has taken another surprising turn. Elisabeth Roudinesco, historian of the French psychoanalytic movement and biographer of Lacan, has recovered the lost lecture in the archives of FranÁoise Dolto. Six weeks before the Marienbad conference, Lacan presented his "Looking-Glass" paper at a meeting of the SociÈtÈ Psychanalytique de Paris (SPP). Dolto, a clinician specializing in children, took careful and copious notes on that occasion. According to Roudinesco, the archival notes dated 16 June 1936 corroborate Lacan's claim that the discussion of the mirror stage in 1938 reiterates the main ideas of his unpublished paper (Esquisse, 159). So the entry in the official conference records need not stay empty. Dolto's notes on the Paris lecture could be used to fill in the blank under the title, "The Looking-Glass Phase," in the IPA proceedings.

It is to these proceedings that Jacques-Alain Miller refers in the annotated bibliography compiled under his supervision: 

Le stade du miroir.

Produit pour la premiËre fois au XIV^e CongrËs psychanalytique international tenu ý Marienbad du 2 au 8 aošt 1936 sous la prÈsidence d'Ernest Jones. ... Cf. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, vol. 18, part. I, janvier 1937, p. 78, o˜ cette communication est inscrite sous la rubrique 'The Looking-glass Phase.' (Šcrits, 917)

 
A similar directive appears in the "Bibliographical note" attached to Alan Sheridan's translation of Šcrits. Unlike the French edition, however, the translator's note refers to both an "earlier version" delivered at Marienbad in 1936 and a "much revised later version" presented in 1949. "The present translation is of the later version," Sheridan writes (xiii). In Miller's "RepËres bibliographiques," however, there is no mention of "earlier," "later," or "much revised" versions of the essay. Two separate entries are given: the first points to the interrupted August 1936 lecture and the January 1937 congress report, and the second to the 1949 lecture and publication. Since the first entry directs the reader to a nonexistent text, Miller's referral may well, as Jane Gallop remarks, be "not just ambiguous, but ironic" (Reading Lacan, 75).

The entry for the 1936 essay in Šcrits produces or, rather, collaborates in the production of yet another ambiguity. It begins with the words "Produit pour la premiËre fois au XIV CongrËs ..." (917). "Produced for the first time": in an age of mechanical reproduction, the phrase implies a series of reprints of the same work. Lacan does not revise or "return" to his own texts. He only repeats them. The bibliographer's formulation is comparable to the final sentiments expressed on the back cover of the 1984 edition of Les complexes familiaux: "One does not know what to admire more--the mastery of the whole, or that it did not present an obstacle to that which was to follow [qu'elle n'ait pas fait obstacle ý ce qui devait suivre]." There is no impediment, no contradiction (among the synonyms for the French obstacle listed in Le Grand Robert is contrariÈtÈ [6:86]) between the work of 1938 and the rest of Lacan's teaching. Unlike the alarming hauteur (and humility) of Walt Whitman's: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself," the back-cover text provides this reassurance: Lacan could do no worse than repeat himself.

But to exclude the diachronic dimension of Lacan's work would seem to counterman his own instructions. Lacan thus cautions his eager readers in 1966: "?It happens that our students delude themselves into finding 'already there' ['dÈjý lý'] in our writings that to which our teaching has since brought us. Is it not enough that what is there has not barred the way [ce qui est lý n'en ait pas barrÈ le chemin]?" (Šcrits, 67). He apparently resists the implication of an already-thereness, of a synecdochic reading of his writings that makes every part correspond with or adequate to the whole. There is a progression in the path he has pursued. And yet the back-cover panegyric--"One does not know what to admire more..."--does not get it entirely wrong. Lacan himself, in spite of his criticism of overzealous seekers, claims to find in Freud's texts an appeal to something that may be termed "always there" (toujours lý): namely, the Name or Interdiction (nom-non) of the Father. The symbolic father designates an invariant, unconscious feature of the social group or community that elevates human subjects above mere brute, instinctual existence and simultaneously subjugates them to its signifying structures. Lacan's writings would transmit the universal law of the signifier discovered by Freud. Such a teaching, however, cannot be subject to the time-bound procession of "earlier" and "later" variants. Its meaning value is supra- or hyperlogical and not chronological.

In keeping with this domain of law and truth, Lacan concludes "Of Our Antecedents" with the acknowledgment that he finds himself placing the early texts now collected in Šcrits in a "future anterior": "they will have preceded our insertion of the unconscious into language [ils auront dÈvancÈ notre insertion de l'inconscient dans le langage]" (71). He implants a future construction in the past tense to express a time that is already in the future, even when viewed through the prism of the past. His conclusion does not repeat the diachronic indication given in the rhetorical question ("Is it not enough that what is there has not barred the way?") posed earlier in "Of Our Antecedents," but rather controverts it. What emerges, then, from a reading of Lacan's several directives to his readers is the impasse of an ambiguity: is this work to be viewed in the incremental sense of "that to which our teaching has since brought us"? or, on the contrary, as that which is "always already there"?

Put another way, the retranscriptive movement that invests past events with later significations (in a word, Nachtr”glichkeit) may be no less central to the temporality of Lacan's teaching than to his teaching about the temporality of the subject. Although the discussion of the intrusion complex in 1938 diverges in certain basic respects from "The Mirror Stage" of 1949, Lacan tends to gloss over these differences when speaking of his fully developed theory. His mention of "the essential ... in [his] article on the family" encourages the reader to consider the concept of reciprocal reflexivity first expounded in the 1930s, aprËs coup, from the perspective of the subsequent meanings it acquires. Analogously, the use of the future perfect to present his early work in "Of Our Antecedents" achieves, or strives after a retrospective/anticipatory effect.

Lacan's inclination to rewrite his intellectual history ("it is less a matter of remembering than of rewriting history" [Seminar I, 20 / 14]) parallels another type of self-fashioning: the rupture he effected between his family ties--the devoutly Catholic and middle-bourgeois milieu of vinegar merchants into which he was born--and the socially upscale and avant-gardiste identity he forged for himself. He was intent on, and largely succeeded in, becoming "a grand bourgeois, a son of no one" (Roudinesco, Esquisse, 312). Lacan's reticence about his past, particularly his childhood and familial ancestry, contrasts with Freud's many autobiographical reminiscences and anecdotes. (There is nothing, for instance, comparable to the confessional mode of The Interpretation of Dreams in Lacan's writings.) This reticence may be traced to the tension between the need for a beginning, a point of departure that requires antecedents, and the need to cut one's self off from one's origins. The crux is: how can one begin to be without origins? If, in Freud's celebrated formulation, there is "one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable--a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown" (SE, 4: 111), for Lacan, the navel is a mark or image or reminder of what is too well known: the umbilical connection that cancels the dream of beginning entirely anew.

It is in keeping with this trend toward self-fashioning that Lacan, baptized Jacques-Marie Šmile, eventually discarded two of his first names. Like his father Charles-Marie Alfred, his brother Marc-Marie, as well as other relatives, he bore the name of the Holy Mother, who was venerated as the "protective saint" of the family vinegar trade (Roudinesco, Esquisse, 23). Šmile is, moreover, almost identical to the first of his mother's Christian names: Šmilie Philippine Marie. The emergence of "Jacques Lacan" seems to have required, quite literally, an effacement of the names-of-the-mother. The correlative to this revisionary erasure in Lacan's later theory of ego formation is the absence of the mother's face in the mirror. 

III 

To recall for a third and last time the bibliographic note that begins "Produit pour la premiËre fois au XIV CongrËs ...," I would now propose that the "first time" mentioned in this note is as difficult to read as the entry blank, the communication meticulously but invisibly "inscribed" on page 78 of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis ("Cf.... Vol. 18, part. 1, janvier 1937") in an additional sense. The first presentation--the lecture that Jones interrupted at Marienbad turns out actually to be the second--after the SPP meeting that Dolto attended in Paris--or, by another count, even more belated. If Wallon's research on the mirror experiences of children and animals is included among the antecedents of Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, the question of beginnings and succession returns in a different guise. So our horizon of origins keeps changing.

Lacan became acquainted with Wallon, a fellow member of the SociÈtÈ de Psychiatrie, in the early 1930s. During this period, he read Wallon's book-length monograph, which cites and develops the studies of Charlotte B¸hler, Charles Darwin, Paul Guillaume, Elsa K–hler, and W.T. Preyer. Wallon's work first appeared in the Journal de Psychologie, November-December 1931, and was soon after reprinted in Les origins du caractËre chez l'enfant (The Origins of the Infant's Character) (1933). When Wallon was put in charge of volume 8 of the EncyclopÈdie franÁaise, on La vie mentale (Mental Life), he commissioned the article that came to be called "La Famille" from the young psychiatrist Lacan (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., 142-43). For the 1938 account of the mirror stage and throughout its later permutations, Lacan draws on the extensive data and observations gathered in Wallon's Les origins.

In "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis," Lacan briefly acknowledges his debt to "Wallon's remarkable work" (18), a debt that remains otherwise unmentioned in his writings. Disclosing "a certain forgetfulness or a curious lapsus," Lacan consistently "skips over" Wallon, as Bertrand Ogilvie puts in (113 n. 1). Wallon is most noticeably absent from the 1949 essay on the mirror stage. Lacan also neglects to mention Wallon in "Some Reflections on the Ego," where he recapitulates his theory of the mirror stage for the British Psycho-Analytical Society: "I introduced the concept. ... I returned to the subject two years ago. ... The theory I there advanced, which I submitted long ago to the French psychologists," and so forth (14). Furthermore, when he presents his "antecedents" in Šcrits, Wallon's name is not among those singled out for recognition. Instead, Lacan speaks of his "invention" of the ideas of the moi and mirror stage (67). Whether the mirror stage is universally formative of the I-function or not, it would certainly seem to have been so in the case of Lacan.

However, a different perspective can be brought to bear on the scandal surrounding this silence. Lacan's recourse to Wallon is revisionary and, at times, antithetical. In this respect, it resembles his much-vaunted "return" to Freud. As I shall presently show, Lacan not only appropriates and assimilates but also transforms Wallon's observations to such an extent that, like the White Knight in Lewis Carroll's looking-glass world, he can proclaim, "It is my own invention" without egregious prevarication. Nonetheless, the discrepancy in Lacan's treatment of Freud and of Wallon raises the question: why this flagrant omission of Wallon's contribution? Why does Wallon only once receive due credit from Lacan, whereas reiterated tributes to Freud fully acknowledge the doctrine from which Lacan departs?

One motive for trumpeting certain influences while muting others may derive from the difference between the arenas of Oedipal and specular rivalry. Proclamations of fidelity to the Freudian discovery, amid often transgressive commentary, may be read as a defense against or cover-up for what (theoretically) Lacan understands very well: aggressivity in psychoanalysis. Viewed thus, Lacan's praise of Freud is also a preemptive strike. Frequent homage accompanies a revisionary reading that, at times, completely repudiates Freud's theories and, at others, makes them anticipate those of Lacan. He wants Freud--dead or alive--no longer behind him. He would put his precursor in the place of a follower.

Wallon occupies a different relational arena. In the strict chronological sense, Wallon (born 1879) belonged to the preceding generation: "But in his innovative position in the field of psychology, he was closer to Jacques Lacan ... twenty years his junior" (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., 66). Like Rank (born 1884) and Ferenczi (born 1873), Wallon is a specular counterpart to Lacan. The adversarial relation with the (br)other, the fight for "pure prestige," in Alexandre KojËve's well-known phrase (7), mandates that only one survive and prosper. This type of struggle leads to a "slaying" of the fraternal rival rather than of the father. So while Lacan tends to present his own work as (a tribute to) Freud's, he presents Wallon's work as his own; that is, he translates himself into Freud, but translates Wallon into himself.

To characterize this rivalrous ratio in other terms, Wallon is the Red Knight to Lacan's White Knight. In contradistinction to the deadly seriousness of the dialectics of Master and Slave, and to the tragic outcome of the competition between Cain and Abel, Lewis Carroll offers a satiric version of the drama of fraternal feuding. Carroll's crimson-clad knight arrives first on the scene and, "brandishing a great club," claims proprietary rights over the startled Alice: "'You're my prisoner!' the Knight cried, as he tumbled off his horse." The pure display of the ego flourishes and, intermittently, falls under the banner of its aggression. The White Knight arrives next and confronts the Red Knight with an inverted symmetry: "He drew up at Alice's side, and tumbled off his horse just as the Red Knight had done; then he got on again, and the two Knights sat and looked at each other for some time without speaking."⁴ On this rarefied imaginary plane, words are marginalized, hardly matter. The moment of recognition-cum-possession is what is fought for. "'She's my prisoner, you know!' the Red Knight said at last" (Carroll, 294).

Alice is an excuse for and not an actual cause of conflict. Carroll constructs a parody of epic warriors locked in mortal combat over an illusory trophy-object. In RenÈ Girard's lexicon (as in Lacan's), Alice is an object of "mimetic desire": "By making one man's desire into a replica of another man's desire, [mimetism] inevitably leads to rivalry; and rivalry in turn transforms desire into violence" (169). Both Girard's dictum--"the subject desires the object because the rival desires it"--and Lacan's--"the desire of man is the desire of the Other"--derive from the KojËvian notion of aggression as an outcome of mimesis (Girard, 145; Lacan, Seminar XI, 105 / 115). "Desire is human," according to KojËve, "only if the one desires ... the Desire of the other" (6).⁵ In the exchange of blows between the knights, whose self-absorption completely defeats whatever gallantry their chivalric code defends, Alice represents no more than a function of their narcissistic and imitated desires. After the inconclusive battle is over ("'It was a glorious victory, wasn't it?' said the White Knight ..."), the Red Knight mounts and gallops off. Even though the White Knight has appeared belatedly in the field of contest, he vaunts his possessive claim: "I came and rescued her!" He continues his journey for some distance with the looking-glass girl in tow.

In what follows I propose to explore the analogical relations between Wallon's ideas about the mirror-image and Lacan's. By means of this ideational dialogue, I shall try to present not only the singularity of Lacan's theory about the encounter with the specular image and its ramifications but also why and how this theory produces a specular effect. 

IV 

In the chapter of Les origins entitled "The Body Proper and Its Exteroceptive Image," Wallon introduces a zoo of creatures to demonstrate, first, the disparity between animal and human modes of cognition and, second, the series of intricate stages in which consciousness of reflexive reciprocity develops in the child. A dog or a cat or a bird can perceive the mirror image, but only the human infant, although still motorically uncoordinated, can grasp the reciprocal relation between the self and its reflection. Wallon cites the striking instance of a drake (un canard de Turquie) that acquired the habit, his partner being dead, of peering into a reflecting windowpane. "Without doubt his own reflection," Wallon writes, "could more or less fill in the void left by the absence of his companion" (218-19).⁶ The drake found consolation only because it was unable to identify the image; that is, it did not see itself but rather an extension of its entourage in the glass. The animal, as opposed to the human infant, cannot grasp the relation between the virtual image seen in the mirror and the reality outside.

Wallon's text on mirror behavior vividly exemplifies the differences in the mental capacities among animal species, as well as among children at various developmental stages. Similarly, Lacan contrasts the behavior of the child and the chimp in his 1949 essay: "The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror" (Šcrits, 93 / 1; see also 112 / 18 and 185). The motoric advantage of the animal is offset by the spark of early human intelligence. Like Wallon, Lacan also mentions the experiments of Elsa K–hler and other psychologists who published their observations in the 1930s. In further keeping with these empirical arguments, Lacan repeatedly refers to the Leonard Harrison Matthews's study of ovulation in pigeons and Remy Chauvin's research on migratory locusts (Šcrits, 95-96 / 3, 189-91; "Some Reflections," 14). Their studies demonstrate that visual stimulation links mental and physical processes in these animals; even seeing the reflected image of members of the same species can produce a physiological change. Matthews's experiments especially support the preeminence accorded the visual in Lacanian theory by proving that, for ovulation to occur in a female pigeon, either the sight of other (male or female) pigeons, or a mirror image of herself alone is sufficient.⁷

It is very odd, as David Macey points out, that Lacan with his "reputation for militant anti-biologism" should thus repeatedly invoke experimental psychology, ethology, and biology (99). But he had already done so earlier. Despite the polemical emphasis on culturally determined complexes as opposed to instinctual factors throughout Les Complexes familiaux, Lacan had unhesitatingly recalled the "material base" of the complex in order to substantiate his idea of the enduring influence of separation from the maternal body (sevrage). "The organic connection," he contends in his encyclopedia essay, "accounts for the fact that the maternal imago possesses the very depths of the psyche" (32 / 15). Because the mirror stage now replaces the nursing dyad and weaning as the governing structure of the psyche, it is not unexpected to find Lacan's anti-biologism once again suspended.

Among other ideas specified in Wallon's work that resonate in Lacan's is the linkage between the child's acquisition of a unified body image and a preliminary understanding of symbolic representation. According to Wallon, the human infant, whose direct vision is limited to a partial body image ("only certain fragments and never assembled"), accedes to a coherent image of the "total body" through the mediation of the mirror (227). Simple though this unification of the self in space may appear to adults, it implies a cognitive subordination of "the givens of immediate experience to pure representation." The mirror experience is thus also the "prelude to symbolic activity," enabling a transition from partial, sensorial perceptions to what Wallon calls the "symbolic function" (230-31).

Wallon's detailed observations clearly established a conceptual paradigm for Lacan's understanding of the mirror stage. Yet Lacan decisively parts company with Wallon--and this departure is arguably the core of his theoretical innovation--on two points: the status of the mirror and the identity of the specular image. 

V 

What is the phenomenological status of the mirror? Is it a real or metaphorical reflector? In Wallon's numerous descriptions of attitudes before the looking glass--be it those of dogs, monkeys, infants in their cradles, or a little girl admiring the straw hat on her head--a real mirror is involved. Wallon placed a literal reflector before his subjects, as did the several researchers whose data are cited in the pages of Les origines. Lacan has a more complicated mirror in mind. It may (but need not) be a real one. Lacan does not rule out the perceiving subject's actual reduplication; yet the mirror is also a metaphor, and, as he remarks in another connection, "it is not a metaphor to say so" (Šcrits, 528 / 175).

In Lacan's theory, the mirror stage or phase functions as a figurative designation for two temporal modalities: first, a sudden moment or flash of recognition--the "jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child"--in which assimilation to the image of the counterpart (sibling, playmate, or actual reflection) takes place; and second, a state of identification/alienation involving the other--"the mirror disposition"--that constitutes a permanent structure of the psyche (Šcrits, 94, 95 / 2, 3). These modalities are implicated in each other but can nevertheless be elaborated separately. Whereas the first phase coincides with early childhood, the second characterizes a psychical tug-of-war, a dialectical tension ranging over the life span of the subject. The first specifies a moment of genesis in which the ego begins its formation. In this respect, Lacan adheres to Freud's supposition in the essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction" that "a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed" (SE, 14: 77). The second phase entails an ongoing narcissistic, imaginary relationship based on aggressive alienation/erotic attraction between the ego and the other.

This second phase in particular bears the mark of another major influence on Lacan's thought. As Miller recapitulated in a 1989 interview (eight years after the death of Lacan, his father-in-law): "Lacan reorganized the Freudian discovery from a point of view that was foreign to [Freud], the mirror-stage ... which comes from Henri Wallon for its empirical basis and from Hegel revised by KojËve for its theory" (quoted in Borch-Jacobsen, 249 n. 11). Lacan's familiarity with Hegelian philosophy and, especially, with KojËve's influential commentary on The Phenomenology of Spirit is evident in Les complexes familiaux and his later writings. KojËve began what was to become a legendary six-year series of lectures on Hegel at the Šcole des Hautes Študes in 1933. Lacan was among the Parisian avant-gardists (including George Bataille, AndrÈ Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Queneau, and many others) who attended these lectures and discovered the key terms of Hegel's phenomenology via KojËve's teaching (Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., 134-35, 140; see also Borch-Jacobsen, 4-5; Casey and Woody, 76-77; and Macey, 57-58, 95-98).

"Hegel speculated," Lacan writes in Les complexes familiaux, "that the individual who does not fight to be recognized outside the family group will never attain autonomy before death" (34/16). The dark, agonistic aspect of the mirror stage (which cancels or mitigates the jubilation it brings) derives from a Hegelian-KojËvian version of the encounter between the subject and the other as a fight for "pure prestige," a life-and-death struggle for recognition on which independent self-consciousness is predicated. More needs to be said about this influence; but, for the purposes of the present comparison, it is noteworthy that Lacan transforms the real mirror that confronted Wallon's experimental subjects into a metaphor for a metapsychological concept of human genesis.⁸

To trace further this skein of similarities and dissimilarities, D.W. Winnicott, in his "Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development" (1967), discloses an interest in the constitution of selfhood analogous to Lacan's. At the very outset of this essay, Winnicott acknowledges Lacan's influential ideas on "the mirror in each individual's ego development" (130), and, in his concluding statements, he also makes quite clear the metaphoric status of the mirror, a status that is implicitly (but not consistently) upheld in Lacan's writings. Thus, although it is possible to "include in all this [reflecting activity] the actual mirrors that exist in the house," Winnicott still insists, "[i]t should be understood ... that the actual mirror has significance mainly in its figurative sense" (138). For Winnicott, too, a real mirror is not prerequisite for the maturational process of mirroring to ensue. In opting for a figural approach, Winnicott is closer to Lacan's views than Lacan is to Wallon's.

Yet whose face appears as the mirror? What body forms or attitudes can function in reflexive relation to the perceiver? Winnicott designates a range of individual forms and even entire familial attitudes: "[W]hen a family is intact ... each child derives benefit from being able to see himself or herself in the attitude of the individual members or in the attitudes of the family as a whole." But, as his essay title suggests, he gives precedence to the mother's role. Under normal circumstances, her responsiveness to the child ("giving back to the baby the baby's own self") confers a positive experience of formation (138). Winnicott thus draws on Lacan's mirror-stage theory but also indicates where his own stance differs. As he notes in his mirror-role essay, "Lacan does not think of the mirror in terms of the mother's face in the way that I wish to do" (130). The mirror remains a metaphorical concept. However, in the terminological alteration from "stage" (stade) to "role," an abstract setting becomes an actual habitation: a familial setting in which the mother's face serves as primary reflector for the young child.⁹

This distinction carries over into the rhetoric that Lacan and Winnicott use to conceptualize what occurs during the analytic situation. Winnicott, in his 1967 essay and throughout his work, develops an analogy between the infant-mother and the analysand-analyst relationships.¹⁰ That is, in exploring what analysts actually do, the "holding" environment they provide for those under their care, Winnicott alludes to aspects of maternal care. Psychotherapy, according to Winnicott, "is a complex derivative of the face that reflects what is there to be seen": "I like to think of my work this way, and to think that if I do this well enough the patient will find his or her own self" (137-38). Doing it "well enough" casts the analyst in the mirror-role of the mother. Lacan, too, in his "Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power" (1958) and other writings, draws analogies between the "metaphor of the mirror" and the analyst's task; however, he typically evokes the "smooth surface [surface unie] that the analyst presents to the patient" (Šcrits, 589 / 229). Lacan stresses the element of "abnegation," or self-imposed absence--"an impassive face and sealed lips"--instead of the resilient, affective reciprocity suggested in Winnicott's recourse to the mirror analogy. Whereas Lacan describes the analyst as bringing to the session "what in bridge is called the dummy (le mort)" (589 / 229), Winnicott envisages the mommy (la mËre) in the analysis.

The connections sketched here (Wallon-Lacan-Winnicott) constitute a line of disrupted continuities in more ways than one. Whereas mimetic rivalry arguably determines Lacan's relations with Wallon, Winnicott does not engage Lacan either as a precursor (paternal) or as a contemporary (fraternal) adversary. Rather, after forthrightly acknowledging Lacan's influence, Winnicott moves on and proposes an alternative mode of understanding the child's formation. Furthermore, given Lacan's sustained reticence about Wallon and the general obscurity of the latter's work outside of France (Les origines has not been translated into English), it is unlikely that Winnicott was directly acquainted with Wallon's research. And yet despite the distance between Wallon's literal and Winnicott's figural notions about the mirror, their views converge in two respects that differ from Lacan's formulations.

The first can be compared to the divergent inflections of rising and falling tones. Wallon evokes the child's triumph at the resolution of the mirror "ordeal" (Èpreuve), and Winnicott the potential for growth and self-enrichment as a result of maternal mirroring. By contrast, Lacan describes a short-lived moment of jubilation. A sense of radical, unalterable alienation pervades his account. He envisions the ego whose formation is precipitated by the visual image of the counterpart in terms of a negativity derived from KojËve's reading of Hegel: "The dialectic which supports our experience ... obliges us to understand the ego as being constituted from top to bottom within the movement of progressive alienation in which self-consciousness is constituted in Hegel's phenomenology" (Šcrits, 374; trans. quoted in Macey, 97-98). Both Michael Eigen, in a comparison of Winnicott and Lacan, and Roudinesco, in a more recent comparison of Wallon and Lacan, comment on the negativistic aspect of the Lacanian vision (Eigen, 421-22; Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan & Co., 143). Significant though this aspect may well be, I would propose that the second point of divergence discussed below is the more fundamental to Lacan's conception of subject formation. It enables or seems to enable an exorcism of the powerful maternal presence. 

VI 

Where the question "Who's in the mirror?" is concerned, Lacan provides a Hegelian-based determination. Unlike Wallon, for whom the identity of the triggering image is indifferent, and most unlike Winnicott, for whom the image is usually--and preferably--an average devoted ("good-enough") mother, Lacan posits the conjunction between the ego and its antagonist-double as a necessary precondition for the moment of recognition. The self sees the self-same image in the dialectical encounter. A sharp contrast is content as well as in tone thus sets apart Lacan's theoretical formulations.

In particular, Wallon's text about the origins of the child's character becomes an origin that is also a point of new beginning (or departure) for Lacan's definition of the specular image. According to Wallon, the reflected body of the perceiving subject need not be the one to activate the mental integration of model and image. Other bodies may serve the same purpose. Wallon gives the example of a little boy, still in an intermediate stage of development, who smiles at his own and his father's images in the mirror but turns in surprise upon hearing his father's voice behind him. The child has not as yet grasped the connection between the reflection and the real presence of the father (223). In Wallon's analysis, the difficulty seems to lie in a spatial realism that prevents the child from linking the actual figure with the virtual one. The pre-mirror-stage child does not yet understand that the two bodies located at two points in space--the tactile body here and the visual body there--constitute only one body. The child attributes an independent reality to each object or person occupying a different space (225). 

Yet after the child has grasped the distinction between reality and its symbols or representations, a ludic element can enter into these relations. If asked, "Where is Mommy?" a post-mirror-stage child may point to let her image in the mirror and then turn toward her laughing. The child now plays with the duality. "Slyly, he pretends to grant preponderance to the image," Wallon writes, "precisely because he has just clearly recognized its unreality and purely symbolic character" (232).

For Wallon, then, the essential factor is the recognition of spatial values, or, more precisely, the coordination of what was perceived as two bodies in two distinct places. The child's behavior suddenly demonstrates a comprehension of the reciprocity between model and image. The realization of their subordinate rather than independent relation is the turning point. Wallon does devote separate sections in his work to children's specular relations with others ("L'enfant devant l'image speculaire d'autrui") and with their own bodies ("L'enfant devant sa propre image speculaire"); and he also discusses the different mental operations involved in withdrawing reality from the images of other bodies and from the self-image. More crucial, however, than the identity of the person seen in the mirror is the elimination of the schism between the felt "me" and the visual "me."

In "The Child's Relations with Others" (1960), Maurice Merleau-Ponty comments on the Lacanian extension of the ideas found in Les origines: 

In reading Wallon one often has the feeling that in acquiring the specular image it is a question of a labor of understanding, of a synthesis of certain visual perceptions with certain introceptive perceptions. For psychoanalysts the visual is not simply one type of sensibility among others. ... With the visual experience of the self, there is ... the advent of a new mode of relatedness to self. ... The sensory functions themselves are thus redefined in proportion to the contribution they can make to the existence of the subject and the structures they can offer for the development of that existence. (137-38) 

For Lacan, Merleau-Ponty suggests, the perceptual synthesis achieved during the mirror stage is a first stepping-stone in a far more complicated process of maturation. This process involves unconscious as well as conscious mental activities. Moreover, as I have already indicated, the identity of the specular image is not an indifferent one. The reflected body belongs neither to the mother nor to any adult caretaker. On the contrary, Lacan's formulations repeatedly underscore the ego's captivation by its own image: "[T]he mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world, if we go by the mirror disposition that the imago of one's own body presents in hallucinations or dreams" (Šcrits, 95 / 3). This emphasis recurs in his work during this period. He speaks of the "autonomy of the image of the body proper in the psyche" and of the infant's jubilant interest in "his own image in a mirror" (Šcrits, 185; "Some Reflections," 14). The figure in the glass is none other than the counterpart of the self.

Adopting the stance of an objective or external focus, Lacan describes an observer's reaction to this drama of reflexive identification: "[O]ne is all the more impressed when one realizes" (and I take the impersonal "one" as a sign of special investment on his part) "that this behavior occurs either in a babe in arms or in a child who is holding himself upright by one of those contrivances to help one to learn to walk without serious falls" ("Some Reflections," 15). At this juncture, then, the question of the subject--"Which dreamed it?" to borrow Carroll's looking-glass conundrum--might arise: how can one see what the child sees without putting one's self in the frame? Lacan's description conjures the child before the mirror in such a way that the presence of other persons is minimalized ("arms") or eliminated ("holding himself"). Likewise, in "The Mirror Stage," he renders the mother or caretaker a virtually invisible factor: 

Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he [the child] is by some support, human or artificial (what, in France, we call a "trotte-bÈbÈ", he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image. (Šcrits, 94 / 1-2) 

Thus the hand that proverbially rocks the cradle and, more ominously, rules the world is whisked away. What remains is some contraption--a baby walker or a pair of disembodied arms--holding the infant. Lacan makes it abundantly clear that the image in the mirror is not the mother's. He reiterates this cardinal point in "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis": it is the "imago of one's own body" (Šcrits, 120 / 25; also 95 / 3). Even when an adult holds the infant before the mirror, Lacan asserts that the crucial formative identification occurs only between the self and its semblable. If such repetition may be considered a symptom (or a symbol), then Lacan's evocations of an infant overcoming the actual obstruction of various supporting agents, however literally intended, acquire an added resonance. His insistence brings me, at the risk of a certain implausibility, to offer the following interpretation: in the small world of the infantile ego striving to surmount its supports, the venerable injunction "Thou shalt have no other images before me" has a revisionary, projecting meaning. The ego (moi) receives a message from the big Other (le grand Autre) that originally emanated from itself.

Some commentators, however, refuse to allow the radical absence of the mother in the mirror-stage theory. Hence there is a tendency to reintroduce her. Mario Rendon, for example, cites Lacan's 1949 essay as a source for the observation that "the image of the self is originally constructed around the perceived image of the mother" (350). Elizabeth Grosz writes of the "(m)other/mirror-image" (32), making the mother integral to the Lacanian concept of reflexive identification. These readings fail to grasp both the literal meaning of the mirror stage and its doctrinal significance. As described in Les complexes familiaux, the intrusion complex already entails a scene of ego formation through the mirroring of the child's own body. From the very outset, Lacan thus posits a psychical mechanism--"narcissistic intrusion" as he calls it--that requires "the subject's recognition of his image in a mirror" (CF, 45 / 18, 42 / 17). 

VII 

Critical differences notwithstanding, Lacan and Wallon both maintain that the unity of the specular image, the total bodily form, or gestalt, is an indispensable part of the maturation process. According to Lacan, "[w]hat the subject welcomes in [the image] is its inherent mental unity; ... what he applauds in it is the triumph of its integrative power" (CF, 18 / 44; emphasis added). Lacan's statement here does provide grounds for finding that which is to come already there (dÈjý lý), anticipating his later formulation of the mirror stage as a drama involving self-reflection and self-integration: a perception of one's-own-body and of one's-whole-body.

Lacan singled out both of these factors in 1948: "What I have called the mirror stage is interesting in that it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject originally identifies himself with the visual Gestalt of his own body: in relation to the still very profound lack of coordination of his own motility, it represents an ideal unity, a salutary imago" (Šcrits, 113 / 18-19). Appropriately enough, "ideal [that is, unreal or imaginary] unity" is endowed by a reflected totality. The celebratory sense of the I is a function of the formal constellation of parts in the mirror. The term "affective dynamism" in this passage should be glossed by the "triumphant jubilation" frequently associated with the child's identification of the image: "[W]hat demonstrates [sic] the phenomenon of recognition, which involves subjectivity, are the signs of triumphant jubilation and playful discovery that characterize, from the sixth month, the child's encounter with his image in the mirror" (Šcrits, 112 / 18). For Lacan (as for Wallon), the behavioral evidence for the child's momentous insight is a joyous kind of playfulness.

The question arises: why joy? Why indeed does recognition of the specular other initially bring with it such jubilation? It is after all also accompanied, in Lacan's agonistic view, by an inevitable estrangement, or "assumption of an armour of an alienating identity" (Šcrits, 94 / 7). Lacan accounts for the child's joyful antics before the mirror as follows: the good gestalt equips the child with a unitary mental image. This image ("the total form of the body") allows some compensation for the malaise ("the fragmented body-image") that persists in the psyche after the prematurity and discordances of birth. Hence he calls the totality glimpsed in the glass "orthepaedic" (94 / 7). The specular counterpart puts Humpty Dumpty together again, however temporarily and phantasmatically.

One source of the widespread appeal of the mirror-stage theory, I therefore suggest, derives from this account of human genesis that, painful and fraught with psychical dangers (fantasies of fragmentation, acute narcissism, alienation) though it might be, takes place without mediation: sans mother and sans father. To a largely secular and skeptical readership, Lacan's mirror stage presents a new myth of genesis. It is a powerful creation myth whose passion and investment is overlaid by the dignity that an abstract and "scientific" terminology confers upon conjecture.¹¹ Unlike the myth of the goddess Athena (Freud's favorite artifact in his large collection) who sprang forth from Zeus's forehead, in Lacanian theory, the function of the I does not emerge as a result of any parental intervention. The birth of the ego takes place in and through the looking glass. In Lacan's view, the mirror is the mother of the ego. But the mother is not in the mirror.

In effect, "The Mirror Stage" as theory and text marks another complex moment of separation for Lacan. First and foremost, identification with the semblable, or self-same, prepares the way for identification with the figure of the father. Reflexive recognition displaces the Oedipal conflict as the linchpin or turning point in the constitution of the subject. Next, in orienting the psychoanalytic focus toward the fraternal (and, only secondarily, the paternal) function, Lacan furthers the challenge, only summarily presented in his essay on the family, to the growing influence of Melanie Klein and the inclination since the 1930s to view the mother as the center of the child's world. As Lisa Appignanesi and John Forrester observe, "[T]he Lacanian scheme guaranteed that psychoanalysis was removed from the ambiguously ewige mutterliche, or eternally maternal, tendencies that British Kleinian and other object-relations theories were encouraging" (462). With these two revisionary moments, Lacan could be said to put himself in place of the (Freudian) father and the (Kleinian) mother. Thus Lacan (re)constitutes himself. The mirror stage of the late 1940s represents his emergence as an embattled but full-fledged contender for theoretical preeminence in the Freudian field.

Briefly to pursue these speculations, critics and historians such as Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Wilfried Ver Eecke, Ogilvie, and Roudinesco have traced the mirror stage to numerous sources. The theory presents a stunning synthesis of several strands of thought in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and experimental psychology. Although Lacan would cast aside most precursors or supports, these same neglected ones merely wait to be recalled. They seem to impose, or at least contribute to, the alienation that curtails Lacan's jubilant assumption of his own invention. He thus tells the truth when he says that the sense of fragmentation is never fully overcome, even in those pleasurable moments in which an image of totality is glimpsed. His famous theory is itself a kind of body-in-pieces, a dream composed of diverse concepts. The vision of the self-constituted individual, or what might be called "the good-enough gestalt" indeed turns out to be a mirage. Humpty Dumpty, the seemingly complacent but ever-fragile ego (hommelette in Lacan's wordplay)¹², is what the idea of the mirror stage defends against.

¹ My discussion is mainly indebted to Jane Gallop's "Where to Begin?"(Reading Lacan, 74-92) for its overall approach and to Roudinesco's biographical work on Lacan for its extensive archival information.

² On the atmosphere at the Marienbad congress, the conflicts between Anna Freudians and Kleinians, and Lacan's general reception, see Roudinesco, Esquisse, 151-61.

³ Gallop gives an acute analysis of this blind entry in Reading Lacan (74-76).

⁴ HÈlËne Cixous writes of Through the Looking-Glass: "[O]ne is immediately tempted ... to take the whole adventure for a figurative representation of the imaginary construction of self, the ego, through reflexive identification" (238).

⁵ The single, disparaging reference to Lacan in Girard's Violence and the Sacred (1972) is thus quite off the mark: "Lacan, too, failed to discover [the mimetic nature of desire], forced as he was by his linguistic fetishism to reinforce the more rigid ... aspects of Freudian theory" (185). Nevertheless, Girard's idea of the mimetic rival differs from Lacan's mirror-stage rival in two basic respects. First, Girard defines mimetic rivalry as a kind of antidialectic, an interminable oscillation that does not lead to any synthesis or progress: "the situation affords no stability of any sort, no synthetic resolution" (154). Second, he subsumes the Oedipus complex under the category of mimetism, stressing the structurally identical positions occupied by the father-brother in relation to the subject (see, e.g., 145). In Girard's view, viable distinctions cannot be made between "primary" and "secondary" identifications and, correlatively, between the two types (fraternal and paternal) of rivalry.

⁶ Excerpts from Wallon's text are given in my translation.

⁷ For further discussion of the significance of Matthews's and Chauvin's research for Lacanian theory, see Ver Eecke, 115-16.

⁸ Roudinesco also notes that "a transition was ... effected from the description of a concrete experiment to the elaboration of a doctrine" (Jacques Lacan & Co., 143). However, her analysis of this transition does not take into account the differences between Wallon's literal and Lacan's primarily metaphoric concepts of the mirror.

⁹ In another connection, Gerald Fogel makes the similar point that Winnicott's work "creates not a theory, but an antitheory": "Theories ordinarily explain, but Winnicott is more interested in grasping or describing the nature of personal experience, not its causes or its components. Almost everything he deals with refers to a relational or existential process" (207).

¹⁰ On Winnicott's subtle deployment of this analogy in four additional papers published between 1941 and 1971, see First, "Mothering, Hate, and Winnicott."

¹¹ Lacan refers to psychoanalysis as a "conjectural science" on several occasions; see, e.g., Šcrits, 472, 863.

¹² See "From Love to the Libido" in Seminar XI: "Whenever the membranes of the egg in which the foetus emerges on its way to becoming a new-born are broken, imagine for a moment ... that one can do it with an egg as easily as with a man, namely the hommelette" (qu'on peut faire avec un oeuf aussi bien qu'un homme, ý savoir l'hommelette) (179 / 197). The passage echoes James Joyce's play on words in Finnegan's Wake (1939): "Mon foie, you wish to ave some homelette, yes, lady! Good mein leber! Your hegg he must break himself" (59). In addition to Joyce's pun, Lacan could also be alluding to one of Freud's favorite French truisms for the need to discuss openly "the facts of normal or abnormal sexual life." As he writes in the case of Dora (1905): "No one can undertake the treatment of a case of hysteria until he is convinced of the impossibility of avoiding the mention of sexual subjects. ... The right attitude is 'pour faire une omelette il faut cesser des oeufs'" (SE, 7:49; see also Freud's letter to Fliess [6 August 1899] in Complete Letters, 365). For Lacan, the connection between the hommelette and the facts of origin--that is, the procreative agency of the parents--seems to be again the telling and difficult one.

Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage”: The Evolution of a Theory 

Shuli Barzilai

1. “History Is Not the Past”: Lacan’s Critique of Ferenczi

2. On Chimpanzees and Children in the Looking-Glass: Wallon’s Mirror Experiments and Lacan’s Theory of Reflexive Recognition

3. Topographies of Conflict: The Machia in the Mirror Stage