Mirror stage is an important term in Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. In his early works, in particular, in the report of the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress in Marienbad, Lacan considered the mirror stage as a phase in development of a child aged 6 to 18 months. Beginning from the 1950s, Lacan described the mirror stage not as a certain moment in the life of a child, but as a subjectivity structure or paradigm of Imaginary. There were several scientists who greatly contributed to the study of the mirror stage. Among them there is Jacques Lacan, who made this concept known to the public. It is extremely difficult to describe the work of Lacan, except for the fact that it is extremely versatile and dynamic, which can be described by the fact that he didn’t publish his ideas in writing, but instead used to voice them at his seminars, materials of which were published only at the end of his life. Another outstanding personality who devoted a considerable amount of time to the research of this phase of people’s development is Donald Woods Winnicott, who was a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst. Works of D. Winnicott were based on a huge pediatric experience and observations of communication of a child with his environment. This paper is dedicated to the study of the mirroring notion in Winnicott’s work in relation to Lacanian theory. To explore this concept in detail, the works of both scientists will be analyzed, in particular their interpretations of the mirror stage and its significance in person’s life.
The concept of the mirror stage was developed by Lacan under the influence of Henri Wallon, whose ideas were based on observations on the ways animals and people react to their own reflections in the mirror. Wallon observed that when children of a human and a chimpanzee were approaching the age of six months they were demonstrating something that can be interpreted as recognition of their reflection in the mirror. While chimpanzees were quickly losing interest in their discovery, people usually were getting very interested in their reflections, began to apply considerable effort and time to study the relationship between their own body and the reflection (Luepnitz 2009). In 1931 Wallon argued that the mirror helps children develop a sense of personal identity.
Wallon's ideas about the role of mirror in child's development evolved outside of the psychoanalytic tradition and were poorly known to public before the attention of Lacan. He used observations of Wallon as a basis for his theory on the development of human subjectivity, which in its essence, though often implicitly, has a comparative nature.
Along the process of the mirror stage concept development, Lacan's attention shifted from its historical meaning to the structural. The first, historical, refers here to the mental development of children, while the structuralone – to the libidinal relation to the body image. In his fourth cycle of seminars La relation d'objet, Lacan said that "the mirror stage is far from being a simple phenomenon, happening in the process of a child's development. It illustrates the conflict nature of dual relationships." (Vanier 2001) The term "dual relationship" can be applied not only to relations between the self and the body, which were always characterized by delusions of similarity and reciprocity, but also to the relation between imaginary and real. Visual identity given in a mirror reflection offers imaginary consistency to the experience of fragmented reality.
Emphasizing the importance of real-world environment of a child, D. Winnicott wrote that "there is no such thing as a child," i.e., a child does not exist by itself, as there is always a mother or someone else close to him. In its development, a child moves from the state of absolute dependence to relative dependence thanks to the repeated experience of harmonious satisfaction of his needs by "good enough mother”. This emphasis on the "sufficiency" is very important in contrast to the redundancy or ideality.
D. Winnicott introduced the concept of "transitional object" and "transitional space", which represent the phenomenon of “intermediate”. It is like the first teddy bear, a thumb or an edge of a blanket, which the child is sucking when asleep, and the space of cultural experiences, sports, religion, creativity, ability to be alone.
In the absence of "good-enough environment" when the mother is physically or emotionally absent, if she is too interfering and cannot adequately understand the needs of her child, she cannot properly respond to the gesture of a child, replacing it with her own, which her child simulates. This situation leads to the formation of false self.
D. Winnicott paid much attention to the feelings of a mother towards her child, and, in particular, her hatred of him, as well as the relations of the psychoanalyst and his patient, hatred in the countertransference, its necessity, and the need for its realization and use. The work of Winnicott has had an enormous influence in contemporary psychoanalytic theory and many areas of human activity: social work, pedagogy, developmental psychology, pediatrics. His works were translated into many languages (Luepnitz 2009).
In the course of individual emotional development mother's face is a precursor of mirror. Winnicott’s ideas are based in many aspects on the work of Jacques Lacan. They are similar in the investigation of the role of mirrors in the development of the self of each person. However, Lacan does not consider the mirror as mother's face, which is covered in Winnicott’s theory.
He focuses only on those children who can see. In the raw formulation, he has the following statement: at the early stages of emotional development, child’s environment, which is not separated from the child, and is not distinguished by him, plays an important role in his development. In the course of time there develops separation between the "non-self" and "self". The pace of this process is different, depending on the child itself and its social environment. The main change occurs separately from the mother – when the child begins to perceive itself as part of the world (Vanier 2001). If the mother's place is empty, then the problems of the child, related to his development, become much more complicated.
All this happens at the beginning of human life, and if it is absent, the emotional and intellectual development of children have serious problems. So, there comes a time when the child looks around himself. When the baby sucks a breast, he may be looking not at the breast itself. It is more typical for a child to look at his mother's face. What does the infant see in this case? To answer, it is necessary to recall some instances of psychoanalytic practice, when patients come back to the earliest experiences and can verbalize them (when they felt that they were able to do so), retaining all the delicacy of pre-speech, non-verbalized and non-verbalizable experience (perhaps, poetry is an exception).
What does the child see when he or she looks at the face of my mother? Winnicott assumed that under normal circumstances the child saw in it him- or herself. In other words, when the mother looks at the baby, the way she looks is directly related to what she sees. It looks very plausible. But the fact is that if a mother who cares for her child naturally performs some action very well, it still cannot be taken as a universal law. Take the case of a child whose mother can reflect, that is pass, to him, only her own mood or, even worse, only rigidity of her own defensive reactions.
Of course, there are cases when the mother cannot respond. However, many children have to endure long periods when they do not get back what they give. They look and do not see themselves. And there are consequences. First of all, their own creativity begins to rust, and the children in one way or another begin to look for other ways to find themselves bit by bit somewhere on the outside in the environment. These methods can also be quite successful, because the blind children also need to get reflected, while not having a vision, through the other senses (Vanier 2001). Of course, if the mother’s face is motionless, she is still able to respond somehow differently. Most mothers react when a child is ill or angry, especially in the first case. Second, the child gets used to the fact that what he sees when he looks is his mother's face. In this case, the mother's face is no longer a mirror. Thus, perception here takes place of apperception, replaces what could have become the beginning of a meaningful exchange with the outside world, two-way process in which self-development interchanges the discovery of new values in the perceived world (Eigen 1981).
In this scheme there is an intermediate stage. Some children do not give up hope and explore object, make every effort to discover its meaning, if it is available. Other children, who are oppressed by their mother's inappropriate behavior, in order to predict the mood of their mother, explore different options of her appearance in the same way as people monitor the weather (Luepnitz 2009). A baby quickly learns how to make such forecasts.
Immediately behind it in the direction of pathology there is predictability, which is unreliable and locks the child within its own ability to predict events. This introduces an element of chaos, and the child will try to escape such situation or in defense will be watching just to perceive it. The child treated in this way will have problems in the future: what is a mirror, and what should it do? If the mother's face doesn’t respond, the mirror will also be a thing to look at, without looking into it.
Mirror stage describes the formation of self through the process of identification with one’s own reflected image. By six months the child still lacks motor coordination; however, Lacan claimed that a child can begin to recognize itself in the mirror before gaining such coordination. The child sees in the mirror his image as a whole, with the persistent inability to coordinate movements of his body, which leads to the perception of his body as fragmented. According to Lacan, the contrast is first experienced by a child as rivalry with his own image, because the integrity of the image threatens to collapse (Eigen 1981). Accordingly, the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and image. To discharge this voltage the subject begins to identify himself with the image. In this primary identification with the twin-reflection self is formed. Moment of this identification Lacan describes as a time of rejoicing, because it leads to an imaginary sense of domination (“What Does Lacan Say” 2010). However, this joy can be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the child compares his shaky sense of domination to the omnipotence of his mother. This identification also includes the ideal self, which functions as a promise of future wholeness, providing strength to true self while waiting.
As Lacan stated, the mirror stage shows that self is a product of misunderstanding – false identification. It is at the stage of mirror that there is alienation from the subject from itself, and the imaginary order is established.
Mirror stage is also an important symbolic dimension. The order of the symbolic is found in the adult carrying a child. At the moment following the joy of recognition of the image as his own, the child becomes an adult – the great other, authorizing the image.
The main direction of Lacan's thought was structuralist revision and careful re-reading of the texts written by Freud. Despite the overall significance of his ideas for the understanding of a person and society and the interest in the latest achievements of science and philosophy, Lacan never lost from sight the focus on psychoanalytic practice, and one of his main objectives was understanding of what actually happens in the process of analysis.Lacan opposed the natural-scientific psychological approach, in which a person is described as an object like other objects in the world, represented by consciousness and learning. Question of the subject as a subject is at the heart of Lacan's work.
Definition of the key ideas in Lacan's ideas is extremely difficult in view of metaphor and hermeticity of his language. Lacan's texts are a peculiar phenomenon of literature: in addition to scientific and philosophical aspects, they have a lot of humor, tricks, provocation and deliberate mysteries. For example, there is a number of Lacan’s maxims that cannot be understood once and for all, but to which he returns in different ways, such as "human desire is the desire of other," "love means not to give what you have, but give something that you have not," "feelings are always mutual," etc. However, we should understand that Lacan did not have a goal to complicate psychoanalysis and work of the analyst. On the contrary, he sought to bring clarity into this area, speckled with uncertainties, myths and misunderstandings since Freud (Eigen 1981). Lacan's ideas influenced not only psychoanalysis, but also philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, film and art history.
Lacan believed himself to base his theory on the scheme imaginary – symbolic – real, which he began to develop in 1953, and detailed in his most famous seminar (1974-1975). This scheme is usually represented as a mathematical model, "Borromeo Rings", which are linked to one other so that the opening of one of them leads to the disintegration of the whole structure. For example, the theme for one of the workshops (16th cycle of seminars) was defined by his famous statement "Events happening with others can satisfy our emotional hunger." Imaginary are the life events of others, others serve as symbols of life processes, and these events are perceived as ones occurring in their own reality. In general, Lacan liked to explain his ideas through the topology images, often treating them in very fancy ways.
Lacan applied the scheme of three registers to himself: the first stage, pre-structuralist, was dedicated to "imaginary", the second stage, the structuralist - "symbolic", the third stage, poststructuralist, - the "real”. Among the other main ideas of Lacan there was the one that the unconscious is structured like language, which is the result of the impact of speech on the subject. It is thus an interpretation of something that is not fully interpreted, but is crying for interpretation. This situation explains Lacan's interest in linguistics.
Works Cited
Eigen, M. “The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion.” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 62 (1981):413-433. Print.
Luepnitz, D.A. “Thinking in the space between Winnicott and Lacan.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 90.5 (2009): 957–981. Print.
Vanier, A. “Some Remarks on Adolescence with Particular Reference to Winnicott and Lacan.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 70 (2001):579-597. Print.
“What Does Lacan Say About The Mirror Stage? – Part I.” LacanOnline.com. LacanOnline, 13 Sep. 2010. Web. 8 Jan. 2012.
