Over the summer, I nannied a two month old child, and one of the first things I can remember doing when I held him for the first time was walking in front of the mirror and trying to get him to recognize himself. After reading Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage”, I know why he failed to recognize himself. It’s interesting to me that infants who still are unable to recognize themselves in the mirror are nevertheless fascinated by the image they see; they can’t possibly conceive of it only being a reflection, when they realize it is them between fifteen and eighteen months.

 

Lacan argues that once a child recognizes their own reflection, it transforms their understanding of themselves from a being that is locked within the view of the first person to an object that can be seen outside of itself. The realization that the child is an object that can be witnessed aids in the formation of the child’s knowledge of self. To further complicate this, although the child is able to recognize a cohesive corporeal being that is themself, this physicality is in conflict with the level of motor skills the child possesses when they are able to recognize themself. Because the child has such little control over their body but can recognize their physical being as whole, Lacan suggests that the irreconcilable differences between the Ego (which is formed by the child’s identification of their own image) and the body cause the child existential turmoil until their motor skills match the whole being they see in the mirror. The child sees their reflection as a rival, because they cannot reconcile the wholeness of the image with their fragmented sense of self.

Now, to bring this topic to more recent times as far as what we’ve been doing in class (since this post is embarrassingly late), I’d like to investigate Kaja Silverman’s take on “The Mirror Image” and the implications of the child’s recognition of self. In The Threshold of the Visible World, Silverman states that the Ego is derived from the body as well as from outside the body. Lacan states that the happiness the child gets from the illusion of wholeness is from the mirror stage, whereas Kaja Silverman argues that the experience is not because of the bodily wholeness of the child’s image but because of the integration of the visual self-image with the internal sense of self. Furthermore, Silverman disagrees with Lacan in that she theorizes that the child seeks wholeness not because it sees itself as fragmented, but because culture avows the importance of wholeness and unity, which gives the child a fragmented sense of self.