To help us contextualize the “mirror stage” essay, which narrates the formation of the ego and the advent of the “imaginary” in psychological life, check out this diagram:

This “knot” helps us see a few important things at once:

• there are three zones that constitute the subject:
  • the Real is roughly equivalent to the Freudian “id”: it is “unsayable” and not representable in any direct way; the infant is all “Real,” in what appears to fully-developed subjects as a chaotic space, one that Kristeva describes for us as the “chora” and which Williams James once described as a “booming, buzzing confusion”
  • the Imaginary is dominated by preverbal signs, images that are tightly bound to the figure of the mother and the desires that attach to her
  • the Symbolic is the familiar world of Saussurean “structure”: we enter the symbolic by acquiring language, and we acquire language because the “father” forbids untrammeled access to the mother to meet all our needs. For “father” we can substitute widely: God, ideology, language, morality, all the “centers” in Derrida’s sense that govern the structures we live in. We speak language with some agency, but we don’t choose the “langue”: to speak is to be a “subject” in Althusser’s sense of the linguistic order. A subject, in order to meet their desires/needs, must channel them through this structure, with all the limitations and frustrations and repressions this entails.
• These zones are only separate in theory: we don’t leave the Imaginary and Real behind when we enter the Symbolic as we acquire language. Thus the overlapping areas, which I won’t get into in any detail. But when we identify with the protagonist in a movie or respond to the seductive voice of a singer or fly into a rage at a partner’s odd habits for reasons we don’t understand, these reactions stem from these overlapping spaces. So, a Freudian slip overlaps symbolic/Real; weeping in the movies overlaps the Imaginary/Symbolic; a “symptom” in which the body is “speaking” through us (let’s say a compulsion to count to seven every time we cross train tracks) represents the crossroads of all three zones “talking at once.”

As before, I’d like to give a shout-out to a few top-notch posts from this round. I’ve selected for quality and also for coverage: I’m really happy that so many of you wrote about texts we hadn’t yet discussed together! So check out:

• Freud and The Interpretation of Dreams: Lei’s on Freud and dreams nicely mixes anecdote and summary of argument to give a vivid sense of how “dream thoughts” are transformed.
• Lacan’s “mirror stage” essay:
  • Anna H nicely links the productivity of the mirror vis a vis the developing subject.
  • Ayesha gives a bang-up reading of the whole argument, with an emphasis on Lacan’s tricky concept of “meconaissance” or “misrecognition”
• Meltzer’s piece on “unconscious”:
  • James digs into the tricky relationship between Freud’s thought and Lacan’s revision/return.
• Freud on the “fetish”:
  • Lizzie explores the “purgatorial” space of the fetish (and dig the title!)

Two-pronged shout-out here:

1. There’s a useful documentary on the Kanopy interface on the life and work on Fanon. The production is a bit cheesy in the manner of all “dramatizations,” but the talking head work by postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha and cultural studies pioneer Stuart Hall is news you can use.
2. More broadly, Kanopy is an amazing and underutilized resource accessible to Hunter students. It’s a big collection of films of all kinds, especially strong in documentaries and educational materials. For me, and for many English major nerds, I suspect, the crown jewel is a big chunk of the Criterion Collection archive of classic films, spanning early cinema (Chaplin, Keaton) to more recent “new classics” from across the globe. It’s a bit of a hassle to sign up, but once you do, you can access via iOS/Android/laptop/Roku or whatever.