Lacan's "The Mirror Stage"

Lacan’s psychoanalytical essay “The Mirror Stage” goes into Freud’s development of the concept of the Id. The baby though possibly unable to move it’s body much at all, is able to notice its reflection. I found this quite fascinating because if you put an animal in front of a mirror they do not have that same sense of self awareness that a baby has, who can’t move as much as say a dog. For example, “The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee is instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror” (Rivkin 441). With this recognition the baby becomes somewhat captivated by its own image. Lacan’s definition of the mirror stage was that it was not just an infant looking at his/her own reflection and that was it. The baby’s perspective on himself/herself becomes what he calls subjective or a human being’s personal perspective on a situation. In other words we all see ourselves in a particular light and are biased with by how we see ourselves. There is a relationship between the Ego and the Body and also what is imaginary and what is real for a child. For example, “Lacan describes his concept of the self as a delusory construct plagued in its very constitution by imaginary identifications with a spurious sense of wholeness or unity” (Rivkin 442).