Mirror stage

The mirror stage (French: stade du miroir) is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.

Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months, as outlined at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936.

Wallon's ideas about mirrors in infant development were distinctly non-Freudian and little-known until revived in modified form a few years later by Lacan.

Richard Webster[1] explains how the "complex, and at times impenetrable paper ... appears to have made little or no lasting impression on the psychoanalysts who first heard it.

A type of repetition compulsion develops from this vacillation as the attempt to locate a fixed subject proves ever elusive.

"The mirror stage is a drama...which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality."

[7] In Lacan's fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, he states that "the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child.

See Lacan's paper, "The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience", the first of his Écrits.

To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.

(Écrits, "The Mirror Stage") Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother.