Lacans Mirror stage Theory

Lacan' Mirror Stage Theory

Lacan states that the mirror stage starts from when a person is an infant and looks into the mirror for the first time and before this moment, they never saw themselves as a single individual identity but rather they just exist, before the mirror stage they are at one with everything surrounding them. He states that when an infant first sees themselves in the mirror they no longer view themselves as separate body parts but rather as a whole person that is seemingly one dimensional in the mirror. This is the exact moment that a person begins to develop a sense of ‘the self’, the person them becomes and individual identity and sees themselves as ‘I’ At this point in a person’s life they develop the conscious ego and unconscious id. 

The mirror stage can be unsettling to a person as the person on the outside doesn't represent how one feels on the inside which creates an inside self and an outside self, the one reflected in the mirror. This may also be unsettling as we don’t necessarily look how we feel. The one on the inside is ever changing and feels chaotic as they can't truly express how they feel to others around them and when we try to explain we may fail to do justice to our real intentions, and we may become oblivious to the real us. The one on the outside which is reflected in the mirror however is viewed as a stable entity which will never portray to the outside world and how one feels on the inside, they represent the super ego which a person is always aiming to be like, they aim to be more like the one-dimensional stable entity which is reflected in front of them.

Lacan states that we will always be aspiring to be more like the reflection we see in the mirror and we will do this from the start of the mirror stage and during the rest of our lives, this is the reason why we try to dress the best as possible, have a nice hair cut etc. We will always try to control our external appearance in order to appear better to others than the chaos within us. Lacan also states that because of this we will always misunderstand others and others will always misunderstand us. He states the people around us will forever be stuck seeing the entity that we perceive on the outside and that no one will ever be able to know the chaotic self that we are on the inside. People around us will never be able to experience us in the same way that we do as they only see the image we see in the mirror and not the image we have of ourselves inside. 

Lacan also suggests that because we will never be able to be like the stable entity in the mirror, we will feel a ‘lack’ in our lives. This lack may go from relationships, to our career or even a lack of motivation as we cannot reach the ‘ideal self’ that we constantly see in our reflection. We will always be lacking in one area of life and will constantly be aiming to fill this need to feel like a whole identity, to feel stable rather than a chaotic stream of consciousness.

 

References. 

·     Lacan Online.com (13^thSeptember 2010) (online) Avaliable from http://www.lacanonline.com(accessed 2^ndDecember 2018)