Mirror Stage

Definition

The mirror stage (le stade du miroir) is Jacques Lacan's account of the ego's formation: the infant (six to eighteen months) jubilantly identifies with its own mirror image, assuming a unified, totalizing form the body does not yet possess — the imago. The wiki receives the concept through its architectural relay in Fuss and Sanders's reading of Freud's office: the imago is "the statue in which man projects himself" (Écrits, p. 2), and the domain it delimits is "a strangely lifeless one" — Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's "The Statue Man" pictures the mirror world as "a sort of immense museum peopled with immobile 'statues,' 'images' of stone, and hieratic 'forms'… the most inhuman of possible worlds, the most unheimlich." Fuss and Sanders's architectural claim is that this stage has a room: "the architectonics of the Freudian subject depends fundamentally upon a spatial dislocation, upon seeing the self exteriorized. It is not only that when we look in the mirror we see how others see us, but also that we see ourselves occupying a space where we are not." The mirror stage is thus interiority's uncanny condition — the self given to itself only as an object in a space where it is absent, the statue at the mirror's frame.

Key Thinkers

• (Originator, not paged — see log: Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1977; Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique.)
• Diana Fuss & Joel Sanders — the stage's architectonics: Freud's office as the built mirror-stage — the mirror hung on the window forcing "the subject of reflection to confront an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself"; the reflection as bust and statuary fragment (1996/2006). See mirror.
• (Referenced in the source, not paged — see log: Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master (1991), "The Statue Man" — the mirror world as statue-museum.)

Related Concepts

• Mirror — the surface that stages the operation; the mirror-as-window and mirror-as-containment regimes.
• The Gaze — the stage's relay: the subject confronting "an externalized gaze relayed back upon itself"; Lacan's symbolic gaze as developed in the wiki via Edelman.
• The Double — the image that "first emerges… as a 'preservation against extinction'" and becomes "the uncanny harbinger of death."
• Interiority — the stage's spatial lesson: innerness given from outside, as a statue in a space where the self is not.
• The Uncanny — the mirror world's register: the statue-museum as "the most unheimlich."
• Psychoanalysis — the theory the stage belongs to; the "substitution of other for self" it enacts in the clinical setting.
• Humanism — what the stage interrupts: "the reassuring classical symmetries of self and other, inside and outside, and seeing and being seen that constitute the traditional humanist subject."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Berggasse 19: Inside Freud's Office (Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006) — the stage's architectural staging: "Lacan saw as much in his early reflections on the mirror stage" (p. 119); the imago as "the statue in which man projects himself" (Écrits, p. 2, quoted p. 119); "the architectonics of the Freudian subject depends fundamentally upon a spatial dislocation, upon seeing the self exteriorized" (p. 119); Borch-Jacobsen's statue-museum (p. 119); Freud's mirror reflection as bust, Roman head, death mask (p. 118).
• source-notes/baudrillard-1994-simulacra-and-simulation

Open Questions

• Lacan's stage is developmental (the infant's founding identification); Fuss and Sanders's is architectural (a room that stages it perpetually). Can a room keep a subject at the mirror stage — and is the analyst's chair-side mirror exactly that apparatus?
• If the imago is "a statue in which man projects himself," is the designed interior's mirror wall a device for manufacturing the statue — and what would an interior that refuses the stage (no reflective surfaces, or distorting ones) produce instead?
• The mirror stage here is read through Schreber's transvestic identification and Medusa's castration: is the stage gendered from the start, and what would a non-petrifying mirror stage mean for masculinity?

Stub note: This page was created from the Fuss & Sanders 1996/2006 ingest and requires fuller treatment — Lacan's mirror-stage essay proper, the developmental literature, and secondary Lacan for architecture.