Jacques Lacan
Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan, Transcend Art and Peace
Latest Update: October 14, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu
Olivier Urbain, Soka University

This review is based on Chapter 3. "The Mirror Stage as Fromative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Jacques Lacan. Pp. 61-66 in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. by Anthony Elliott. This is an incredibly difficult piece to read. Don't wrestle with all the psychoanalytic terms. We'll do that together. Just try for the general idea. That's made a lot easier by Anthony Elliott's introduction on pp. 5-6.

The point I'd like you to grasp for this discussion is that "Lacan's argument that the subject finds an imaginary identity through an image granted by another represents a major advance on approaches which uncritically assume that the ego or the "I" is at the center of psychological functioning. . . . Lacan [here locates] . . . a sense of otehrness at the heart of the self. . . . " at. p. 6.

Some feminists argue that the only mirror for the female is that of the male world, insisting that she cannot reach her real self, for the confusion of the reflected image. A similar argument is made in subaltern theory. Is the mirror in which the identity is reflected, and seemingly, but confusingly, whole, the true indigenous identity, or is it merely a confusing identity that represents the colonizing world?

As dominant discourse presents the current crisis as the West versus Islam, this will become a major issue in how the US comes to understand the "Other."