Why speak of the “mirror stage”1 as an archive that has been obliterated? The reason is both simple and complex. First, there is no existing original of the lecture on this subject delivered by Jacques Lacan at the 16th congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which took place in Marienbad between the second and eighth of August 1936. After he had been speaking for minutes, Lacan was interrupted by Ernest Jones, the chairman, who considered that this French participant, of whom he had never heard, was exceeding the time allotted to each speaker. At this time, the rule regulating the duration of each spoken contribution was already being applied at international conferences. Lacan, who regarded the interruption as a humiliation, quit the conference and went on to the Olympic Games in Berlin to see at close quarters what a sporting event manipulated by the Nazis was like. One might well see some connection between the forceful manner in which Jones interrupted Lacan’s talk and Lacan’s notorious invention of “variable sessions” marked by radical brevity and a sense of deliberate suspension. All his life, Lacan would struggle with an impossible control over time, as evinced by the masterful analysis presented in his 1945 essay on “logical time.”
The Marienbad incident arose out of a serious misunderstanding. In the eyes of the then leaders of the IPA, Lacan was not yet the Lacan known to history, but merely a modest, anonymous clinician belonging to the Société psychanalytique de Paris (SPP), with no claim to any special privileges. In France, on the other hand, Lacan was already recognized in literary circles as an important thinker. He often was put on a par with Henri Ey, whom many saw as the leader of a new school of psychiatry, even though his reputation was not high among psychoanalysts. As for Lacan himself, he already considered himself as important enough to find it intolerable to be treated so dismissively at an IPA congress. As a result, he did not hand in his text for publication in the conference proceedings.
We have nevertheless two records of the August 1936 text. The first is to be found in the notes Françoise Dolto took at a preliminary lecture that Lacan delivered to the SPP on 16 June 1936, notes that are undoubtedly a faithful reflection of the missing August text. The second trace is to be found in the draft of an article by Alexandre Kojève, with whom Lacan was to have collaborated in the summer of 1936. The article did not see the light of day in final form and was never mentioned by Lacan himself, who probably forgot about it. But it is a pointer to the genesis of his later ideas about Descartes’ cogito, the subject of desire, and the origin of madness.2
These notes should be compared with another text by Lacan that was included in a famous article on the family commissioned by Henri Wallon and published in 1938 in the Encyclopédie française. According to Lacan himself, this long article, reprinted in 1985 under the title of “Family complexes,” reproduces the content of the 1936 Marienbad lecture.3 The passage in question occurs in the second part of the article, entitled “The intrusion complex.” It is followed by a paragraph on “Jealousy, archetype of social feelings,” which has sub-paragraphs bearing on “Mental identification,” “The imago of fellow beings,” and “The meaning of primal aggression.” The paragraph on the mirror stage is divided into two parts: (1) The secondary power of the mirror image; (2) The narcissistic structure of the ego.
As Françoise Dolto’s notes show, on that day at Marienbad Lacan expounded not only the “stade du miroir” paragraph that was taken up again later in the Encyclopédie but also a large number of the themes developed in the 1938 article. Her notes show that the lecture was divided into nine parts: (1) The subject and the I (je); (2) The subject, the I (je) and the body; (3) The expressivity of the human form; (4) The libido of the human form; (5) The image of the double and the mirror image; (6) Libido or weaning and the death instinct, Destruction of the vital object, Narcissism; (7) Its link with the fundamental symbolism in human knowledge; (8) The rediscovered object in the Oedipus complex; (9) The values of narcissistic symptoms: twins. All this probably reflects, with a few variants, the paper written by Lacan for the Marienbad congress: a text too long for the IPA authorities, and one neither in the style of Freud nor of Melanie Klein, but influenced by Alexandre Kojève’s seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
Lacan’s lecture, transcribed by Dolto, is followed by a discussion in which Marie Bonaparte, Daniel Lagache, Georges Parcheminey, Rudolph Loewenstein, René Laforgue, Paul Schiff, and Charles Odier take part. The lecturer then answers them all. The lecture is so obscure that the SPP audience finds it hard to understand what Lacan means. They ask him to define his attitudes more clearly, in particular his view of the relation between weaning and the death impulse, and his conception of the link between the I (je), the body and fantasy. Is the I (je) one’s body? Is fantasy the specular image? Another question asked is: what is the relationship between the I (je) and the ego (moi), and between the I and the personality?
This raises a major theoretical issue. As is well known, in Freud’s works the notion of the subject is not fully conceptualized, even though he does use the term. At this point in time, Lacan is trying to introduce the concept as it has been used in classical philosophy rather than in psychology: the subject is man himself, inasmuch as he is the foundation of his own thoughts and actions. Man is the subject of knowledge and law. Lacan is trying to link not Freud’s second topography of the id, the ego, and the super-ego with a theory of the I, but to connect together a philosophical theory of the subject and a theory of the subject of desire derived from Freud and from Hegel via Kojève. From this he will pass to the notion of the subject of the unconscious.
It is from an article published by Henri Wallon in 1931 that Lacan borrows the term of the “mirror stage” (stade du miroir).4 However, Lacan neglects to cite his main source. Wallon’s name is not mentioned either in Lacan’s lecture or in the bibliography of the Encyclopédie française. As I have had occasion to show, Lacan always tried to obliterate Wallon’s name so as to present himself as the inventor of the expression. For instance, Françoise Bétourné has found some sixty examples of the use of the term “mirror stage” in Lacan’s work. Lacan always insists on the fact that it was he who introduced the term. In his seminar on L’Acte psychologique (session of 10 January 1968), he says: “Everyone knows that I entered psychoanalysis with the little brush that was called the ‘mirror stage’ . . . I turned the ‘mirror stage’ into a coat rack.”5
In order to understand what happened in 1936, we need to know that Lacan was then still unacquainted with the work of Melanie Klein, whose theories were as yet little known in France. In the discussion that followed the SPP lecture, no one mentioned her work, concerned though it was with ideas on object relations, weaning, and character formation in infants. In fact, Lacan, in his own way – a “French” way, that is – was providing an interpretation of Freud that ran parallel to Klein’s own interpretation of the master at the same period. Lacan’s specific reading of Freud arose out of his attendance at Kojève’s seminar on The Phenomenology of Spirit and follows directly from questions asked in the review Recherches philosophiques, of which Kojève was one of the leading lights. Kojève’s generation had been marked by the “three H’s” of phenomenology, Husserl, Heidegger, and Hegel. This generation was seeking in philosophy a way of apprehending a world that saw the rise of dictatorships, that was haunted by the problems of anxiety, fragmented consciousness, doubts hanging over human progress, and all the forms of nihilism deriving from the fear that history might be coming to an end. Lacan belonged to this group.
Documents from this period show that in July 1936 Lacan intended to collaborate with Kojève in writing a study dealing with the same philosophical principles as those found in the Marienbad lecture and later in the article in the Encyclopédie. The study was to be entitled “Hegel and Freud. An attempt at a comparative interpretation.” The first part was called “The genesis of self-consciousness,” the second, “The origin of madness,” the third, “The essence of the family.” In the end, the study was never written. But in the fifteen pages that survive in Kojève’s handwriting we find three of the major concepts used by Lacan in 1936: the I as subject of desire; desire as a revelation of the truth of being; and the ego as site of illusion and source of error. These concepts would also be present, mixed in with the two theories on the origin of madness and the essence of the family, in all the texts Lacan published between 1936 and 1949. They are to be found in “Beyond the reality principle” and “Family complexes,” as well as in “Observations on psychic causality” and in the second version of the “mirror stage,” a lecture delivered at the 16th IPA congress in Zürich.6
There can be no doubt that Lacan drew inspiration from Kojève’s handwritten pages, in which their author suggested that to be up-to-date the thirties would need to progress from Descartes’ philosophy based on “I think” to Freud and Hegel’s philosophy based on “I desire,” on the understanding that desire is the Hegelian Begierde rather than the Freudian Wunsch. Begierde is the desire through which the relation of consciousness to the self is expressed: the issue is to acknowledge the other or otherness insofar as consciousness finds itself in this very movement. The other is the object of desire that the consciousness desires in a negative mirror-relationship that allows it to recognise itself in it. Wunsch, or desire in the Freudian sense, is more simply an inclination, an aspiration, the fulfilment of an unconscious wish. Thus in the transition from a philosophy of “I think” to a philosophy of “I desire” there is, according to Kojève, a split between the true I of thought or desire and the ego (moi), seen as the source of error and the site of mere representations.
This shows us the evolution of Lacan’s interpretation of Freud between 1932, when the thesis on Aimée and the paranoia of self-punishment was published,7 and 1936, when the lost first version of the “mirror stage” was written. The analogy between Lacan and Klein consists above all in the way they both contributed at almost the same time to an internal overhaul of psychoanalytical thinking. Like Melanie Klein, Lacan approaches Freud’s second topography with an opposition to any form of ego-psychology. Two choices were possible after the overhaul aimed at by Freud himself in 1920–3. One was to make the ego the product of a gradual differentiation of the id, acting as representative of reality and charged with containing drives (this was ego-psychology); the other turned its back on any idea of an autonomous ego and studied its genesis in terms of identification.
In other words, if one chose the first option, which was to some extent the path followed by psychoanalysis in the United States, one would try to remove the ego from the id and make it the instrument of the individual’s adaptation to external reality. If one chose the second option, which was that of Klein and Lacan and their respective followers, and later of Self Psychology (that of Heinz Kohut, for example), one brought the ego back toward the id to show that it was structured in stages, by means of imagos borrowed from the other through projective identifications.
To understand this development, we must define the idea of narcissism in the Freudian sense of the term. Although Freud’s position changed several times after the publication in 1914 of his famous article “On introducing narcissism,”8 we can give a more or less firm definition of the distinction he drew between primary and secondary narcissism. Primary narcissism is a first state, prior to the constitution of the ego and therefore auto-erotic, through which the infant sees his own person as the object of exclusive love – a state that precedes his ability to turn towards external objects. From this ensues the constitution of the ideal ego. Secondary narcissism results from the transfer to the ego of investments in objects in the external world. Both primary and secondary narcissism seem to be a defence against aggressive drives.
In 1931 Henri Wallon gave the name épreuve du miroir (mirror test) to an experiment in which a child, put in front of a mirror, gradually comes to distinguish his own body from its reflected image. According to Wallon, this dialectical operation takes place because of the subject’s symbolic comprehension of the imaginary space in which his unity is created. In Wallon’s view, the mirror test demonstrates a transition from the specular to the imaginary, then from the imaginary to the symbolic. On 16 June 1936, Lacan revised Wallon’s terminology and changed the épreuve du miroir into the stade du miroir (“mirror stage”) – that is, mixing two concepts, “position” in the Kleinian sense and “phase” in the Freudian sense. He thus eliminated Wallon’s reference to a natural dialectic. In the context of Lacan’s thinking, the idea of a mirror stage no longer has anything to do with a real stage or phase in the Freudian sense, nor with a real mirror. The stage becomes a psychic or ontological operation through which a human being is made by means of identification with his fellow-being.
According to Lacan, who borrowed the idea from the Dutch embryologist Louis Bolk,9 the importance of the mirror stage must be linked to human prematurity at birth, which is demonstrated objectively by the anatomical incompleteness of the pyramidal system in infants and their imperfect powers of physical coordination during the early months of life. From this date, and increasingly as time goes by, Lacan distances himself from Wallon’s psychological design by describing the process in terms of the unconscious rather than of consciousness. Basing himself on one of Kojève’s theories, he declares that the specular world, in which the primordial identity of the ego is expressed, contains no alterity or otherness. Hence the canonic definition: the stade du miroir is a “phase” – that is, a state structurally succeeding another state, and not a “stage” in the evolutionary sense. The distinction is not negligible, even if Lacan retains the Freudian terminology and the idea of historicity.10 The mirror phase, occurring between the sixth and eighteenth month of life, is thus the time when the infant anticipates mastery of his bodily unity through identification with the image of a fellow being and through perceiving his own image in a mirror. Henceforth, Lacan bases his idea of the mirror phase on the Freudian concept of primary narcissism. Thus the narcissistic structure of the ego is built up with the imago of the double as its central element. When the subject recognizes the other in the form of a conflictual link, he arrives at socialization. When on the contrary he regresses to primary narcissism, he is lost in a maternal and deathly imago.
In abandoning himself to death he seeks to rediscover the maternal object and clings to a mode of destroying the other that tends toward paranoia. Like Melanie Klein, Lacan favours the archaic link to the mother in the construction of identity, but unlike her he retains the Freudian idea of a stage with a beginning, an end, and a precise state within a duration. As we know, Melanie Klein abandoned the idea of “stage” or “phase” for that of “position” (Einstellung in German, position in French). According to her view, “position” (depressive or paranoid/schizoid) occurs at a certain point in the subject’s existence, a point in his development, but this moment, internal to his fantasy life, may be repeated structurally at other stages in his life. Another difference between Lacan and Melanie Klein is that she rejects the idea of primary narcissism and postulates the early existence of object relations as a constituent factor in the appearance of the ego. We can see how Lacan, through the notion of the mirror phase, works out his first conception of the Imaginary and constructs a concept of the subject, distinct from the ego, which has nothing to do with that of Freud.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the first to comment on Lacan’s idea, in his 1949–51 lectures on child psychology. While paying tribute to Wallon, he showed that Lacan had a much firmer grasp of the essential Narcissus myth, beyond what Freud said of it, thus opening the way to a more phenomenological approach to the problem: “Lacan revises and enriches the myth of Narcissus, so passionately in love with his image that he plunges into the water and is drowned. Freud saw the sexual element of the myth first and foremost, the libido directed towards the subject’s own body. Lacan makes full use of the legend and incorporates its other components.”11
The question of the subject becomes central in the second version of the lecture on the mirror stage, delivered in Zürich at the 16th IPA congress in 1949. Ernest Jones was again the president, but this time he let Lacan read his paper through to the end. The positions Lacan adopted now were different from those of 1936. What he was concerned with in 1949 was a plan for constructing the notion of the subject in psychoanalysis and in the history of science – a topic already touched on under the influence of Kojève. The title of Lacan’s lecture reflects his new preoccupation: “The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.”
Before arriving at this new formulation, Lacan had been careful to enter the psychoanalytical movement through the front door. After the humiliation at Marienbad he published an article in L’Évolution psychiatrique entitled “Beyond the reality principle,” in which he called for the creation of a second psychoanalytical generation able to bring about the theoretical “revolution” necessary for arriving at a new interpretation of Freud. As is well known, Lacan belonged to the third world-wide generation, but he saw himself as the spokesman of a second generation vis-à-vis the pioneers of the first French generation, whom he accused of not having understood the master’s discoveries. He made a point of dating his text as precisely as possible: “Marienbad-Noirmoutier, August–October 1939.” The dating is not without significance. It was at Noirmoutier that Lacan spent the summer of 1936 with his first wife, Marie-Louise Blondin, then five months pregnant. At the age of thirty-five, about to become a father for the first time, he hails the triumphant advent of a generation of whom he now sees himself as the intellectual leader, and which he charges with the task of “reading Freud” against and independently of all ego-psychology.
On the theoretical plane, this call to rebellion is a continuation of Lacan’s formulation of the first version of the mirror stage and of the article in which he was to have collaborated with Kojève. Lacan distances himself from the idea that an individual might adapt to reality. Thus he makes mental identification a constituent factor in human knowledge. Hence the proposal to identify “imaginary posts (postes) of personality,” the three elements in Freud’s second topography (ego, id, and super-ego), and then to make out a fourth, the I, which he describes as the function by means of which the subject can recognize himself. This, Lacan’s first formulation of the concept of the Imaginary, by which the genesis of the ego is assimilated, as with Melanie Klein, to a series of operations based on identification with imagos, is accompanied by an even vaguer mention of the notion of symbolic identification. Needless to say, this idea was to be expanded later.
When Lacan was preparing his new lecture on the mirror stage for the Zürich congress, he was no longer advocating the same positions as those he had put forward before the war. He had now read the work of Melanie Klein and discovered that of Claude Lévi-Strauss. He was also adapting the principles of Saussurean linguistics for his own purposes, though he had not yet made use of them. He was interested in the logics of the Cartesian cogito, and still fascinated by the psychogenesis of madness. The theme of the cogito, which was absent from the 1936 text, became central in that of 1949, when Lacan set forth a theory of the subject. To understand its significance we must examine the lecture he gave at Bonneval in 1946, “Observations on psychic causality.”
In answer to Henri Ey, who suggested combining neurology and psychiatry so as to provide the latter with a theory that could incorporate psychoanalytical concepts, Lacan advocated a revision of psychiatric knowledge based on the model of the Freudian unconscious. However, as against the scientists who reduced man to a machine, both men shared the belief – as did most psychiatrists at that time – that psychoanalysis restored a humanist meaning to psychiatry, in that it rejected the idea of a classification of diseases isolated from the everyday experience of madness.
It was in this context that Lacan advocated the need for a return to Descartes – not to the philosophy of the cogito but to a philosophy capable of apprehending the causality of madness. In a few lines he commented on the famous sentence in the first part of the Meditations that later became the subject of a polemic between Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.12 Descartes wrote: “And how could I deny that these hands and this body are mine, were it not perhaps that I compare myself to certain persons, devoid of sense, whose cerebella are so troubled and clouded by the violent vapors of black bile, that they constantly assure us that they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering, or who imagine that they have an earthenware head or are nothing but pumpkins or made of glass. But they are mad, and I should not be any more the less insane were I to follow examples so extravagant.”13 Thus in 1946 Lacan suggested, as Derrida did later, that Descartes’ founding of modern thought did not exclude the phenomenon of madness.
If we compare this attitude with that of 1949 concerning the mirror stage, we see that Lacan has changed his point of view. Having appealed to Descartes in 1946, he now rejects Cartesianism and points out that the experience of psychoanalysis “is fundamentally opposed to any philosophy deriving from the cogito.” In the 1966 version, the one included in Ecrits, he corrects the lecture by reinforcing his criticism of the cogito: he says that the mirror stage is “an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the cogito” (E, p. 1). We can therefore see how Lacan evolves between 1936 and 1949. At first he constructs a phenomenological theory of the imaginary while distancing himself from the biological notion of “stages.” Then he appeals to Cartesian rationality to show that madness has its own logic and cannot be apprehended independently of the cogito. And lastly he invents a theory of the subject that rejects not only the Cartesian cogito but also the tradition of ego-psychology that derives from the cogito. His criticism was directed as much at Daniel Lagache, who was anxious to set up in France a psychological unit that would include psychoanalysis, as at the American advocates of ego-psychology, who, it may be said in passing, were no Cartesians.
As for the 1949 lecture, it is quite simply splendid in its style and tone. We are a long way now from the 1936 version of the mirror stage. Thirteen years after his humiliating failure to enter the arena of the psychoanalytical movement, Lacan invites us to partake in a genuinely tragic vision of man – a vision derived from a baroque aesthetic, from Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s views on Auschwitz,14 and a conception of time influenced by Heidegger. He turns psychoanalysis into a school for listening to the passions of the soul and to the malaise of civilization, the only school capable of counteracting the philanthropic but deceptive ideals of happiness therapies that claim to treat the ego and cultivate narcissism, while really concealing the disintegration of inner identity.
Translated by Barbara Bray
1. Jacques Lacan, “Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, telle qu’elle nous est révélée dans l’expérience psychanalytique” (1949), Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 93–101. Translated by Alan Sheridan as “The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience” (E/S, pp. 1–7).
2. Françoise Dolto, “Notes sur le stade du miroir,” 16 June 1936, unpublished. On the notes by Alexandre Kojève, see Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan. Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée (1993), translated by Barbara Bray as Jacques Lacan, Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). The unpublished document was communicated to me by Dominique Auffret.
3. Jacques Lacan, Les Complexes familiaux (1938), reprinted in Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001), pp. 23–84. See also Emile Jalley, Wallon, lecteur de Freud et de Piaget (Paris: Éditions sociales, 1981) and Emile Jalley, Freud, Wallon, Lacan, l’enfant au miroir (Paris: EPEL, 1998).
4. Henri Wallon, “Comment se développe chez l’enfant la notion de corps propre,” Journal de psychologie (November–December 1931), pp. 705–48; Les origines du caractère chez l’enfant (Paris: PUF, 1973).
5. As quoted by Françoise Bétourné, L’insistance des retours du Un chez Jacques Lacan, doctoral thesis in fundamental psychopathology and psychoanalysis, University of Paris VII, 23 February 2000, vol. 3, pp. CVIII–CIX. Emile Jalley rightly notes that Lacan mentions authors cited by Wallon without knowing them directly himself. See Freud, Lacan, Wallon, p. 151.
6. See in particular: Jacques Lacan, “Au-delà du ‘principe de la réalité’” (1936), Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 73–93; “Le Temps logique et l’assertion de certitude anticipée” (1945), pp. 197–215; and “Propos sur la causalité psychique” (1946), pp. 151–97.
7. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (1932) (Paris: Seuil, 1975). See pp. 12–16.
8. SE 14, pp. 67–102.
9. Louis Bolk, “La Genèse de l’homme” (Jena, 1926), in Arguments 1956–1962, vol. 2 (Toulouse: Privat), pp. 1–13.
10. In English the terms “phase” and “stage” are often used interchangeably. In German, Stufe is used to mean “stage” in the Freudian sense, while Stadium translates the Lacanian concept.
11. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Merleau-Ponty à la Sorbonne, résumé de cours 1949–1952 (Grenoble: Cynara, 1988), pp. 112–13. See also Emile Jalley, Freud, Wallon, Lacan.
12. See Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the history of madness,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 31–63.
13. René Descartes, The Philosophical Works, vol. 1, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 145.
14. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder, 1972).