IT IS AT THIS point, Lacan writes, that the analyst will do his work not by responding sympathetically, nor by failing to respond (the apathetic listener). He has to replace the mode of the voice and the ear with the image, becoming, as he puts it, a ‘pure unruffled mirror’. Coupled with his description of the ego as ‘opaque to reflection’, the use of the term ‘mirror’ cannot be overlooked. It is in the mirror that the ego is first born as an idea, and it is in the echo of the symbolic voice that it gains its identity: the analytic mirror must displace—‘subduce’—these ‘archaic imagos’.
JULIET FLOWER McCANNELL, Figuring Lacan