Illustration: Two persons, man and woman, facing each other, holding full-length gilded mirrors on a theater stage. The man and woman holding the mirrors are slightly askew and ape-like, while each mirror holds not the reflection of the other, but an image of the "ideal image" of the holder, upright, handsome, but not relaxed. A spotlight is on the mirrors; the bearers are in the shadows. The man speaks "Hello," with his gaze on his mirror-image; the woman says "How'd you do," with her eyes looking at her mirror-image. The mirror-images are exchanging gazes. The word "mirror" points to each mirror with a mirror; the word "stage" labels the stage with an arrow.
Lacan tells us, in his 1949 lecture on the mirror stage (following up on a lecture of 1936), that the human child is born prematurely. Its experience, based on its uncoordinated motor skills, is of a world in bits and pieces. Born with senseless senses, unorganized organs, and disjointed joints, the child makes no delineation between inside and outside, between self and (m)other.
Illustration: disjointed, unorganized baby, and mother's breast (or multiple breasts), with no clear separation between the two or foreground/background. (Lacan talks of Hieronymous Bosch's paintings.)
The human being comes into the world without an ego - without an identity, without a sense of self separate from an other (its mother).
Illustration: Baby: "You mean I need to be Born Again?"
Then, one day, there is a "startling spectacle" in front of the mirror...
"Unable as yet to walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support...he nevertheless overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support, and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image."
Illustration: Child, presenting its form to the reader, saying "Ta-ta! How specular!"
In the mirror image, the child senses stability, unity, and stature - a mastery it hopes to one day attain.
It is here that the subject recognizes - or mis-recognizes - its self.
Illustration: Child, standing, gazing into the mirror, saying "Pleased to meet me." Off to the side, Shakespeare says "When we are born we cry that we are come/To this great stage of fools."
But this act of (re)cognition is marked by a lack - the sense of a whole achieved points out a hole.
Illustration: two onlookers off to the side. One says "Oh, look - this is getting Freudian." The other says "What are you looking at?"
For Lacan tells us that this act of recognition is ultimately a misrecognition: that is, by seeing my self in the mirror - by saying this, what I see with my eye, is I - I glance over the fact that the existence of this "I" assumes a split between the self and the (mirror-image) other: I glance over the fact that the "I" does not, in any way, pre-exist. In recognizing my self - in accepting the image before me as my self (but then, there is no choice; there would be no "I" to reject my self), I create a self before the mirror: this is I, as I must have always been.
But this is also a misrecognition in another sense: I recognize the "miss", the gap between my self and my image, and, in doing so, I am alienated from myself. Once again, I create a self before the mirror: this time, in the sense that I stand before it, to create this uncanny double outside of myself, which is me.
Illustration: Reader, holding Lacan for Beginners to side, with his back to Lacan, saying: "I'm alienated. I fail to recognize..." Lacan: "Yes! You got it!" Reader: "Apparently, I did."
Let's review:
Illustration: Man, standing in front of mirror, saying "Le'go my ego."
See Also Kid A In Alphabet Land: An Abecedarian Roller Coaster Ride Through The Phallocentric Obscurantism Of Jacques Lacan.