Lacan brings to us a really interesting conversation with his essay “The Mirror Stage”. Lacan explores the development of the human psyche and its relation to the external world. This stage is important as it marks the point at which the child first becomes aware of itself as an independent entity separate from the world around it.

Lacan argues that the mirror stage occurs around the age of six months when the child first recognizes its own reflection in a mirror. When a youngster recognizes its own picture, they feel joy and satisfaction, and this experience serves as the catalyst for the development of the ego, or concept of self. Lacan points out that the picture the kid sees in the mirror is not a true reflection of their physical selves, but rather a gestalt, a more complete view than the child’s own fragmented perception of themselves. In this context, the mirror stage indicates a point of mistaken identity or the development of an imagined bond between the infant and its reflection. I find it really interesting that we can get past that idea as we’re so used to our reflection at an older age, but as a younger human with no answers, that’s what we perceive.

One of the most interesting aspects of Lacan’s theory is his account of the “scission” or split that occurs in the mirror stage. Lacan believes that the separation between the “I” and the “me,” between the subject who sees and the observed picture, results from the child’s experience of its own reflection. As the subject realizes that its image is not truly this but rather an outside object, this split makes the subject feel alienated.

Overall, Lacan’s idea of the mirror stage provides an argumentative explanation of how the human psyche grows and how the ego is formed. His focus on the significance of early childhood events in forming our sense of self is generally acknowledged and continues to have an influence on modern psychology.

As you probably know, there’s no reading for tomorrow, and we’ll review the prior unit. This is a golden opportunity for you to set yourself up for success on the exam.

I’m happy to walk through some of the high points of the readings as I see them, but I think the review will go best if you come prepared with questions. Take a look at the blog study questions and come prepared to throw out any that seem tricky for you.

Finally, I’ve put together a brief survey to take your temperature on how you feel about the course and its various components. It’s anonymous and ungraded (obviously), but I hope you will consider taking a moment to jot down your thoughts. I’ll give some time at the end of class to work on it, if we can wrap up the review in time.

In “Marxism and Literature” Ray Williams explores the idea of cultural dominance and the means by which the ruling classes uphold their authority through ideology and language. Williams contends that hegemony functions on several levels, such as the economic, political, and cultural ones, and that it involves negotiation and permission rather than straightforward coercion. Hegemony is used to describe how dominant groups in society maintain their hold on power and authority by influencing the ideas, beliefs, and values that the rest of society accepts in Ray Williams’ book “Marxism and Literature.” Ideology, discourse, and cultural output, including literature and popular culture, are used to accomplish this. Hegemony involves more than just coercion or force; it also involves the swaying of public opinion and the negotiation of agreement. It functions on many different levels, including the economic, political, and cultural ones, and is frequently disputed and questioned by those who want to overthrow the current order. Williams demonstrates how hegemonic ideas and values are propagated and reinforced using literary and popular culture as examples. He demonstrates how dominant groups suppress opposing views and advance their own agendas by exerting control over the tools of cultural production. Williams also analyzes how intellectuals contribute to and resist hegemonic discourse, stating that it is their duty to critically examine the prevailing beliefs of the day. One question that arose when reading was how does Williams’ concept of hegemony differ from traditional Marxist ideas about class struggle? Williams’ concept of hegemony broadens the study to encompass cultural fights and the ways that dominant groups create the ideas and beliefs of society, whereas classic Marxist views concentrate primarily on the economic struggles between the working class and the capitalist class. Williams contends that in addition to using economic tools, the ruling class propagates concepts that advance its objectives through cultural creation. To confront the prevailing notions of our time, one must engage in this cultural conflict, which is a crucial part of the larger effort of social transformation.

Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist thinker, has a significant influence on Ray Williams’ discussion of hegemony in “Marxism and Literature.” One of the earliest Marxist philosophers to acknowledge the significance of culture and ideology in preserving capitalist hegemony was Gramsci. According to Gramsci, the ruling class also uses cultural institutions and ideological apparatuses to keep its hold on power in addition to coercion and force. The idea that dominant groups in society maintain their power through influencing the ideas, beliefs, and values that are accepted by the rest of society is what he meant when he referred to this process as cultural hegemony. Williams expands on Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony by contending that literary and cultural output serve as significant battlegrounds in the struggle against prevailing ideologies. He shows how literary texts, like other types of cultural creation, can either support or contradict the prevailing societal views. Williams also emphasizes the role of intellectuals in the fight against hegemony because it is their job to critically examine prevailing beliefs and create alternative discourses that oppose the existing quo. This theme can be found in Gramsci’s writing as well, where he emphasized the need of intellectuals in establishing a counter-hegemony against the prevailing cultural narrative.

Within “The Mirror Stage As Formative”, Lacan describes the 8-16 month infant as losing in intelligence to a Chimpanzee, based on their differing reactions when they see their own reflections in the mirror. They are both able to perceive themselves in their reflections and recognize that as “I”; the Chimpanzee may recognize a possible mate or rival at first as he gets excited within the illusive motions, but when he eventually recognizes himself he loses all interest for an image that has suddenly become empty as the formation of the “I.” In contrast, the child with a similarly empty image will do everything in his power to keep it animated, for he does not perceive his reflection as empty. In other words, while the Chimpanzee is able to see his reflection for what it is — an empty reflection of his visage, unable to process its own emotions and only capable of mimicking his motions — the child sees his reflection as everything but what it is in a similar nature to the arbitrariness of language. Lacan defines the child’s ability to recognize his reflection as the expression of situational apperception; it is an identification where the child sees his image as imago heavily influenced by his motor incapacity and nursling dependence (primal needs), where the concept of “I” is precipitated in a primordial form. Ironically, despite its similar nature to language, this stage is created within the absence of it — where the “I” has not yet acquired its function as subject.

Lacan argues how the conception of the mirror stage contradicts the philosophy of the Cogito — “ I think, therefore I am.” In response to this concept that rationalizes thinking in the implication that thought guarantees existence and creates human reality, Lacan asserts thought as the seemingly death of self in the spin-off quote “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.” Ironically, despite impersonating a real person in all his animation of life, the image that the child sees in the mirror is fictional. In relation to “I” as a primordial form, the image that the child admired within the mirror is an “Ideal-I.” It is a secondary identification influenced by desires or libidinal normalization in Lacan’s words, where a discordance is made as the mirror reflects an ego incongruent with the child’s reality. Within the mirror stage the mirror stops being a true reflection and becomes a mirage containing power which the child is yet to acquire — a Gestalt. The mirror-image symbolizes the threshold of the visible world as the child finds his existence somewhere in between the mirror and his physical body in his attempt to unite the “I” with the Gestalt. Lacan argues that the existence of the Gestalt is necessary for maturation; for the development of its gonad, the female pigeon needs to see one of its kind — whether it be male, female, or even its own mirror reflection. In a similar concept, the modern adult creates a social media persona in relation to the mirror-image for the development of their self-esteem and ego. Therefore, the mirror-image becomes not only the threshold of the visual world but also a transition from the solitary to the gregarious form.

Sigmund Freud, in his Interpretation of Dreams, lays down the complexity of the act and the methodology required to go about interpreting dreams. He first, however, talks about the nature of what he calls the Oedipus complex: where, early in the development of the subject which includes their sexuality, their sexual desires are directed toward their parents. The male subject directs their love and desire toward their own mother, while envying and their own father because the father is currently inhabiting the position the subject wishes they were in. So it is their goal to “kill” the father and marry the mother like Oedipus Rex did in the original greek tragedy. The complex itself inhabits on the level of the unconscious, determining the actual activities of the everday conscious subject without their knowledge or conscience of the unconscious’ doings and motivations. Thus, these feelings of love and hate are not expressed or formulated in those terms by the subject in their everyday life and thinking throughout early childhood.

Freud talks about the myth of Oedipus Rex as something much more captivating to modern audiences than contemporary tragedies that use the same fatalistic themes, that it carries the same weight upon us today as it did for the ancient Greeks. He believes this to be so because it directly taps into this Oedipus complex that is within us all. Freud says Oedipus directly accomplishes our childhood wishes which have since then been repressed and turned into an object of disgust. And as well as capturing and bringing our attention to this unconscious desire, it also captures our reaction to it: violent repression. In the tale, Oedipus gauges out his own eyes after realizing he has done exactly what the oracle has told him he would do and what Oedipus alongisde his parents have tried avoiding this whole time (marrying his mother, and killing his father). This viscerality of the tale of Oedipus and the fact that it encapsulates something deep within us which has been repressed throughout our lives is something that other plays which cover the same themes cannot replicate without simply retelling the story of Oedipus Rex.

Freud contrasts this with Shakespeare’s Hamlet which covers similar topics and themes. Unlike in Oedipus Rex where Oedipus fulfills the childhood wish and the fantasy of the Oedipus complex is brought to the attention of the viewer, the Oedipus complex present within Hamlet remains repressed and something that isn’t mentioned directly whatsoever. It is something that has to be interpreted out of the progression of the narrative. Freud justifies having identified the Oedipus complex within Hamlet by highlighting the inadequacies of previous interpretations as to the hesitance of the character Hamlet in fulfilling his father’s dying wish to kill the man who married Hamlet’s mother. Freud identifies these feelings of hesitance, which he says—given the circumstances—should rather be feeling of vengeance, as due to the fact that the man is he about to kill literally fulfills the childhood wish of Hamlet that has remained long repressed. Hamlet identifies with the man who takes his father’s place and in that sense questions himself and his own morality given that he sees that he is no better. Freud then points out the presence of the Oedipus complex in the circumstances that lead Shakespeare himself to write the play, being his own father’s death. In the same sense as the interpretation of dreams leads us to understand the desires of the unconscious, Freud argues that the interpretation of creative works does the same as well in understanding the unconscious of the author.

Those who have prior knowledge of the mirror test might believe it will be a smooth journey into understanding what Lacan is getting up to in his paper “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” They would be wrong, and I would suggest they buckle up because Lacan goes where no “monkey” (1112), man, or magpie has gone before when he takes the otherwise ordinary event of an infant encountering their image in a mirror and synthesizes from it a moment which “would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form” and claims it is when “the agency of the ego” (1112) is manifested. 

Lacan emphasizes the “imagos of one’s body” (1113) is of particular potency for the child who before encountering it exists as Gestalt; a form (or formlessness, rather) defined by the infant’s very lack of the necessary “imago…to establish a relation between the organism and its reality” (1114). So it is the “drama” of the mirror phase which transfers the child from a state of “insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject…the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” (1114). In short, this experience works to manufacture a sort of dialectical relationship between self and image which leads to a “fragmented body” (1114). That our bodies and notions of self are built upon the “misrecognitions” (1116) apparent to the child who, in their reflection, see a capable, whole being even when they remain “sunk in [their] motor incapacity and nursling dependence” (1112) or Gestalt is something which Lacan argues must lead to a resolution. This fundamental tension or “alienation” (1115) between the Gestalt and the Imagos is precisely where the child learns to associate with the image they are confronted with; “which [they] must resolve as I” (1112). Thus, it is through the process of identification that we are alienated… 

But… also through the process of alienation that we are… identified…

And, I think this contradiction might be my major problem with this moment that Lacan signals as being vital for subject formation. He spends a great deal of time emphasizing this point of visual contact and has to continuously rely on the ineptitude of the child in the Infans stage to legitimize his claim. However, I think that there is something a bit reductive in believing that the child has no contact with or notion of “self” prior to the body fragmentation that transpires in the mirror. There are, of course, quite obvious examples when we think of blind children, children without regular access to mirrors, and so forth who all still come to develop a robust sense of self. But, perhaps more generally, I get the feeling that Lacan doesn’t seem to recognize the manner that other bodily senses are very much so happening for children before (or if) they find their own reflection and that these experiences are developmental. The child feels and hears and tastes and has preferences for certain sensory input. A child knows its own voice and its own desires. And, I think it is for this reason that the infant can be identified (and thus alienated) at all! They are already more than the abstracted Gestalt Lacan makes them out to be by the time their Imagos appears before them.

This isn’t to say that I disagree with Lacan, though. We are alienated from ourselves to a certain extent. There is a dual relationship between the body and the ego and we exist neither as one nor the other and, yes, obviously something important does happen when a child realizes that they are more than the sum of their “jubilant activity” (1112). But, there seems to be something far more relevant going on when we stop viewing the mirror stage as a one off event and start thinking of it as something ongoing and multifaceted. For example, I love thinking about the mirror stage in relation to my virtual identity. I think body fragmentation was/is more real for me not when I looked in the mirror, but when I used avatars on video games or logged onto social media. In a similar vein, what does “gaze” have to do with subject formation? Is ego something that develops from the self and the mirror alone? What about the other subjects around us that confirm what we see in the reflection?

There’s a lot more that can be said and a lot more I still want to gain from this piece. But, for now, I’ll leave with a quote from The Eyes of the Skin by the brilliant Juhani Pallasmaa whose work I was reminded of after reading Lacan:

“The gradually growing hegemony of the eye seems to be parallel with the development of Western ego-consciousness and the gradually increasing separation of the self and the world; vision separates us from the world whereas the other senses unite us with it.”

Sigmund Freud, an Australian neurologist and someone who was the founder of psychoanalysis, write the piece “The interpretation of Dreams” in which he introduces his theory on the concept of dreams, their meaning and the effects they have. Freud became an important figure in psychology as he brought up his theories to the world and introduced new meanings, ideas on how the mind works and interpretations of dreams.

Freud believes that our desires and emotions in the awake life are the reason why we have certain dreams. He believed in this connection between the conscious and unconscious mind, where our unsaid thoughts and desires in life, in our conscious mind, turned to symbols and images in our dreams, unconscious mind, as a way to express ourselves . In his belief, our dreams all have meanings behind them, and are most likely desires of ours not said aloud. To support his theory he brings up the idea of the process that transforms our unconscious thoughts into a content of dreams, also known as “Dream-work”. Dream work is made up of 4 parts, condensation, displacement, symbolization, and secondary revision. Condensation, a number of ideas combined into one. Displacement, emotion being detached from one idea and attached to another, most likely something that is seen as socially acceptable. Symbolization, an object representing a desire. And lastly, secondary revision, the creation of a narrative coherence.

Freud also describes dream work as the operations that transform the latent content into the manifest content. Manifest content in Freud’s theory is the visuals, the images and content in the dream, whereas the latent content, or in other words the dream thoughts are the “conclusion of our enquiry”(793). Freud mentions how these dream thoughts are the reason why we understand the meaning behind dreams. Dream thoughts and dream content are related as we see the dream-content as a transcript of the dream-thoughts. Manifest content is used to hide meanings , hence why it’s the symbols and images in the dream. Whereas latent is the hidden psychological meaning, the desires and thoughts that we unconsciously interpret it into dreams. Lastly, Freud compares dreams to a picture-puzzle, where he sees that each piece is needed to complete the entire meaning.

Freud has become really important to psychology , as his ideas are bringing to light the connections of unconsciousness and conscious mind of a person. His ideas became known as one of the mnay influential writings in psychology.

Dreams are tricky to pin down; they’re not like butterflies to a lepidopterist. A dream’s interpretation depends on many factors and contexts, all not knowing if what the dream is trying to tell you is actually what the dream is trying to tell you — and who knows if the dream’s trying to tell you something? Dreams are bewildering— and who can you blame? Dreams are there, we made them, and we are there within them, somehow and in all-hows. However, all this obscurity does not stop psychiatrists and thinkers from attempting to become the lepidopterists of dreams, pining them down with meanings, interpretations, and signs.

Before Freud — indeed, before Freud — a dream’s interpretations were not so much brimming with sexual urges, and not everything was a phallus. Psychiatrists merely interpreted the superficial layer of the dream, not looking deeper — screw the abyss, signs, all that jazz. Psychiatrists interpreted the manifest content “as it’s presented in our memories.” You dreamed of walking through a supermarket with Walt Whitman, catching Garcia Lorca fondling some watermelons (Allen Ginsberg, Supermarket in California). The psychiatrist said you wanted to go to the supermarket or needed to go to the supermarket and were probably reading too much Whitman and Lorca (ain’t nothing wrong with that, in my humble opinion.) But as with Ginsberg’s poem, dreams were brimming with meaning.

After Freud — don’t dream about bananas, recorders (they mean — you know what they mean,) or purses or peaches (you, too, know these meanings) — don’t dream about anything because you wished (dreams are wish fulfillment, now) to kill your father and shack up with your mother. No, in all seriousness, as outlandish and outdated — and misogynistic — some of Freud’s ideas are in The Interpretation of Dreams, it’s these ideas (not so much about the Oedipal complex and high libido, in my opinion) that help alter psychoanalytic (think Jung,) but also presents psychiatrists with a different way to analyze the human psyche.

In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud presents his “new task which had no previous existence: the task, that is, of investigating the relations between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, and of tracing out the processes by which the latter have been changed into the former.” Freud is saying that the former psychiatrists are wrong in their approach of psychoanalytic. There is no longer just the manifest content, but “a manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts, (let us call this latent content.) And Freud’s task and the new psychoanalytic approach is to see how the latent has transformed into (or effects) the manifest (and, in my opinion, vice versa.)

The manifest content is the remembered narrative that plays out in the dream. As I mentioned, itself is superficial, only surface deep. On this level, dream language is often from memories. The manifest content is jumbled, jumpy, and all over the place. The latent content (or dream-thought) is the underlying meaning of the dream; it’s usually parts of the dream we do not remember after waking. The latent content is like the unseen details on a page when a teacher says to read between the lines. Freud’s interest lies in the relationship between the two, and he believes the answers to dreams (as well as the self) sit between the manifest and latent content.

Through Freud’s task of investigating the relationship between manifest and latent content, to this writer, he becomes part of an over-arching theory of psychological two-ness, and thus, socially two-ness, that spans generations and multiple disciplines.