Presentify windows5/2/2023 ![]() For these reasons, the mirror stage marks a turning point in the development of the subject. The mirror stage ushers the developing subject into a regime of what Lacan calls imaginary relations (that is, relations based on identification with images) and thus clears the way for their subsequent entry into symbolic systems of language and meaning. Leaning toward the mirror, the child becomes, at least in their own fantasy, an enduring "me" separate from other people the experience, though, also gives rise to a tension between the child's self-image and their experience of the body, a tension which is equally enduring. Recognizing the image in the mirror as their own, the child, "in a moment of jubilant activity," begins to "take in an instantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind" (76). ![]() With roots in animal psychology and Gestalt psychology, it imagines the moment in which an infant, who has not yet developed an integrated sense of self nor mastered gross motor skills, begins to recognize their own image with the help of "some prop, human or artificial" (Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" 76). Lacan's canonical essay "The Mirror Stage" offers a model of early childhood cognitive development and, more broadly, subject formation. ![]() (2) This uncanny register, we argue, produces a time of moments that functions in contrast to clock time. (1) Highlighting the anxiety implicit in the mirror stage, Lacan seizes upon the frame around the mirror, which, in its function as a parergon, renders the mirror stage uncanny. We say "at the edges" because of the way that Lacan begins to examine the function of frames and framing within the psychic apparatus. We suggest that, by taking seriously these innovations in Seminar X, we can locate a theory of time at the edges of Lacan's discussion on the mirror stage, one that has not been adequately appreciated within literary studies, by Lacanians or by theorists of time or affect. Third, by means of "The 'Uncanny,'" he explores the disquieting mood of the entire process. Second, he emphasizes the frame around the mirror, rather than the reflective glass, effectively changing the meaning of "stage" in the original essay into a theatrical metaphor rather than a phase. First, he emphasizes the mirror stage as the imaginary production of a "moment," rendering it more clearly a theory of temporality than of embodiment. Yet Lacan's discussion of the mirror stage thirteen years later in Seminar X, three years before its reissue in Ecrits, is startling and potentially quite significant given how it adds unexpected new affective dimensions to the concept of the mirror and, in the process, offers a disquisition on time.Īs Lacan reinterprets his "The Mirror Stage" essay in a new Freudian key, he makes a few pivotal innovations. ![]() It is easily "Lacan's most famous theoretical contribution" (Johnston, "Jacques Lacan" sec.2.2) and, even by its first publication, was "a pearl which he had carefully cultured for some thirteen odd years" (Nobus 104). The concepts developed in "The Mirror Stage," which is now an indispensible part of psychoanalytic theory and a staple of introductory courses in literary theory, are known chiefly via Lacan's 1949 essay, which gained new prominence once it was republished in Lacan's epochal Ecrits in 1966. In the process, he was changing its import considerably. In Seminar X, Lacan was finding a way to fuse his own earlier thinking on childhood development with a fresh analysis of Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay "The 'Uncanny.'" Given that Lacan's influential 1949 essay "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience" can be read as a rewriting of Freud's 1914 essay "On Narcissism: An Introduction," and thus can be understood as part of Lacan's broad project of returning to Freud's original texts, we will suggest that, in the sessions from Seminar X spanning late November through late December of 1962, Lacan was returning his own "return to Freud" to Freud. We are eager to call attention to Jacques Lacan's reconsideration of the mirror stage in Seminar X: Anxiety, recently published in English for the first time. APA style: Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar.Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar." Retrieved from 2019 Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English 27 Jun. MLA style: "Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar." The Free Library.
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