the child during the so-called mirror stage: such a primordial experience founds
what both Freud and Lacan define as the Ur-Ich,the primal basis upon which the
ego will later emerge. The mirror stage establishes a structural psychic dialectic
between the subject and the other that serves as a model for the entirety of the sub-
ject’s many chronologically successive imaginary identifications: the ego is noth-
ing but their sum total at a given point in time. Therefore, it is not too much of an
exaggeration to maintain that, by means of the continuous acquisition of new
imaginary identifications corresponding to different crucial moments in the sub-
ject’s psychic life, the mirror-stage experience is repeated indefinitely throughout
one’s existence due to the imaginary relationships that are established with other
human beings.^9
Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage relies primarily on evidence drawn from var-
ious psychological experiments.^10 These have shown that a child of between six
and eighteen months old recognizes himself in the image of his own body as it is
reflected in a mirror. Moreover, this recognition produces a clearly observable “ju-
bilation” in the child. The subject recognizes himself in the otherness of the spec-
ular image: in so doing, he undergoes a redoubling through which he is able to
objectify himself in the mirror, to identify himself with an imaginary other. It is
important to note that this specular image does not need to be provided by a mir-
ror: the image of another child of approximately the same age will also be per-
ceived by the subject as a specular image, that is to say, without recognizing the
other as other.
Imaginary identification can consequently be said to be alienating by defini-
tion; in addition to this, the alienated ego also fails to recognize its own function-
ing. Thus, a double misrecognition (méconnaissance) takes place: in fact, the ego not
only, as it were, “finds itself ” at the place of the other (the first misrecognition: the
ego is alienated) but also provides the subject with a deceptive impression of unity
(the second and most fundamental misrecognition: the ego does not recognize it-
self as alienated). According to Lacan, it is the ego that makes me accept as true that
I am myself and the other is the other. This was Descartes’s conclusion in the Med-
itations,and it explains his statement that madness consists in believing oneself to
be other than one is (“they think they are kings when they are really quite poor, or
that they are clothed in purple when they are really without covering”).^11 Lacan
undermines this argument on its own grounds by asserting that it is no more crazy
to believe oneself to be a king when one is not than it is to believe oneself to be
oneself.^12 The ego makes us believe that we are isolated, solitary spherical beings,
deaf and dumb as planets, as Lacan suggests elsewhere.^13
At this stage, we should be able to clearly demonstrate why the subject cannot
be reduced to the ego. The latter is a (false) unity consisting of an extensive macro-
image in which various (ideal) images are overlaid and amalgamated, and whichthe subject of the imaginary (other)