the child comes to confuse with (what turns into) “himself ”; this self/ego has thus
to be considered as a passive, mental object.The ego becomes an inertialobject, since
it fails to accept its dialectic.^14 Hence, we can conclude that the subject cannot be
reduced by any means to the ego, simply because the latter is actually an object.
This unreceptive hypocrisy, this primordial autism, corresponds to the “madness”
of the ego; consequently its paradoxical truth emerges precisely in “ordinary”
madness, where any dialectic between the subject and the other is even more rad-
ically put into question: the most succinct definition of a psychotic in Lacan’s first
theory of the subject would be someone who is stuck at the mirror-stage, and
therefore fails to recognize the other as other. Lacan thus includes madness in the
basic structure of human subjectivity: psychosis is no longer understood as an or-
ganic deficiency but as a possibility open to all human beings.
But why is the subject captivated by the image of his own body in the first place?
It is only by answering this question that we can truly understand the genesis of
the ego. I shall now provide a detailed description of the theoretical reasons which,
according to Lacan, justify his explanation of the phenomena observable in the
mirror stage:
( 1 ) Lacan accepts one of the principal tenets of Gestalttheory according to which
an animal is instinctively predisposed to recognize the image of the body of an-
other animal of the same species as a whole, and is consequently attracted by it. It
is only thanks to Gestaltenthat an animal’s sexual reproduction is made possible: re-
production is necessarily associated with the lures of the Imaginary.^15 Lacan thinks
that human instincts also function via Gestalten, but in a distorted way: in fact, such
a distortion makes it impossible to consider human drives as mere natural instincts.
In other words, man has a “disordered imagination”:^16 his later claim according to
which there is no human sexual relationship should also be related to such a dis-
order. These arguments constitute the only significant biological reference of
Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory.
( 2 ) In what way is the functioning of Gestaltendistorted in human beings? In gen-
eral, Lacan thinks that man is, by definition, a disadapted animal: this is a view he
will never abandon, and one which leads him to criticize Darwin. Human be-
ings’ astounding psychic development and the emergence of language and cul-
ture that it made possible are far from being the result of a particularly successful
adaptation of the species:^17 on the contrary, “man’s relation to nature is altered by
a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism.”^18 More specifically, according to
Lacan, human disadaptation is primarily due to the fact that all human beings are
bornprematurely;as he remarks, such a physiological prematurity of birth is espe-
cially noticeable in “the objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness of the