There are three stages in the development of the child between the ages of
six and eighteen months in the mirror (specular, imaginaire) stage (a) the
image in the mirror is a reality like any other, and the child (or simian)
may look behind the miror for the reality, (b) the child stops treating it
as a real object and will not look behind the mirror for an other; to this
point his reaction is like that of a monkey, (c) he recognizes it as his own
image. [My birddog did not look behind the mirror or treat it as his own
image. Because of his good nose, he was never deceived in the first place
into thinking that the image in the mirror had any reality.] This is the
stage of the imaginaire, a term not translatable very well as imaginary, but
more I believe as "imagic." This is a progressive process in his evolution
toward being a subject. Identifying himself with an image which is not
himself permits him to recognize himself, contributes to recognizing himself
as a separate physical body.
He likewise identifies himself with another. There is a confusion between
himself and the other; he even identifies his body with that of others. An
other is treated as his double. Such is the nature of his original relation
to his mother, in which the child does not really distinguish his body from
his surroundings. (Sartre called the differentiating process "nihilation"
and made it a conscious process in an existential philosophy--or psychology
--based on reflective consciousness.) But between sixteen and eighteen
months, by identifying himself with an image which is not himself, he ends
up recognizing himself. It is the first "drame de l'existence " (Fages, p.
15), and anticipates his maturation.
Psychotic children may show anguish at their mirror image, as chimpanzees
reared in isolation seem also to show (Desmond, p. 188), and seem frozen,
turned to stone. Now the child must move out of this mirror, specular,
imaginary state into the " stade du symbolique," the stage of the symbolic.
Otherwise, he remains in the imaginaire as an expression of his mother. He
moves into this symbolic stage through the arrival of an element which
deprives him of the ability to identify himself with the mother, i.e., the
father, the Lacanian phallus (the name of the father). [It would seem that
in today's society in the United States it might well be the name of the
significant other, or maybe even a beloved dog-as-name-of-the-phallus, and
may very well emphasize the bourgeois basis of Lacanian psychoanalysis, as
Deleuze claims, moreover, in Anti-Oedipus.] The access to the symbolic and
subject status is through the Oedipus structure or triad (child, mother,
father-phallus).
The Oedipus structure has three stages also (a) this is the same stage as
the third stage of the mirror, specular stage, i.e., the imaginary, in which
the child identifies with the mother. The Oedipus thus overlaps with the
specular. (b) The father arrives, deprives the child of mother's bed, and
the possibility of the identification with the mother. (c) The child, forced
to name the father as the origin of the absence of the mother, performs a
metaphorical, linguistic substitution, entering thus to true selfhood by the
metaphorical, symbolic event, through the pathway of language. The "phallus"
is the "name of the father" in Lacan's explanation of the symbolic nature of
the Oedipus structure. The phallus is the symbolic entity which arrives to
introduce the structure of difference into the "specular," imaginary
(imagic) non-differentiation of child and mother. As such, the child attains
selfhood as metaphor, whereas the name of the father (phallus) substitutes
for the specular identification with the mother. It could be demonstrated
that Sartrean differentiation is also heavily based on the denominating
power of language (v. Plank, 1981).
The human self is realized through a substitution (i.e., metaphor),
otherwise the child would remain identified with the mother. The reality of
the human self is a substitution, made possible by the existence of the
symbolic. Lacan's Oedipus explains the differentiation of the child from his
mother as a reality of metaphoric substitution in the structure of
difference of the family triad, the reality of which is metaphoric
substitution. Reality is symbol and the self is actualized (constituted) by
language in the signifier-signified structure (where, however, for Lacan,
the role of the signifier is dominant over the signified, which is
actualized by the signifier). Neurosis is the failure to accede to the
symbolic, thus remaining in the imaginaire. The Lacanian phallus acts as a
differentiation factor to give the child the aptitude to give the name of
the father as the cause of the absence of the mother. This access to the
symbolic order is access to language, culture, and civilization. Through
linguistic elements and symbol the child can then exercise, repeat, prolong,
and play out the expression of his desire or desires for that which is
absent. This is a fine piece of work!
According to Lacan, his doctrine is "founded on the fact that the
sub-conscious has the radical structure of language, that a material is in
play there which operates according to laws which are those discoverable in
the study of real languages (langues positives), of languages which are or
were spoken" (my translation, Fages, p. 20). The subject is thus constituted
by the symbolic order, for language means the relation of signified to
signifier. It would appear that anything which removes the visual mother
forces the arrival of the symbolic and that deprivation of the visual
triggers the symbolic or at least true selfhood, the authentic functioning
individual. Nietzsche likewise seems to suggest that the unconscious is
actuated into consciousness by language "...this conscious thinking takes
the form of words, which is to say signs of communication, and this fact
uncovers the origin of consciousness" (GS, 354).
We will now have to deal with such questions as to whether the chimp, if he
has no language, can have (in Lacanian terms) a self, or a subconscious, and
whether Lacan's ideas force us to the conclusion, with Descartes, that he is
an automaton or whether we have to reject Lacan's ideas based on the
apparent absurdity of their application to chimps, or whether I may simply
be wrong in attempting to judge Lacan based on applying his ideas to
chimpanzees, i.e., on lumping man and ape together within the configurations
of the Will to Power and evolutionary continuity extending to every level.
But first, while I watch my dog dream, a brief look at Lacan's ideas through
the thinking of Nietzsche
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