Google - Summary of stages of the mirror-stage and it's repercussions?
- Posted:
- 3+ months ago by ErinWatson
- Topics:
- art, mirror, stage, performance, contemporary, google, summary
Responses (1)
"Lacan, relying on empirical data from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, posits that very young children, between the ages of six and eighteen months, quickly acquire the ability to identify their own images in reflective surfaces. At this time, infants are lacking in most physical and mental abilities possessed by older human beings...........This initial state of helpless “motor impotence and nursling dependence” entails the infant experiencing a swirl of negative affects: anxiety, distress, frustration, and so on..........the fascinating image of his/her body is this image's promise that he/she can overcome his/her Hilflosigkeit and be a unified, pulled-together whole, an integrated, coordinated totality like the bigger, more mature others he/she sees around him/her-self.............This imago-Gestalt of virtual wholeness, identified with by the infant...thereafter ontogenetically accretes the ego as a series of self-objectifications in images and, soon after with the event of language acquisition, words too.........identification with the imago-Gestalt of the moi entails alienation.........the infant is encouraged to identify with the mirror image as “me” by verbal and gestural prompts issuing from the bigger other..."Look, that's you!"...“What a handsome boy!,” “What a beautiful girl!,” “You're going to grow up to be big and strong, just like your daddy,” etc............As a result of all of the above, Lacan considers the recognition that happens in the mirror stage to amount to “mis-recognition” (méconnaissance). This likewise holds throughout life for all ensuing experiences of “recognizing” oneself as being a particular kind of “I,” namely, taking qua imagining oneself to be a certain sort of ego-level self." (Johnston)