If we turn to the index at the back of the Ecrits that Jacques-Alain Miller has carefully compiled, we find references to the mirror stage stretched throughout the papers that comprise the Ecrits. Narcissism, in which the image of one’s own body is sustained by the image of the other, in fact introduces a tension: the other in his image both attracts and rejects me” ( Julien, Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud, p.34). At the very moment when the ego is formed by the image of the other, narcissism and aggressivity are correlatives. “In the mirror stage, Lacan compressed the two phases into one. Lacanian psychoanalyst Philippe Julien suggests just this, seeing the mirror stage theory as a compression of two phases: narcissism and aggressivity: Lacan clearly approved of their publication in reverse chronological order, which we can perhaps take as an indication that the aggressivity paper is an expansion or development of ideas put forward in the mirror stage papers of 19. Indeed, these two papers contain very similar ideas, and although the aggressivity paper is chronologically the earlier, it is much longer, and in the published Ecrits follows the paper on the mirror stage. Although the original paper on the mirror stage was presented in Marienbad in 1936, the fact that both the 19 papers were delivered less than a year apart suggests that it helps to read both together. It was presented less than a year after the paper on ‘Aggresssivity in Psychoanalysis’ was delivered in Brussels in May 1948. The paper in the Ecrits published in 1966, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, was first delivered in 1949 at the International Psychoanalytical Association congress in Zurich. Rather than leaving the subject in the late forties, Lacan continued to develop the mirror stage theory from Seminar I in the early fifties, right up until Seminar XXII in 1975.Ĭontext of the mirror stage theory in Lacan’s work The second article on the mirror stage will look at how it is presented and developed over the course of Lacan’s Seminar. By looking at these as well we can learn something about the development of the mirror stage theory and its place in Lacan’s thought at that time. This is usually seen as the main text on the mirror stage theory, but there are a number of other texts roughly contemporary with it, through which Lacan develops related ideas. This first part looks at the presentation of the mirror stage as we find it in the Ecrits, specifically in the 1949 paper, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’. This is the first of two articles looking at the theory of the mirror stage in Lacan’s work.
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