The Mirror Stage as formative of the function of the Eye as Revealed in the Psychoanalytic Experience by Jacques Lacan

Among the psychoanalyst in the recent years, Lacan has had the greatest influence in literary theory. He reinterprets Freud in the light of structural linguistics and he is perhaps best known in theoretical circles for his pronouncement that the “unconscious is structured like a language."

For Lacan, the unconscious of mind is structured like Saussure's language system of operation as paradigmatic and syntagmatic or like Jakobson's metaphoric and metonymic. He goes against Freud's controversial idea about biological drives. He asserts that the development of an identity of a subject is a social construct not biological.

There are stages of human development according to Lacan. They are:
The mirror stage
The imaginary stage
The symbolic stage
In the mirror stage, the child discovers his own image, which becomes other to the self, thereby establishing subjectivity. In this stage, there is no split in personality. The baby treats mother as mirror and identity itself with her. But in reality the image of mother is ‘other’. As a result, when the language intervenes, the child knows that the identification was false.

However, the child's reconstruction of ego to be one with mother continues thereafter. As the baby develops, the love to the mother increases and the father is seen as threatening to its desire. The subject (identity) has the split into two conscious and unconscious where our ego is decentered. It is also called the imaginary stage because there is an imaginary identification with mother. Mirror stage is also called the imaginary stage or mirror stage is also a part of imaginary stage. In this stage, firstly, child feels its image coherent. It feels united with the mother's body. Secondly, the child feels that the image does not belong to itself. The image has separate existence. So, the sense of harmony and alienation goes on simultaneously during the imaginary phase.

Lacan claims that the sense of unification and the sense of alienation do not remain only in the mirror stage. This sort of double sense remains throughout our life. This mirror stage is also called pre- linguistic stage where child first identifies himself with mother and at the same time it identifies itself to be alienated from mother too.

Lacan defines “other” to be other to the subject (ego). This “other” exists prior to subject entry in to language and after the access to the language, there is the split. This splitting result to the symbolic stage and the aporia is created. In this stage man moves linguistically in to the chain of signifiers and this is never ending process.

The presence of father in the form of language threatens the child's unification with the mother. There results the gap between signifier and signified or subject and object. The language creates unconscious level in child's mind. Obviously, there now occurs the gap between I (self) and we (self + other). All the prohibited things remain in the unconscious level by language.

In real stage language is terribly insufficient because of which the stage transfers beyond the approach of symbolic stage. Due to the inadequacy of signifying system, the desired object is never possible to acquire. The signifiers slide over signified, which is like jellyfish. Signifiers seek for signified, which is previous harmony but again signifier emerges eventually after one signified is fulfilled. There is always mismatch between language and desire. One can unite with mother only at the cost of death so, desire is never fulfilled. There are multiple signified and desires and so the duality remains forever.