Jacques Lacan

The video above is a brief overview of Lancan's Mirror stages - It is not academic in any way (naughty words included be warned!!) However it gives you a 'lighter' version than whats below!!


Jacques Lacan (1901-81) tried to give Freud a contemporary intellectual significance, extricating his thought from the gloss of later commentators, and extending it in ways suggested but not achieved by Freud himself.
The unconscious was not Freud's great contribution to European thought, but his discovery that the unconscious had a structure. That structure, continued Lacan, is a discourse that operates across the unconscious-conscious divide.
Lacan's terminology is fluid, not to say elusive, but he adopts Freud's trinity of id, ego and superego. But Lacan argues that our continual attempt to fashion a stable, ideal ego throughout our adult lives is self-defeating.
Lacan's unconscious is structured like a language, which gives language a key role in construction our picture of the world, but also allows the unconscious to enter into that understanding and dissolve essential distinctions between fantasy and reality. As do other psychoanalysts, Lacan sees mental illness as a product of early childhood difficulties (notably imbalance between the Imaginary and the Symbolic) but children progressively gain a self-identity by passing through pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages of development.
Lacan also had a trinity of his own: the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.

•The Real is the unnameable, the outside of language.

•The Imaginary is the undifferentiated early state of the child, a combination of subject and parent, which remains latent in adult life, manifesting when we falsely identify with others.

•The Symbolic is the demarcated world of the adult with its enforced distinctions and repressions. The unconscious is not simply reflected in the language we use, but is equally controlled by it.

Discourse, including social, public language, shapes and enters into the structure of the unconscious, and is inextricably mixed with the unsatisfied sexual desire that emerges disguised in dreams, jokes and art.
Lacan replaced Freud's postulated oral, anal and genital stages of child development with his own pre-mirror, mirror and post-mirror stages.

Pre Mirror - During its first six months of existence, the child gradually fills the gap between bodily sensations and its perceptions of the outside world with symbols: fantasies with which its consciousness is merged.

Mirror - Then, over the next year or so, the child begins to recognize the outside as an extension or mirror of its own bodily image, absorbing at the same time an awareness of outside language.

Post Mirror - But in the next, post-mirror stage, when the child begins to speak for itself, these traces of meaning are repressed because they represent something from the child has separated. But desire remains, hedged about by prohibitions and compromises, into adulthood, and provides the Id with its own logic, language and intentionality.

From this early stage too comes any neurosis or psychosis that the adult may subsequently suffer from, these resulting from imbalances between the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real.

Criticisms of Lancan
•Lacan was a perplexity, even to his own profession.
•The mirror stage is pure supposition.
•Speech, according to Freud, appears with the Oedipus complex, and thus much later than Lacan's model would allow.
•The unconscious is not structured like a language, not on the evidence to date.
•There is no room in Lacan for individual experience, and documentation by case history is very poor.