. .

xiv

Bibliographical note

The agemy of the &rrei Lt the unconrcious or reason since Freud

L'inrtme de la Iettre d m I'Ltconrcienr ou la raison depuis Freud. Delivered

on 9 May, 1957, in the Arnphith&2ue Descartes of the Sorbonne, Paris,

at the requesi of the Philosophy Group of the F6d6ration des Ctudiants 8s
Lettres. Written version dated 14-16 May, 19~7.Published in L a P y c h d y s e , vol. 3, P.U.F., 1957, pp. 47-81.
On a fuesrionprelLninluy to mypossi6le treatment ofpsychosi~
D u e guerrion p r d l k h i r e d tout rraitement possib& de Ia pychose. Based

,.,,,
,

,.,
, ,!
,,,,

on the autho<s seminar for the first two semesters of the year 1955-6.
,,Written December 195danuary 1958. Published in L a PychMalye,
~01.4,P.U.F., 1959, PP. 1-50.

T k s&~cation of tkPMu
L a Sigmjrcation du p h d ~ u .Lecture given in German under the title
Die Beahieunmg der P h d I u at the Max-Planck Institute, Munich, at the
invitation of Professor Paul Matussek, 9 May, 1958.
The direction of the treatment and the principles of its power
L a direction de la cure et I s principer de son pouvoir. First report to the

CoUoque international de Royaumont, 10-13 July, 1958, at the invitation

of the SocietC franpise de psychanalyse. Published in L a P y c h d y s e ,
voL 6, P.U.F., 1961, pp. 1 4 ~ x 6 .

, ,

The subversion of the subject and tk dialectic of

desire in the F r e u d k unconrciou
Subversion du syer et ddecrigue du &sir d m l'inconrcienr freudien.

Delivered at a conference entitled 'La Dialectique', held at Royaumont,

1 p z 3 September, 1960, at the invitation of Jean WahL

..

ONE

The mirror stage ;as formative.o f the

function of the I as revealed in
psychoanalytic experience
Deliwed at the 16th International Con-

~f

Psychoanalysis, Zilrich, July 17, 1949

fMf

The conception of the mirror stage that I introduced at our last congress,
thirteen years ago, has since become more or less established in the
practice of the French group. However, I think it worthwhile to bring it
again to your attention, espeaally today, for the light it sheds on the
formation of the I as we experienceit in psychoanalysis. It is an experience
that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogiro.
Some of you may recall that this conception originated in a feature of
hnrnan behaviour illuminated by a fact of comparative psychology. The
child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the
chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recogn k as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in
the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebnir, which Kohler sees as the
expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of
inieIligence.
This act, far from exhausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once
the image has been mastered -and found empty, immediately rebounds
in the case of the child in a series of gmtures in which he experiences in
play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the
reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it
reduplicates - the child's own body, and the persons and things, around
him.
This event can take place, as we have known since Baldwin, from the
age of six months, and its repetition has often made me reflect upon the
startling spectacle of the infant in front of the mirror. Unable as yet to
walk, or even to stand up, and held tightly as he is by some support,
human or artifiaal (what, in France, we caU a 'rrotte-&M), he nevertheless
overcomes, in a Buner of jubilant activity, the obstructions of his support

h i t s : A Selection

and, fixing his attitude in a slightly leaning-forward position, in order to

hold it in his gaze, brings back an instantaneous aspect of the image.
For me, this activity retains the meaning I have given it up to the age
of eighteen months. This meaning discloses a libidinal dynamism, which
has hitherto remained problematic, as well as an ontological structure of
the humanworld that accordswith my reflections on paranoiacknowledge.
We have only to understand the mirror stage US an identij~arion,in the
full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that
takes place in the subject when he assumes an image - whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic
theory, of the anaent term imago.
r This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the chiid at the infm
stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would
seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which
the I is preapitated in a primordial form, before it is objecrified in the
dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to
it, in the universal, its function as subject.
Tbis form would have to be called the Ideal-I,' if we wished to incorporate it into our usual register, in the sense that it will also be the
source of secondary identifications, under which tenn I would place the
functions of libidinal nonnahtion. But the important point is that this
form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a
fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual
atone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being (& dwenir)
of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical
syntheses by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own
reality.
The fact is that the total form of the body by which the subject antiapates in a mirage the maturation of his power is given to him only as
Gerrdr, that is to say, in an exteriority in which this form is certainly more
constituent than constituted, but in which it appears to him above all in
a contrasting size (un relief de smmre) that fixes it and in a symmetry that
inverts it, in contrast with the turbulent movements that the subject feels
are animating him. Thus, this Gesrdt - whose p r e p c y should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains
sarcely recognizable - by these two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes
the mental permanenceof theI,at the same time as it prefiguresits alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondenw that unite the
I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that

T h e mirror stage

dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation,

the world of his own making tends to find completion.
Indeed, for the imagos -whose veiled faces it is our privilege to see in
outline in our daily experience and in the penumbra of symbolic efficacityz
- the minor-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world,
ifwe go by the mirror disposition that the imago ofme's own do& presents
in hallucinations or dram, whether it concerns its individual features,
or even its infirmities, or its object-projections; or if we observe the role
of the mirror apparatus in the appearances of the &dZe, in which psychical
realities, however heterogeneous, are manifested
That a GLC&should be capable of formative effects in the organism
is attested by a piece of biological experimentation that is itself so alien
to the idea of psychical causality that it cannot bring itself to formulate
its results in these terms. It nevertheless recognizes that it is a necessary
condition for the maturation of the gonad of the female pigeon that it
should see another member of its species, of either sex; so suffiaent in
itself is this condition that the desired efiect may be obtained merely by
placing the individual within reach of the field of reflection of a mirror.
Similarly, in the case of the migratory locust, the transition within a
generation from the solitary to the gregarious form can be obtained by
exposing the individual, at a certain stage, to the exclusively visual action
of a similar image, provided it is animated by movements of a style suffiaently dose to that characteristic of the species. Such fdcts are inscribed
in an order of homeomorphic identifiation thatwould itself fallwithin the
larger question of the meaning of beauty as both formative and erogenic.
But the facts of mimicry are no less instructive when conceived as cases
of heteromorphic identification, in as much as they raise the problem of
the sigmfication of space for the living organism -psychological concepts
hardly seem less appropriate for shedding light on these mattem than
ridiculous attempts to reduce them to tbe supposedly supreme law of
adaptation. We have only to reall how Roger Caillois (who was then
very young, and still fresh from his breach with the sociological school
in which he was trained) illuminated the subject by using the term
'legendary pycharrhenia' to classify morphological mimicry as an obsession with space in its derealizing effect
I have myselfshown in the social dialectic that structures human knowledge as paranoiac3 why human knowledge has greater autonomy than
animal knowledge in relation to the field of force of desire, but also why
human knowledge is determined in that 'little reality' (ce pea de r6dit9.

c,,\\;>

T h e mirror
. . stage
which the Surrealists, in their restless way, saw as its limitation. These
dectiom lead me to recognize in the spatial raptation manifested in the
mirror-stage, even before the social dialectic, the dect in man of an
organic insufficiency in his natural reality - in so far as any meaning can
be given to the word 'nature'.
I am led, therefore, to regard the function of the mirror-stage as a
paaicular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation
between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the
I m w e l t and the Umwelt.
In man, however, this relation to nature is altered by a certain dehiscence at the heart of the organism, a primordial Discord betrayed by
the sighs of uneasiness and motor unco-ordination of the neo-natal
months. The objective notion of the anatomical incompleteness of the
pyramidal system and likewise the presence of certain humoral residues
of the maternal organism confirm the view I have formulated as the fdct
of a real spec;f;cPremanuity ofbirrh in man.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that this is a fact recognized as such by
embryologists, by the termfoetdrarion, which determines the prevalence
of the so-called superior apparatus of the n e w , and especially of the
cortex, which psycho-surgical operatiom lead us to regard as the intraorganic mirror.
This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively
projects the formation of the individual into history. The mirror stage is
a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to antidpation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of
spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a
fragmented body-image to a form of in totality that I sM1 call orthopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the amour of an alienating
identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire
mental development. Thus, to break out of the circle of theImnwelt into
the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.
This fragmented body - which term I have also introduced into our
system of theoretical refemces - usually manifests itself in dreams when
the movement of the analysis encounters a certain level of aggressive
disintegration in the individual. It then appears in the form of disjointed
limbs, or of those organs represented in exoscopy, growing wings and
taking up arms for intestinal perjecutions - the very same that the visionary Hieronymus Bosch has fixed, for all time, in painting, in their ascent

5 .

from the fifteenth century to the imaginary qetiith of modem man. But this
form is even tangibly revealed at the organic l&el,jn the lines of 'fragilization' that define the anatoiny of phantaed exhibited in the schizoid.and
spasmodic symptoms of hysteria.
Correlatively, the formation of the 7.
is symbolized in dreams by a
fortress, or a stadium - its.inner arena and enclosure, h o u n d e d by .
marshes and rubbish-tips,.dividiig it:into two opposed fields of,contest
where the subject flound&~
in, que$t bf the'lofty, remote inner castle
whose form (sometimes jwaposed in the.s+e scenario) symbolizes the , .~
id in a quite startling way.'Similarly, ~hfheinentsl.~lane,wefind
realized
the structures of fortifig ,works, the ,metaphor of which arises spon- . .
taqeously, as if issuing gio+ the:symptbis themselves, to designate the
mechanisms of obsessional neurosis.- invehibn, isplation, fedupliration,
cancellation and displackment;
But if we were to build qn these subjecti"e givens alone - however
us see ;
little we, free them fm& the conditioh of experience thatthem as partaking of the nature of a lin&tic technique -our theoretical
attempts would remain'exposed.to the charge of.projecting;themselves
into the unthinkable ofan absolute subject. This is why I have sought in
:
the pment hypothesis, e;rp&ded in a conjunctibnof objective' data, the'
. ' I ,
guiding grid for a method of ryndolic redurtwn.
It establishes in the defences of the ego a genetic order, in accor&nce
. .
with the wish formdated by Misi Ant+ Freud; in the G t '&t of her, .
,A"
great work, and siniates (as agaiiist a ' frequently'expressed,prejudice)
.P
hysterical repression and:its retums' at a more'archaic stage than o b - ,LL ,
sessional inversion and its i<olat&g.pmcesses, and the latter in turn'&. 4
'. .'
.i
preliminary to paranoic &=nation, which.dat&.from the deflection of the , .ib*
.
.,.
specular I into the social I. ; .
.
This moment in whicl, the mirror-stage cdfnes to & end iniugurates,
,
'by the identification with the imagogo'of the c o u n t e h q and thi dr+a.of . . .. . ,
primordial .jealousy'(so well bmu& out by .& &ool of Charlotte
Biihler in the phenomenon of hfantile crm+icm), the dialectic.thatwill
henceforthlink'the I to socially eworated situations.
It.is thismomcnt that decisively tips the wholk of human knbGledge
i:
,
&to mediatiiatiqi +rough &'desire of the,othei, .consustes its objects
i n &s&t eqqivalence by the.co-operation of others, and tums the I
i n t ~that a p p ~ t &.for .which every: inshctual- thrust constitutes a
danger, eveh though it-should &rrespond to a
maturatior) -.the
very normalization of this maturation being 'henceforth depeiden< in ;
. .
...
. .
.
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Ecrits:

A Selection

T h e mirror stage

man, on a cultural mediation as exemplified, in the cue of the sexual

represents the patent form of that h c t i o n , its effects will, for the most
object, by the Oedipus complex.
part, remain latent, so long as they are not illuminated by some light
In the light of this conception, the term primary narcissism, by which
&ed
on to the level of fatality, which is where the id manifests itself.
analytic doctrine designates the libidinal investment characteristic of that
We can thus understand the inertia characteristic of the formations of
moment, reveals in those who invented it the most profound awareness
the I, and 6nd & r e the most extensive definition of neurosis - just as the
of semantic latencies. But it also throws light on the dynamic opposition
optation of the subject by the situation gives us the most general formula
between this libido and the sexual libido, which the first analysts uied to
for madness, not only the madness that lies behind the walls of asylums,
define when they invoked destructive and, indeed, death instincts, in
but also the madness that deafens the world with itskund and
4
order to explain the evident connection between the narcissistic libido
The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling m the
and the alienating h c t i o n of the I, the aggressivity it releases in any
passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic sales, when
relation to the other, even in a relation involving the most Samaritan of
we calculate the d t of its threat to entire communities, provides us with
aid.
an indication of the deadening of the passions in soaety.
In fact, they were encountering that existential negativity whose
At this junction of nature and culture, so persistently examined by
reality is so vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of
modem anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of
being and nothingness.
imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.
But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only witbin the
For such a task, we place no trust in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare
limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness, which, as one of its premises,
the aggressivity that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the
that constitute the ego, the illusion of autolinks to the m~conn~smces
idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.
nomy to which it entrusts itself. This flight of fancy, for all that it draws,
In the recourse of subject to subject that we preserve, psychoanalysis
to an unusual extent, on borrowings from psychoanalytic experience,
may accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the 'Thou arr rhar', in
culminates in the pretention of providing an existential psychoanalysis.
which is revealed to him the cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in
At the culmination of the historical effon of a society to refuse to
our mere power as pmctitioners to bring him to that point where the
recognize that it has any function other than the utilitarian one, and in
real journey begins.
the anxiety of the individual confronting the 'wn~entrational'~
form of
the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort, existentialism must
be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that
have indeed resulted from it; a freedom that is never more authentic than
I. Thmughout this article I leave in i s
4 ' C o n c c n m ~ t i a ~ i r t ' ,an adjective
when it is witbin the walls of a prison; a demand for commitment, expresspeculiarity the translation I have adopted coined after World War II (this article
ing the impotence of a pure consciousness to master any situation; a
for Freud's I&d-Ich [i.e., 'je-idtal'], aas written in 1949) to describe the life of
without funher wmmenr, other than to the concentrarion-camp. In the hands of
voyeuristic-sadistic idealilation of the sexual relation; a personality that
ccrtiin witen it became, by extension,
say that I have nor maintained i t since.
realizes itself only in suicide; a consciousness of the other than can be
appliclble to many aspas of 'modem'
1. Cf. Claude fi-Suausr, Smuwd
satisfied only by Hegelian murder.
Andmp(ogy, Chapter X.
U e [Tr.].
3. Cf. 'Aggressivityin Psychoanalyis',
These propositions are opposed by all our experience, in so far as it
p. 180.
teaches us not to regard the ego as centred on t h e p e r c e p ~ n ~ o ~ c w ~ u ~ ~ x p. 8 and
syJrem, or as organized by the 'reality principle' - a principle that is the
expression of a scientific prejudice most hostile to the dialectic of knowledge. Our experience shows that we should start instead from the
fwcrion of m'connairsance that characterizes the ego in all its structures,
so markedly articulated by Miss Anna Freud. For, if the YerneLurng

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