First off, tomorrow is Christmas*, so a very Happy Christmas to you all! Here’s a reimagined “Twelve Days of Christmas” to reward you for bothering with me.
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Second, I need to have a working title prepared for my MA thesis in just over a month! There may be small amounts panic happening already… (Eep!)
In an effort to better prepare myself for that eventuality, I’ve been revisiting some thoughts on the Self and the Other. In a recent research essay I was working on, one author/psychoanalyst/theorist I really couldn’t seem to escape is Jacques Lacan.
For those unfamiliar with the name or the man, Lacan was a French theorist born in Paris (1901) to a Catholic family. He elected to study medicine and psychiatry, and eventually, he went on to work in psychiatric institutions. His doctoral thesis was on paranoid psychosis. His psychoanalytic studies caused him to become well renowned and widely disputed. He was even excommunicated out of the International Psychoanalytic Association and formed his own schools for analytics. He was a great admirer of Sigmund Freud as well, which shouldn’t be neglected, as Freud’s work greatly influenced him and his application of psychoanalysis.
One of his concepts which appears important to my idea of Self and Other is his Mirror Stage theory.
Lacan’s article “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I” (1936, 1949) has become a kind of post-structuralist motto. The essay presents the idea that human identity is “decentred.” His theory is born from the behavior of infants when they first become capable of recognizing their own mirror image. If you’ve spent any time around a baby at this age (6ish months to about 18 months old), you can attest to the baby’s excitement and near fascination with seeing itself. To Lacan, this experience is a testimony of how recognizing its mirror image gives the infant its first affirmation of itself as a “unified and separate individual.” Before this, Lacan sees the infant as pieces of a body not fully put together; it is unable to determine a Self (I) or an Other. (Sharpe)
Essentially, he implies that the Self, the I, isn’t organic. It’s wholly an Other, because we have to rely on outside input to form the idea of Self. Odd, right?
(This is probably the part where Saussure rolls his eyes and waits for the rest of us to catch up.
Also, if you’re experiencing confusion, I would like to say that trying listen to Lacan lecture is scarcely less confusing. If you’re interested in listening to a lecture of his, I’ve embedded a YouTube video below, which is an hour long. May the odds be ever in your favour, because I did not last even ten minutes.)
Back to business…
In his Mirror Stage theory, Lacan cites language as part of his evidence for the Self as Other. He uses pronouns that allow us to refer to ourselves in the third person as indicators that identity or ego is based on objects. It is “an artificial projection of subjective unity modelled on the visual images of objects and others that the individual confronts in the world” (Sharpe).
I’m certainly not equipped to take apart Lacan’s work or to really affirm it, but I will say that, at least in part, his mirror image theory makes sense to me.
Lacan’s use of language calls to mind Saussure. When thinking of Saussure, I very willingly concede that language is a social fact and it is changing all the time. Saussure teaches that language is made up of a set of “signs,” and each sign is made of the union between a signifier and a signified. Saussure further divides language to distinguish langue (language as a system) from parole (an individaul’s speech).
So, depending on parole and the sign used, someone could, for example, call the tall objects that grow outside and have leaves, trunks, and roots “cars,” and it would mean the same thing to them as it does to us when we say “trees.”
Applying that to identity and Self, if my Self is made of what I understand it to be then that is an ever changing image. Its meaning is split between the Self given (similar to Saussure’s langue) and the Self I emphasize (parole). My fragmented lived bodily experience and ideal image of identity/ego can be subsumed in Others or embodied in specular images of Self.
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Thus, just as language is suspect, so is the Self. Subject. I. Me (a name, I call myself. Fa, a long, long way to run! …Forgive me).
And although Subjects desire stability and order for identity, our identities are fundamentally divided. I would argue that that divide becomes a resting place where each Subject’s desire for alterity resides (Lacan 73). And it is for individual alterity that we create Others.
How’s that for a headache on Christmas Eve?
*I’d just like to point out that I didn’t forget what day Christmas is. I posted this entry from New Mexico, where it was Christmas Eve; my blog is still stuck in Ireland’s timezone, where it was already Christmas.
Works Cited:
Lacan, Jaques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. John Forrester. Norton, 1991.
Sharpe, Matthew. “Jacques Lacan (1901—1981).” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/lacweb/
Others N' Me: Literary Research 
