The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the / as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience

2001 ◽  
pp. 16-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham

This chapter concentrates on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where the Hegelian theme of mutual recognition as the origin of man’s self-consciousness and potential freedom is tested against the complex circumstances of colonialism. Fanon’s idea that the ‘Negro slave’ is recognized by the ‘White Master’ in a situation that is ‘without conflict’ suggests a possibly double, or self-resistant, meaning: the colonial situation after slavery ushers in something like a phony war; but also colonialism’s historical interpretation is not exhausted by the Hegelian master-slave logic. Through this double possibility of the colonial, one wonders whether after Hegel it is historical interpretation or the historical process itself that has gone awry. Such dynamic tensions suggest an impossibly divided dialectics at work throughout Fanon’s corpus. The section of Fanon’s ‘The Negro and Recognition’ devoted to a critique of Adler points to an earlier footnote in Black Skin, White Masks which offers a lengthy engagement with Lacan, allowing us to reread the politics of racial difference into the scene of the Lacanian mirror-stage. Here, the resistant ‘other’ of psychoanalysis unlocks the possibility of another ‘politics’ capable of addressing, by better recognising, some of its most significant impasses.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-163
Author(s):  
Shiloh Whitney

Abstract While Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception relies on the descriptive register of the body proper, his Sorbonne lectures on child psychology investigate the genesis of the experience of a body as one’s own. I demonstrate the uniqueness of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the narcissistic affect and sociality involved in this developmental process, distinguishing his account vis-à-vis Wallon’s and Lacan’s studies of the mirror stage. I conclude that in Merleau-Ponty’s account, (1) the experience of the body proper is not singular, but encompasses a range of phenomenological variation; and (2) the genesis of the body proper is not confined to the mirror stage. The production of bodily boundaries is an ongoing process identified not only with its advent in childhood, but also with adult emotional life. The boundaries between inner and outer domains of perception are not merely discovered, but must be negotiated and cultivated in the intercorporeal affective dramas of adult life.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Y. Fong

Uses Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage as a point of departure for developing a new theory of aggressivity.


Author(s):  
Lorna Ann Moore

This chapter discusses the one-to-one interactions between participants in the video performance In[bodi]mental. It presents personal accounts of users' body swapping experiences through real-time Head Mounted Display systems. These inter-corporeal encounters are articulated through the lens of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his work on the “Mirror Stage” (1977), phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968) and his writings on the Chiasm, and anthropologist Rane Willerslev's (2007) research on mimesis. The study of these positions provides new insights into the blurred relationship between the corporeal Self and the digital Other. The way the material body is stretched across these divisions highlights the way digital media is the catalyst in this in[bodied] experience of be[ing] in the world. The purpose of this chapter is to challenge the relationship between the body and video performance to appreciate the impact digital media has on one's perception of a single bounded self and how two selves become an inter-corporeal experience shared through the technology.


2005 ◽  
pp. 120-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Lagache

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