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Introduction
Published in Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, Cancer and Creativity, 2018
Esther Dreifuss-Kattan, Teresa O’Rourke
Lacan argued that selfhood can only be accomplished with an outside object, be it the mother, the father or the mirror. He recognized the unconscious as being structured like a language and emphasized the symbolic structural signifier that emerges from our dynamic unconscious. He suggested that the visual of the Imaginary is brought forth by the early Mirror Stage of the infant. The mirror is first provided by parents through the infant’s body which looks at and touches the mother/father and thus cultivates a body ego. The ‘real’ mirror helps to differentiate the image of the body from the image of the self. The infant recognizes in the mirror that her body is a bound and organized unit, a Gestalt of sorts that is really an illusion, but that fosters a desire for independence, in spite of present lack of skills, coordination and formation of boundaries (Schwab, 1994).
The Inanimate Body Speaks
Published in Nathan J. Timpano, Constructing the Viennese Modern Body, 2017
The puppeteer established his second marionette company in Vienna in 1911. Unlike his earlier theater in Prague, which was a public venue that utilized traditional Germanic marionettes for conventional puppet plays, the Viennese company was a private affair, held in Teschner’s home, and presented select audiences (including Klimt and Alfred Roller) with the artist’s modern, Europeanized versions of wayang theater.61 Known as Der goldener Schrein (Golden Shrine, Figure 5.4) and the Figurenspiegel (Figure Mirror, Figure 5.5), Teschner’s puppet stages showcased golek-like puppets controlled by rods (or Stäbe in German) that were fitted with additional internal strings that Teschner used to manipulate their joints and limbs more easily. Unlike the stage for the Golden Shrine, which Teschner designed as a miniature proscenium theater, the Figurenspiegel was fitted with a muslin sheet hung within a large convex glass lens that protruded from the stage into the viewer’s space. Rather than simply operating his puppets from behind a cotton sheet, as in a traditional wayang theater, Teschner instead separated his figures from their spectators by operating them from behind (or within) the convex glass apparatus.62 The invention of the “mirror” stage was important, since it allowed Teschner to experiment with theatrical lighting and cinematic illusions, most notably by illuminating single puppets with spotlights that could then fade in or out to reveal other figures in contrasting perspectives or positions.
Encounters of Nothingness
Published in Usva Seregina, Astrid Van den Bossche, Art-Based Research in the Context of a Global Pandemic, 2023
Revisiting Freud (1919), the double's primary function is insurance against destruction of the ego, which is associated with the moment of transition from primary narcissism to the broader realm of object relations. The doubling gains its uncanny effect due to, and only after, such transition. The mirror stage was proposed by Lacan (1949) as a turning point in the transition from primary narcissism to the state of being a “human subject” (Lacan 1949, 75–81). According to Lacan (1949), the mirror stage establishes a relationship between an organism and its reality – between innwelt and umwelt (78). The ego that is born or confirmed at this “mirror stage” has two significant dimensions: it is illusory, and its protective function comes at a cost. The visually perceived reflection of the body in the mirror stage functions as the placeholder for the imagined self: “the strange folly that estranges one's own self from one's self itself, which makes the personality able to cling to itself” (Peters 1991, 61). The image in the mirror offers the comfort of an identity, but it is an illusion, it is simultaneously “the origin of and the double” of the ego, and thus a source of terror, alienation, and paranoia because it provides a glimpse into the uncanny spectre of non-being (Rahimi 2013). The double reverses from having an initial assurance of immortality to becoming an image of death (Freud 1919, 235) – the horror of substitution. The reflected image then is more constitutive than constituted. Constitutive of the “I” and integral to an illusionary sense of identity. Anything that threatens the integrity of that illusionary image, or its uniqueness, will bring horror, disintegration, and an annihilation of self. The disruption to the illusionary coherences of self that stitches an individual's inner experience (innwelt) to the outside world (umwelt) will be terrifying in the uncanny sense of terror because it reveals the “lie” we original told ourselves regarding the “sameness” of that (constitutive) image and the “I.”
Chemsex: Reintroducing Sexuality in the Pleasure and Pain of the Infans
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022
The origin of sexuality is traumatic for the human subject, as it emerges from the encounter between physical and psychic processes on the one hand, and the world and its mandates on the other (McDougall, 1996). In other words, sexuality is constructed when the subject, while being dependent on their environment, collides with that environment’s otherness, the Other, represented primarily by the parent who performs the maternal function. The early care that this parent provides brings about both pleasure and unpleasure, due to the parent alternating between being present and absent, and the consequent arousal that this causes to the subject. Combined with the subject’s aforementioned dependence, this leads to the question of the Other’s desire (Lacan, 1966), the attempts to answer that question, and the meaning consequently given to the self and the world. The Other responds to the needs of the subject, who is in the infans state (Aulagnier, 1975), that is, outside of language, where experience comprises the sum total of the sensorium of fragmented somatic zones, which are predecessors of the erogenous zones. Here, an undifferentiated sensory pleasure/pain experience prevails, as Aulagnier (1975) describes. The Other’s response gives meaning to the experience through the language, signifiers, and representations that will be used to metabolize that experience. Furthermore, the Other shall, through their own gaze, provide an image for the subject to identify with, and thereby to unify the fragmented infans body, as Lacan (1966) describes in the mirror stage.
A Phantom Phallus?
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2020
Furthermore, as the psychoanalyst Gérard Pommier (2010) proposes, the recent progress in brain research can help us overcome a false antagonism, arguing that the empirical evidence of neuroscience proves psychoanalysis right. One point in case would be the use of mirrors to alleviate pain and treat paralysis in amputees and what they reveal about images (mirror neurons) in brain functioning and how the use of mirrors as medicine overlaps with Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage (2006), the formative stage when children recognize their own image in a mirror, a defining moment in the origins of subjectivity. During that stage, there is no sharp separation between the linguistic and the corporeal. The infant and main-caretaker interaction is both corporeal and linguistic: cooing, babbling, wiggling, stroking, and caressing, all happening together, wiring and rewiring the brain. This decisive turning point in the infant’s ego formation via identification with the mirror image not only points to the primal role of the image in the formation of subjectivity, but gives indications that the body’s gendered materiality is mediated by an internalized body image creating a map of sensory perceptions, a cartography of erogenous zones, overdetermined by language and culture.
Affective Ankylosis and the Body in Fanon and Capécia
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2018
For Lacan, the mirror stage orients the infant’s chaotic assemblage of erogenous surfaces toward a projected image of synthesis in a body it anticipates assuming (Lacan, 2006a). That this body is anticipated indicates that its image is what Lacan, in formalizing a notion originally from Freud, calls an ideal ego, an imago or model of others; these are “not the product of purely personal experience but universal prototypes which may be actualized in anyone’s psyche” (Evans, 1996, p. 85). Thus the counterpart to the speculative body the mirror stages is a corps morcelé or the “shattered body” of the infantile ego, which emerges as a disintegrated entity out of its discordance with the prototype that stands as the “statue onto which man projects himself” (Lacan, 2006a, p. 76).