Tracing Hegel’s Spirit in Lacan’s Mirror Stage
That Freud taxonomized and popularized the unconscious mind, we already know. He postulates that our minds are divided into the ego, the super-ego, and the id. There is one facet that Freud overlooks, however: the origin. From where does consciousness emerge? Does it develop? What event, if one exists, brings us into ourselves? Jacques Lacan, in an attempt to expand and complete Freud’s project, offers a Hegelian solution — the other.[1]
In his Mirror Stage, Lacan posits that when a child first sees itself in the mirror, its drives unite to form a gestalt. This unification actualizes the faculty of memory, and can be considered when the subject becomes conscious: I am there. This should not, however, be interpreted as a reformulation of Descartes’ cogito. Indeed, both subjects are certain about two different things. The Cartesian subject is certain that it watches itself. Its mind can reflect on its actions. The Lacanian I, as he puts it, is certain that it is being watched. After realizing that its image is significant, the subject
[…] playfully experiences the relationship between the movements made in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it duplicates. (Ecrits, 75).
When the subject realizes that the reflection in the mirror moves in accordance with its own movement, the subject forms an identity. This revelation is twofold. First, the subject acknowledges itself and its movements, then it realizes that others can watch it move. The realization reveals itself to be an identification; the subject identifies with and, in turn, assumes the image.
This act is alienating and reveals a series of untruths. The subject first enters
[…] the symbolic matrix in which the Iis precipitated in primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of information with the other, and before language restores it (Ecrits, 76).
In typical Lacanian fashion, he condenses a number of key points into a concise, obtuse sentence. However, the importance of this description could not be understated in understanding the necessity of this process. This is the child’s first experience with their ego. The baby, realizing it controls the will of the mirrored image identifies with the image. However, because the baby is undeveloped physically compared to their mental capacity for understanding, the imago becomes the “ideal-ego” or “ideal-I” toward which the baby strives for its entire existence. This subjectivity allows the baby to enter the symbolic matrix, or the realm of untruths and language. Language, others, and the Other will end up ordering the baby back where their subjectivity belongs in society. Moreover, they behave similarly: they impose themselves on us. We did not choose to be in society, and we certainly did not choose our own language; these two features are deeply intertwined. We exist in the world of the Other filled with others.[2]This is what Lacan means when he talks about the baby being “objectified in the dialectic of information with the other” (Ecrits, 76). Our subjectivity precedes our objectifying ordering, and will likely remain after we are gone. We speak now of Lacan despite his death; our language allows us to preserve his subjectivity in a meaningful capacity. This is what Lacan means about the subject being in the world of the Other — there are a depressing series of operations that are beyond our control which order us. When we see ourselves in the mirror, we recognize the alienation entailed from existence.
But, in a way, the subject is not the object in the mirror. The object in the mirror is detached from the subject. No matter how much the subject wants the object to conform to its actions, the object will still be mirrored. Moreover, there is something distant, disconnected about the mirrored form.[3]It is separate from the subject itself. The declaration “That is me” ushers in a separation between the figures. We acknowledge the unreality, and we acknowledge ourselves placed within it.
Lacan’s — and thereby, Freud’s — debt to Hegel[4]could not be understated. In the notoriously dense Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel tells a story of a slave overcoming their master. When describing self-consciousness, Hegel says it
[…] exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged (PoS, 111).
Before we assess this claim, we ought to take a step back and widen the lens through which we read Hegel. Hegel wants to describe the history of human consciousness and its development. This is his dialectic. So, the story goes that consciousness, before encountering another consciousness, dominated objects to sustain itself. It dominated things incapable of noticing it: food, drinks, etc. This relationship can be aptly summarized as a subject-thing relationship, whereby the subject may instantly dominate the thing and use the thing for itself. All is fine and well, until consciousness encounters another consciousness. This is the second stage of consciousness. Each consciousness brings the mindset of domination to the other — when they meet, they apply this mindset. In the aforementioned quote, two claims anachronistically accord with Lacan’s elucidation: that self-consciousness exists in and for itself. We can read this as self-consciousness objectifying itself (the “in” itself) and existing as a subject (the “for” itself).
This relationship is twofold. Each self-consciousness recognizes the other, while being certain of its own subjectivity by knowing it is not the object which is designates outside itself. As Hegel puts it: “[self-consciousness] has come out of itself” (PoS, 111). But, we have already presupposed a necessary condition for this superseding. Self-consciousness must be certain it precedes that which it supersedes “to become certain of itselfas the essential being” (PoS, 111). It is through negation that the subject, the primary self-consciousness becomes certain of its objectifying the other self-consciousness; for it recognizes that it is not that which it encounters.
To this point we have only described the conditions of self-consciousness encountering another self-consciousness. What occurs thereafter is a struggle between the two. “Each seeks the death of the other” as they want to dominate the other, like they are accustomed to doing (PoS, 113). What determines the winner, then? Who emerges victorious and thus the dominator of the other? Hegel writes
[…] it is only though staking one’s life that freedom is won; only thus is it proved that for self-consciousness, its essential being is not [just] being, not the immediateform in which it appears […] but rather that there is nothing present in it which could not be regarded as a vanishing moment, that is only pure being-for-self (PoS, 114).
The master risks their own life to dominate the slave; conversely, the slave confronts their own mortality and death and decides to forgo struggling. The slave has confronted the other, which entails death. The master, on the other hand, has not truly faced their own mortality — they have never gone further than dominating the slave and, as Hegel puts it, being-for-self. The slave, however, has faced death and given up in the face of it. Hegel writes that “self-consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self-consciousness” (PoS, 115). To whom does this apply? It must apply to the slave, who recognizes that being dominated is preferable to being dead; the master never confronts this reality. In this sense, the slave has a more realconsciousness; certainly, their consciousness is more complex as they understand the significance of perishing.
Two questions are left to address in Hegel’s work before referring back to Lacan. Firstly, why does the master keep the slave alive? Secondly, what does the domination of master to slave entail? To address the former, we can hypothesize that the master wants to be noticed and desired. If the master kills the slave, their wish will not be fulfilled. As for the latter, the will of the master becomes the will of the slave. The slave provides for the master; the master controls the labor of the slave. The master exists to will the slave.
After exhaustively explaining the complexities of the master/slave dialectic, we may finally see how it accords with Lacan’s mirror stage. Immediately we are presented with an interesting dilemma. Is the child the master, the slave, or the undeveloped self-consciousness prior to encountering itself in the mirror? Conventional wisdom might posit “undeveloped self-consciousness,” but that would ignore Freud’s influence on Lacan. I submit that, in accordance with Freud’s description of the child, the child pre-mirror stage is the master. In his On Dreams, Freud recounts a story of a child, who when hungry, would just imagine a bowl of cherries to nourish himself. This, he claims, is not uncommon among infants. When describing the unconscious workings of children, Freud asserts that they
[…] fulfilled wishes which were active during the day but had remained unfulfilled. The dreams were simple and undisguised wish-fulfillments(OD, 150).
Infants have a more powerful unconscious which elicits results. Adults, on the other hand, do not spend as much time wishing, as they know the bitter reality of how futile these wishes are. Thus, the infant may wish anything into actuality, while the adult recognizes the uselessness of that enterprise.[5]The master controls the will of the slave; all the master needs to do is close their eyes and the slave actualizes their desires. I think that the master is a more apt characterization of the infant pre-mirror stage for this reason. Further, we have outlined the complexity of the two self-consciousnesses. The consciousness of the infant pre-mirror stage is not nearly as complex as their consciousness following the formation of the imago. Before, they are an assemblage of fragmented drives; after, they are one. For these reasons, we ought to consider the mirror stage as paradoxically regressive and yet progressive: it advances the self-consciousness into a new, complex state; but it also reduces the power of the infant. To this point, I think we may conclude that the infant regresses from the master to the slave after observing itself in the mirror.
In an interesting substitute, Lacan replaces the realization of one’s mortality with the realization of one’s being observed. The slave realizes that they are mortal in the face of death; the infant realizes they are an object in the gaze of others in the face of their reflection. In the context of the mirror stage, this makes sense: the infant does not face their own death. Instead, their conclusions are contextualized within the scopic field. This is, in effect, the context in which the infant finds themself. There is no grand struggle. Instead, the infant (the subject) realizes it exists when it acknowledges others can view it (an objectification). This harkens back to how Hegel described self-consciousness existing forand in itself.
Finally, there is the question of the master in the mirror stage. Freud might posit that the super-ego becomes the master, the guiding consciousness. However, could the Other not be the master? Is it not the Other who orders the subject? Is it not the Other who gave the subject the very tools with which to express itself? Lacan himself famously states that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (Seminar XI, 235). Hegel might turn Lacan’s system on itself by positing that the master keeps the slave alive to receive its recognition; killing it would not accomplish its goal. The master (man) desires the desire of the slave (the Other). Lacan would disagree. Is it not the slave who would like to supersede their master? To become the master themself? Perhaps, replies Hegel, but slave would not risk its life to supersede the master; and the master would sooner be dead than be a slave. To which Lacan would invoke the Oedipus complex, in slightly different terms. Instead of the father representing the father in the classical Freudian sense, which is to say the figure which precludes the baby from having the mother’s breast, the father supersedes that to become the law. The world of the Other is comprised of the actions of the other(s), including the establishment of laws and order. Then, the subject must have the desire of the Other, which is the law. Hegel agrees that the will of the master is also the will of the subject, but there are some contradictory elements to this puzzle. How could the slave have the desire of the Other if the slave will never overcome its fear of death? The master’s consciousness is not as complex as the slave’s consciousness. Thus, the key to solving this puzzle is knowing who to denote as “the Other.” But this denotation could contradict the master and the slave, who, until this point, have been in uncontroversial positions following both elucidations.
Who, then, is the Other? Whose desire do we have?
[1]The Other is split in Lacan’s work. There is the little other (le petit autre) and the big Other (le grand Autre). The little other can be seen in the Mirror Stage — the ego reflects itself and sees other versions of itself (others in the world). The big Other, on the other hand, represents a larger, more dominating Otherness — most prominently, the law and language itself. This paper will employ both terms.
[2]The fact that we inherit a language which we use to express ourselves can be deeply traumatic, per Lacan. We can never truly signify what we wish to signify: our aspirations, fantasies, wishes. In sum: our desires. Our language seems to make us perpetually lacking. Interestingly enough, Lacan noticed how sometimes signifiers “slipped” out of his patients’ mouths, which is to say that he noticed how deeply engrained the signifier is in our unconscious.
[3]Lacan eventually attributes this to the gaze. The gaze is not biological; instead, it is characteristic of the scopic drive, which allows us to recognize that if we watch ourselves, others can watch us as well. The gaze is what ushers the subject into the symbolic order, making it transcend mundane materialism. While Freud did not talk extensively about the scopic field, there is mention in of it in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. the Oedipus complex relies on the scopic field to germinate resentment for the father, Freud posits that “seeing […] is ultimately derived from touching” (TETS, 251). Freud saw scopophilia as fueling “sexual curiosity” which arouses libidinal energy (TETS, 251). That people look at covered sexual objects is not a perversion itself; curiosity never submits. However, it becomes a perversion when the gaze is focused on sexual organs or when people derive their pleasure from it (i.e., voyeurs). Moreover, in the case of voyeurs specifically, they tend to supplant their sexual copulation with the act of looking. This is all to say that the scopic field is somewhat present in Freudian metapsychology, but not as brazenly as in Lacan’s.
[4]One must wonder if what Freud would have thought if he read the philosophy of Hegel. Although there are some parallels between the development of the Oedipus complex and the superseding of self-conscious over another (the father being the master and the child being the slave), it is not likely that Freud had Hegel in mind.
[5]This also marks the dominance of the reality principle over the pleasure principle, another landmark moment in the development of the child. The pleasure principle is the driving force that operates at the basis of every desire we have; it seeks to release tension. The reality principle, however, is the result of the bitter truth of wish-hallucination. It serves to safeguard the pleasure principle by learning to abide by “no”; it will also postpone pleasure.
Sources
Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, and Peter Gay. The Freud Reader. Norton, 1999.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel’s Phenomenology Of Spirit. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar Of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts Of Psychoanalysis (Vol. Book XI). Norton, 1998.
— –, Ecrits. WW Norton & Co, 2007.
About the author: Jack is currently pursuing degrees in Philosophy and Economics. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Fan.
