“The psychologist Henri Wallon observed that both humans and chimpanzees seem to recognize their own reflections around six months of age. In 1931 he published a paper in which he argued that mirrors aid in the development of a child’s self-conception.
Five years later, Jacques Lacan presented his development of this idea at the Fourteenth Annual Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad. He called it le stade du miroir, the mirror stage. Before it reaches the mirror stage, the infant is simply a conduit for its own experience. (The Lacanian baby is always male, adding yet another layer of distance for the female reader considering her self-conception, though I will close it here.) Self-conception is piecemeal—here is a foot, here a hand—but perhaps closer to what Lacan would later call the Real. There is no I. Experience is not mediated by signification or perception. Then the baby sees herself in the mirror. The image of her own body disturbs and then delights her as she identifies with it. The self becomes unified and objectified simultaneously, and the uneasy grasping for a fixed subject begins The baby cannot tell the difference between the mirror self and the actual self. It is the first story she tells herself about herself: that is me. It is the beginning of self-alienation.”
- Girlhood, Melissa Febos
