Mirror Stage

The mirror stage is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Philosopher Raymond Tallis describes the mirror stage as "the cornerstone of Lacan’s oeuvre." Lacan's mirror stage is based on his belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside of himself) from the age of about six months. Later research showed that, although children are fascinated with images of themselves and others in mirrors from about that age, they do not begin to recognize that the images in the mirror are reflections of their own bodies until the age of about 15 to 18 months.

Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months, as outlined in his first and only official contribution to larger psychoanalytic theory at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of "Imaginary order". This evolution in Lacan's thinking becomes clear in his later essay titled "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire."