The Mirror Stage: I, I, I...

The Mirror Stage:

The primordial perception of the "I."  At around 6 months of age the child recognizes its own image in the mirror.  However, there is a disconnect between the child's sense of itself and the image of the uncoordinated, undeveloped image in the mirror; the fragmented body.

The imagos:

An unconscious, idealized mental image of someone, especially a parent, that influences a person's behavior.  The child in this undeveloped state identifies the parent (imagos) as the ideal human, causing feelings of uneasiness about their own place in the order of things.  Lacan says the relationship between the mirror stage and the imagos serves the function of establishing a relationship between the organism and its reality.

The Ego:

Lacan says it best, "This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history.  The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of fantasies that extends from the fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopedic  - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity (the ego), which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. 

 

 So really, it's not your parents' fault, its yours...