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Norbert Wiley, University of Illinois

The Infant’s Smile of Self-Recognition: Lacan’s Mirror Stage or Pragmatism’s Dialogical Self*

Lacan has presented us with a provocative theory of the self. In this paper I will try to get at his core arguments, paying special attention to the weak spots. His idea that humans go through a “mirror stage,” in which, upon self-recognition in the mirror, the child identifies erroneously with the mirror reflection and not with the person being reflected, has been criticized. Merleau-Ponty, for example, thinks the infant can figure out the reflexive process of the mirror by common sense, and can identify, correctly, with the person being reflected. i.e. him or her self. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 129) Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation also agrees with pragmatists’ dialogical self theory. Footnote 1. But Lacan thought he needed the “mis-recognition” idea to explain some other developmental experiences, especially what he thinks is a tendency for humans to become paranoid under stress. So Lacan thought we mis-identify with the glassy reflection in the mirror and Merleau Ponty thought we identify, correctly, with our actual bodies and selves. Lacan’s reflection and reflectee

2are distinct entities. Merleau Ponty’s reflection and reflectee are the same.

*Forthcoming, Micro Social Theory Lacan draws on his mirror stage to build his theory of gender -- which, for that reason, can also be claimed to be faulty. By now there are many criticisms of Lacan, (Chomsky referred to him as a “charlatan”) but the one I will make will be singular in being based on the pragmatists, George Herbert Mead and Charles Sanders Peirce. I will draw out a pragmatist interpretation of self -recognition in the mirror to show how Lacan misunderstood this experience. I should add that, even though Lacan’s theory is based on a mirror-based fallacy, many of his ideas are original and useful in themselves. Freud too had a questionable starting point -- the oedipal complex.

Lacan thought the jubilation at the mirror was based on the infant’s first perception of his or her body, previously, he says, seen as “bits and pieces,” but now as a unified totality. Lacan misunderstood the infant’s excitement. This jubilation is actually based on the infant’s discovery of the self, not the body. In this discovery the infant has also discovered the semiotic energy (or “mana”) which propels the self.

The Mirror Stage

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Lacan appears to be working with four developmental stages: (1) "bits and pieces," (2) the mirror stage, (3) the oedipal transition and (4) the post-oedipal, symbolic stage, which comprises the remainder of life. The mirror stage (Lacan, 2006, pp. 75-81) is his famous innovation and modification of Freud. Freud did include a sub-stage of primary narcissism, which is the germ of Lacan's mirror stage, but Lacan's expansion and additions produce a major break with Freud.

Lacan's dissertation (Lacan, 1932) on paranoia already showed him working with a bi-polar, loosely-coupled ego, capable of splitting apart and working against itself under stress. Part of the paranoid's ego has been "projected" onto others, and it is now facing the remaining part as a persecuting enemy. Lacan seems to have found the notion of the split-off and wandering segment of the ego useful in clinical work, giving a more vivid picture of how the defense mechanisms work, and, in particular, how we can lose control of them.

During the 1920s the early French psychoanalysts were offering a novel explanation of seemingly unmotivated murders, several highly publicized cases of which were on the public mind. These psychoanalysts were suggesting that the murders were based on unconscious guilt, the need for self-

4punishment, and in particular the paranoid mechanism as the explanation (Dean, 1986). Their explanation can be seen as a repairing of the collective consciousness, not through Durkheim’s ritual punishment, but through the finding of psychosis and what might be called the medicalization of the ritual process.

Lacan's dissertation attempted to explain one of these cases: a woman's paranoid fixation with and (unsuccessful) knife attack on one of the great French actresses of the time. Lacan's use of the loosely-coupled ego to explain this attack was quite influential. What Lacan needed, however, was a theory of how the dualization or split in the ego originated in the first place. In other words he was led to deduce the mirror stage to explain an otherwise inexplicable causal sequence. The mirror experience, as Lacan interpreted it, explained the paranoia. This deduction, as I will point out, was a “stretch” and it gave Lacan a logically reckless approach to the infant’s mirror experience.

In 1936 Lacan first presented his mirror stage paper, which was intended to supply the needed theory. Unfortunately Lacan chose to suppress that early version of the paper, and we have only the 1949 version, which appears in English in the 2006 Ecrit collection (also see Lacan, 1953). Thus we first encounter the idea, not at the innocence of its birth, but thirteen years, and doubtless many second

5thoughts, later. Still, it is the latter version on which Lacan's mature system rests.

Concerning Lacan's interpretation of the mirror stage, his empirical base is not made clear. He refers loosely to James Mark Baldwin, Charlotte Buhler and Wolfgang Kohler, none of whom did very systematic mirror research. More importantly he used Wallon’s mirror research, which included the self-idealization (Lacan calls it a “misconnaisance”) with the mirror reflection (Wallon, 1933).

Both Wallon and Lacan thought the visual image of the child in the mirror looked better than the child thought he or she looked. Earlier the child had only visual “bits and pieces” and lacked a head. Now, with self-recognition, the child views a more developed, integrated image of itself. This superiority, as these thinkers saw it, causes the child to identify with the image, not as a reflection of what he or she actually looked like but as an ideal reflection of what the child would prefer to look like.

This interpretation, I will argue, is completely incorrect. It is the smile and jubilation that threw Lacan off. Without question the infant is now delighted, but it is not because it has discovered it’s (normal) body. That is certainly nice, but it’s much more profound and gripping that the infant has discovered it’s self, it’s dialecticity, it symbolicity. All

6humans, including the infant, as Peirce explained, are symbols (Peirce, 1934, para 5.313, pp. 188-189). More precisely they are triadic symbols (sign, object, referent), of a dialogical nature.

Later the infant will get somewhat similar jubilation as it learns to swim or to ride a bicycle. But the self-discovery jubilation is far greater than the ones that will come later. The discovery of internal symbolicity is the movement into meaning. The child has entered the sea of culture. Now we are, in a way, God-like in how our minds can see into realities. The person’s inherent symbolicity is the lens through which we can see all the other symbols in the world. These others enter our consciousness through this avenue -- our semiotic “eyes”. But I am now getting ahead of myself, and I must get back to building the argument.

In considering the self-recognizing infant, Lacan makes a relatively free-floating inference concerning what goes on inside the infant's self at that time. He sees the child's ego as differentiating and dualizing, not by some internal process, as I will have it, but by a kind of addition or lamination from without. After giving Lacan's interpretation I will formally present my counter-interpretation.

Lacan does not treat the "bits and pieces" stage, which precedes the mirror stage, in great detail, though this stage

7primarily concerns the image of one's own body, i.e. the body ego. The infant has not yet seen his or her own body as a whole or gestalt. Instead there are the parts you can see, doubtless in some disarray, from the shoulder's down, and the parts you cannot see, but can feel and hear, those of the head. In addition there may be parts from other people's bodies, particularly that of the close caretaker, still vaguely mixed in with one's own. The first self recognition in the mirror, especially if it’s a full-length mirror, will show you what you actually look like as a whole, and will also clear up any lingering doubts about where your body ends and those of others begin. Later I will argue that the more important bits and pieces of this stage are those of the mind, i.e. of the self's internal and invisible structure. But for Lacan's argument, the earliest stage is that of a fragmented body.

Two problems with Lacan's account might be mentioned at this time. For one, experience with a mirror looks like a relatively minor thing in a child's life, and mirrors have not always existed anyway. Can a universal stage of human development be based on this specialized an experience? In defense of Lacan, he intends the mirror idea to apply to a variety of reflective devices. As he puts it, "the idea of the mirror should be understood as an object which reflects -- not just the visible, but also what is heard, touched and willed by the child” (quoted in Rose, 1982, p. 30). In fact, however, Lacan deals primarily with the visual mirror and not with these

8wider and metaphorical mirroring processes. I too will deal primarily with the visual mirror. I do not regard the mirror stage as a major, universal human experience, although self-awareness or reflexivity, however it may be obtained, is perhaps the defining feature of the self.

A more serious problem is that Lacan underplays the purely sensory-motor or "enactive" (Bruner, 1973, pp. 316 ff.) unity that the infant's body has at this stage, from six to eighteen months. The visual or, in Bruner's terminology, “iconic" representation of the body may be in bits and pieces, but the purely motoric or kinesthetic representation would be rather organized by this age. The mirror experience adds another mode of unity to a pre-existing one, but it does not give organization to complete chaos.

In Lacan's mirror stage paper, however, he begins by constructing his basic interpretation, centering it largely on how he chooses to understand the child's smile and jubilation that comes with self-recognition. The smile, for Lacan, celebrates an enormous victory. For the child not only looks much better than it thought it did. Not only is there a unified, total body, far superior to the (visual) bits and pieces. In addition this body is, in Lacan’s view, physically superior in motor skills to what the child felt itself to have. As Lacan puts it:

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This event can take place . . . from the age of six monthson. Its repetition has often given me pause to reflect uponthe striking spectacle of a nursling in front of a mirror whohas not yet mastered walking, or even standing, but who—though held tightly by some prop, human or artificial –--overcomes, in a flutter of jubilant activity, the constraintof his prop in order to adopt a slightly leaning-forward position and take in an instantaneous view of the imagein order to fix it in his mind (2006, pp. 75-76

The child at this moment of self-discovery is thus said to experience a kind of motoric upgrade in which, losing consciousness of its body, it gains a temporarily more effective body. Lacan gives no evidence whatsoever of this motoric upgrade, and the mirror researchers in psychology have never verified his claim. In the quotation from Lacan, a child who cannot yet stand, does stand, so great is the (alleged) power of the mind at this moment. The child is identifying, in the psychoanalytic sense (2006, p. 76) with the mirror image.

This image seems to have an exterior, outside quality, which makes the identification, in Lacan's view, quite clearly

10with an "other," and not with the infant’s self. This other, the mirror image, is not just a duplication of the body, but a distinct improvement – and in that sense a distortion. In other words, Lacan does not seem to understand how mirrors work. He thinks they can not only reflect, but also, at least in this case, “touch up” the reflectee. Thus the appreciative smile and jubilation. The child's self-esteem rises, for it now has become a different and better person.

In my interpretation I will agree that self -recognition makes the child a different and better person, but my view will be drawn from pragmatist theory, not from psychoanalysis. The infant's self, for Lacan, has now doubled, so to speak, but it did not do this by differentiating or splitting from within. Instead, that which is within the self is still there, but it has added from without, a flattering twin. This addition is mechanical rather than organic. This makes it possible for the mirror self to become detached and to attack, paranoid-wise, its owner. The paranoia idea is clever, for inexplicable paranoia is a common symptom. Anyone who has every smoked marijuana in a group knows that some smokers are made paranoid by the drug. But it is the drug and not the “mirror self” doing it.

This duplication produces gains as well as losses. The great gain, in addition to the new energy of an ego ideal, is a more flexible ego. Language can eventually be built on this

11ego, whereas it could not be built on the bits and pieces version. For Lacan, the mirror split, including its dividing and alienating qualities, is a necessary precondition to the eventual mastery of language, itself based on a successful transition through the oedipal crisis. In Bruner's 1973 more Piagetian language, symbolic or verbal representations cannot be built directly on enactive ones, but must be mediated by visual representations, which themselves congeal with the enactive.

In addition the mirror stage gives the person a "centered" quality, not previously available in the bits and pieces stage. This new center is, technically speaking, “eccentric," for it is anchored in the external, mirror image. Still, organizationally, it acts as a center of activity and permits a greater efficiency of action. This dyadic ego, now centered on the exterior pole, is not quite the bi- polar ego of the pragmatists' internal or intra psychic conversation -- their version of the thought process -- although it is close. The pragmatists' internal dyadicity, to be explained in more detail later, organizes the self by means of the thinking process, the internal conversation. In contrast Lacan's internal dyadicity organizes by identification and feeling, fusing together the bits and pieces stage and the aggrandizing mirror image. Lacan's duality organizes by the power of its commitment, for this identifying image must be saved and protected at all costs.

12When thought finally comes for Lacan’s child, with the entry into the symbolic, it will bear more resemblance to Durkheim's epistemology than to the pragmatists' reflexivity.

Among the losses, the child is now on a narcissistic, self-loving plateau, much more pleasurable than the bits and pieces stage, but still an obstacle to true sociability and the recognition of others. Eventually, for Lacan, the child will have to get off this plateau and rise, by means of the oedipal transition, to the developmentally higher level of true sociability. This will require language and moral commitment.

From this loss comes another -- the tendency to treat others as though they were the mirror other, i.e. to relate to other people narcissistically. Even after the oedipal crisis is successfully negotiated, and the child develops the capacity to recognize others, there will still be a tendency to backslide into the mirror stage, thereby treating others not as separate moral centers but as part of the self. The mirror scheme stays, as a kind of archaic layer, exerting a pull toward self-loving, narcissistic morality, even after a social morality is attained.

A third loss is the tendency to lose control of the mirror self under stress. Paranoia, as mentioned, is Lacan's favorite example. The paranoid's mirror self has uncoupled and is now acting in the role of socially other people. More generally,

13Lacan's mirror self, in its duality, both permits normal defense mechanisms, and, under extreme conditions, abnormal ones. The ego, as Lacan says, is inherently or constitutively paranoid, but becomes clinically so under extreme stress. This psychotic uncoupling arises from the deflection in which “the specular I turns into the social I." (2006, p. 79).

Counter-interpretation of the mirror stage.

Let me return to that smile and jubilation. Why is the child smiling? My interpretation will present a sequence of events which changes the meaning of that smile. Before the child self-recognizes there is a period during which the child seems to think the mirror image is actually another child. Recent research (Rochat and Zahavi, 2011, p. 208; Anderson, 1984) suggests that the child in the mirror is initially seen as a socially other child, a sort of playmate. The viewing child will attempt to interact with the other child, presumably following whatever interaction style it already had established with other children. During this time the mirror image would not be seen as better or superior to the self, for there would not yet have been the excitement or (Lacan- hypothesized) motoric spurt of self-recognition. The other child would be seen as a true other, and all attempts at interaction, including eye contact, would still be drawing on the bits and pieces ego. Nor would there be any identification at this point, for the

14child does not yet know the child in the mirror is the self. The playmate experience might occur only once, in the same specular experience in which self-recognition was eventually achieved. Or it might occur over a series of mirror experiences, finally culminating in the one that reached self-recognition. (Footnote 2)

Attempts at interaction will eventually lead to the discovery of coincidence, in which the actions of the playmate seem quite similar to one's own. When this happens the viewer's interest changes from play to curiosity, for the coincidences suggest some kind of connectedness. This curiosity, as I see it, leads to a systematic exploration of the seeming connectedness, in which the child's attempts to touch the other child's body produces a precise pairing of movements, particularly those of the hands. Whatever the viewer does, the viewed does. Motor behaviors coincide and the other child seems totally controlled by the self. Or in methodological language, there is a correlation, suggesting a possible causal relation, between the viewing and the viewed child.

The child now senses that this is not just another playmate, not a playmate at all, but it does not yet sense that this is an image of the self. Instead there may be a kind of merging quality with the other, such that the self is being pulled into the other

15child, or the other into the self. This feeling of merging into another would not be a pleasurable feeling, as self-recognition will be, but a threatening one. The bits and pieces, barely held together at this point, are being disjointed even more by the mystery of the pairing.

The pairing continues however, and this remarkable series of coincidences starts getting over-determined. A new interpretation -- based on eye contact -- begins in the child, and this is the beginning of self-recognition. This new interpretation is a gestalt, i.e. a way of organizing information, though it is not Lacan's gestalt. His is that of a body. Mine is that of a relationship, specifically the relationship between the kinesthetic-proprioceptive image and the mirror image. The child begins to realize that the child in the mirror is his or her self, and that the coincidences can be explained, not by merger, but, as Merleau Ponty has it by visual duplication. Mitchell (1997) refers to this latter explanation as “kinesthetic-visual matching.’’

What I think happens is that the eye conversation between viewer and viewed becomes a question. The viewer asks the viewed, “are you, me?” The question is asked by putting a questioning look in the eyes. Then a smile comes and the smile means “yes, I’m you.” This interpretation is admittedly speculative, and the current pace and precision of mirror

16research is not sensitive enough to test this hypothesis. But it looks to me like the natural way the puzzle would be solved.

This new gestalt comes as a great relief, a state of anxiety turning into one of intense pleasure. A lot of information crashes in at once: the playmate is me, the pairings are explainable, the merging is harmless, this is what I really look like (Lacan's sub- gestalt), those eyes are my eyes, and -- to anticipate -- this outside vantage point that I am getting on myself feels good, because it validates and strengthens the one I was getting from mother. I can now see myself as others see me (and as I really am). This is Charles Horton Cooley’s “looking glass self” at its birth (Cooley, 1902, pp. 183-184).

A point that Lacan missed in under-rating the sensory-motor unity of the infant's body was made nicely by Merleau-Ponty (1964). The baby's self recognition does not merely unite two visual pictures of the body, the bits and pieces version and the one from the mirror. More importantly it unites the mirror image with the entire body ego, including the more "visceral" sensory-motor representation and the bits and pieces visual one. It does not merely add a complete visual picture to an incomplete one. It also unites two, totally different sensory modalities, Bruner's enactive representation and his iconic.

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Why does the specular image of one's own body develop later than that of the other's body? it is because the problem to be solved is much more difficult in the case of one's own body. The child is dealing with two visual experiences of his father: the experience he has from looking at him and that which comes from the mirror. Of his own body, on the other hand, the mirror image is his only complete visual evidence. He can easily look at his feet and his hands but not at his body as a whole. Thus for him it is a problem first of understanding that the visual image of his body which he sees over there in the mirror is not himself; and second, he must understand that, not being located there, in the mirror, but rather where he feels himself to be introceptively, he can nonetheless be seen by an external witness at the very place at which he feels himself to be and with the same visual appearance that he has from the mirror. In short, he must displace the mirror image, bringing it back from the apparent or virtual place in the depth of the mirror back to himself, whom he identifies at a distance with his introceptive body. (1964, p. 129).

What Merleau-Ponty sees here is a breakthrough in cross-modal knowledge of the self. Before the mirror recognition, the knowledge was motoric and "introceptive,"

18with an overlay of fragmented visual representation. The mirror gives the full visual, and in doing this it merges with and decidedly raises the power of the pre-existing, motoric self. In Bruner's terms, there are three kinds of "representation" -- the enactive, iconic and symbolic. Accordingly the child has two major achievements in multi-modality: adding the iconic to the enactive and adding the symbolic to merger of the previous two. The mirror stage would perhaps be the central case of combining the iconic and the enactive

These are directions in which Lacan did not choose to go. He stayed pretty visual, both with the viewer and viewed. But I will return to Bruner's three layers of self later when I discuss the possible role of symbolization itself in the mirror experience.

The interpretation I am constructing of the child's smile and jubilation, then, is more complex than Lacan's. To begin with, the child is saved from anxiety, from the threat of the pairing and the merging. The child also discovers what it looks like; not only how its head -- previously unseen -- fits onto its body, but also how it can look into its own eyes. Of course the child it sees is a happy child with a big smile on its face. One is discovering ones self at one's best, at a moment of happiness and growth. There need be no motor upgrade to

19explain this sense of being better, for psychologically, at the moment of self-recognition, one is better.

The most powerful reason for this jubilation, however, may not be relief from anxiety or even the visual discovery of the (happy) body, but rather a crystallization of the internal structure of the self, particularly the structure of the internal dialogue. By now -- let us say eighteen months -- the infant has been distancing from the close caretaker quite a bit, especially cognitively. In the child development literature at present there is a dispute over how much mother-child symbiosis exists. The established position, both in the literature and in psychoanalysis, saw a close symbiosis, from which the child would have to gradually separate (see Mahler, Pine and Bergman, 1975 for an influential statement of this position). The new position sees less symbiosis, whether emotional or cognitive, and instead sees what might be called a smarter baby (see Stern, 1983; 1985 for a statement of the new position, also Applegate, 1989). Both positions, however, in their own way, see an infant growing in autonomy and self-complexity. A major feature of this complexity is the steadily sharpening power of the internal conversation.

George Herbert Mead pictured this conversation as initially non-symbolic, as a "conversation of gestures," only gradually becoming symbolic. In Jerome Bruner's language we might say the internal conversation, i.e. the thought process,

20glides from the enactive- motoric to the visual-iconic to the verbal-symbolic. These three kinds of conversation, with three different modes of representation, are unlikely to be in water-tight, chronological sequences. Instead there would seem to be some co-existence and parallel processing, such that early forms of iconic and even symbolic conversation are intermixed with the more motoric, enactive variety. In other words that the approximately eighteen month old baby, integrating the motoric and visual selves before the mirror is also experiencing early forms of symbolic, i.e. abstract, internal conversation. This abstract conversation, and for that matter the less abstract varieties as well, operates as though we were two people, talking to each other. Internal conversation, in other words, is dyadic and dialectical. A major thread of baby's exploration of autonomy is the growing use of the internal conversation as a steering device. (Wiley, 2016, pp. 22-33). When the infant looks into its own eyes and discovers that these are its own, more happens than Merleau-Ponty's merger of the motoric and visual selves. In addition, those eyes converse, much as they do for adults when they occasionally look into their own eyes in a mirror, although baby's ocular conversation is the original. The conversation of those eyes, I would argue, acts as an objectification of the baby's internal conversation. This objectification crystallizes

21the previously somewhat mysterious and slippery inner conversation.

The biggest reason for the smile and jubilation, then, is not the discovery of something outside the self, not the gestalt of the body, but the discovery of something inside the self, the gestalt of the inner dialogue. For Mead, the self is that which can be an object to itself, i.e. which can be reflexive. This reflexivity, previously vague, uncontrolled and in "bits and pieces" for the child, now falls into place. The mirror dyadicity is not, as with Lacan, the new ego but rather a metaphor for it, the reality itself lying unseen and within. Lacan calls this self-recognizing insight the discovery of the ”I,” which he calls the “ideal I.” (2006, p. 76). But he has the wrong I. His is a distinct other, which, in a way, lies outside the self. Mine (or rather that of George Herbert Mead) is also a kind of other, but one that lies inside and is the core of the (dialogical) self.

The smile is the discovery of the mind, how to operate the mind and how to think. The inner resource and the means for operating this resource both click in at once. This is not yet full-blown linguistic capacity, which is an extension of the internal conversation mechanism. But it is the germ of language. A kind of pre- linguistic role-taking or reflexivity has already been going on with the close caretaker, and from that base, with the self. Internal role- taking, or conversation, was previously indistinct and unsure of itself. Now the discovery of

22the duplicate of the self, smiling in the mirror and looking into one's eyes, clarifies and crystallizes the other pole of the internal conversation. Baby finds his or her I in the mirror, smiling back at him or her. The quasi-identification with the mirror reflection is not, on my interpretation, the source of a new, alienating dyadicity. For, this mirror identification is merely the means to a deeper and more important identification, the one the child makes with the other pole of the internal conversation. It is with an "other" in a much weaker and less “otherish" sense than Lacan thought. The newly discovered or crystallized internal pole is, in a way, “other”, but it is not outside the self in the way the mirror reflection is.

The notion that the three kinds of internal conversation partially overlap, in parallel processing fashion, helps explain how the child can be aware of or know anything at the mirror. If you take a strict "bits and pieces" view of the pre-mirror baby, it is difficult to see how there can be awareness of a playmate, pairing, merging or even self-recognition. This knowledge would all seem to be only available by hindsight, after the bits and pieces stage has been replaced by the integrated ego. Otherwise you would seem to be postulating "self before self."

I see two explanations of how awareness can be present at this point. For one, the baby is already engaging in early

23forms of (internal) symbolic interaction. In fact babies are often already beginning to use early forms of words at twelve months. Secondly, the baby gets new cognitive powers from the experience of self- recognition, and these powers are aware of themselves as they come into existence. In other words I see the mirror experience as the unification of motoric, iconic and, in addition, symbolic representations of the self. Let me now contrast the two interpretations, Lacan's and my own. (1) The main difference is in the nature of the new duality or dyadicity. Lacan's is "specular," and, as he says "imaginary" (i.e. connected to an image). I regard this duality as unimportant. The important duality, which pre-existed the mirror experience to some extent, is that of the internal dialogue. Lacan has no place for this duality. (2) My duality still permits the uncoupling and wandering around that Lacan attributed to the mirror self, particularly in his theory of paranoia as self-punishment (for unconscious guilt).

There are two, noticeably distinct versions of the internal conversation among the pragmatists. For Mead this conversation is between the I and the me, the latter concept merging with the more abstract notion of the "generalized other" (Mead, 1934, p. 154). This is, in a way, the self-as-present talking with the self-as-past. In contrast Charles Sanders Peirce has the internal conversation going on

24between the I and the "you," the latter being the "other self that is just coming into life in the flow of time"(Peirce, 1955, p. 258). This is the self-as-present talking with the self-as-future. Although not much attention has been given to this difference between the two great pragmatists, I think the internal conversation, particularly when it becomes symbolic, is often Peirce’s I-you dialogue and not Mead's I-me, although the me (or generalized other) is always in the background, listening in, so to speak. In a larger sense the conversation can be viewed as triadic. The I talks to the you about the me.

I think this internal "you," this self coming into existence, can do the same theoretical work that Lacan's wondering mirror self was constructed to do. In other words, the task for which Lacan invented the mirror stage -- to explain the splitting and uncoupling of the ego in mental illness -- can still be taken care of in Peirce's formulation. Now, however, the duality that turns against itself is not based on an added or tacked-on portion of the self. Rather the split is from within, specifically from inner temporality and the capacity of this temporality to divide into interactive poles, the I and the you. But my duality cannot be used to seal the bond with the mother, for the self-transformation of the mirror experience does not, in important respects, resemble the relation to the mother. Rather, the crystallization of the inner conversation and the strengthening of the inner dialectic distances and separates the child from the mother.

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Conclusion.

In conclusion I would like to relate Lacan to an anthropological point in Durkheim. This is something of a logical “stretch,” but it is theoretically suggestive. This is the relation of the child’s jubilation to the effervescence that Durkheim’s aborigines get in their annual clan reunions (Durkheim, 1995, pp. 207-241. These gatherings strengthened the aborigines’ complex mythology, i.e. their explanations of their community, its origins and destiny, their environment and their selves. All reunions, even in contemporary industrial society, do some of this, but the reunions of these stone-age communities have a much more powerful defining character. These reunions drew on music (e.g. with the bull horn); dramatizing the myths; singing, screaming and yelling; ignoring the darkness of night; elaborate body painting, rejoicing in the intense unity of the clan; feeling the power (the “mana”) of the excitement; letting the effervescence do what it will, and engaging in ordinarily forbidden forms of sexual intercourse to intensify the connections.

Durkheim’s ritualizing clan is an extreme case of reality construction, for the clan’s reality (largely coded in myth) becomes much stronger as a result of this dramatizing experience. All societies have a reality constructing process,

26but it is rarely as condensed and visible as in Durkheim’s case.

My point is that the mirror child’s jubilation upon experiencing self-discovery in the mirror is similar to the self-discovery that Durkheim’s clan experiences in its annual ritual celebrations. The energy of semiotic experience is similar to the religious notion of “grace, but this energy is a secular form of grace. Durkheim called this secular grace, “mana.” This mana floods the child when it discovers its inner dialogicality, itself an internal community.

The child feels the power of this mana when he or she looks deeply within for the first time and finds the complex organization that constitutes the self. The child now understands the self and can put it to better and more effective use. Similarly the Australian natives discovered mana, in the inner community of their own clan. The clan is now stronger, more informed and has more energy to face its year of dispersal and food-scarce dry weather. The mirror child too has a better understanding, a stronger sense of agency and an intensified supply of energy to face the world.

In other words Lacan got the smile wrong. It is not jubilation for discovering the integrity of the bodily self. If is for discovering the integrity of the dialogical self. And it is based, not on physiological energy but on the semiotic energy

27of a purged interiority. Clutter has been removed and the child can now see into itself.

Footnotes

1. My impression, watching my children at the mirror and remembering my own mirror experience, agrees with that of Merleau-Ponty, although I realize personal experience may have limited validity.

2. Anderson (1984) gave a review of mirror research with human infants, which began around 1970, after Gallup’s (1970, 1979) innovative research with primates. This research on children is helpful for understanding the early development of self- awareness.

These researchers, though, would not accept baby’s smile, or even jubilation, as a valid indicator of self-recognition in a mirror. There are many reasons why infants smile, including simple encounter with another child.

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