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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Article
Is Lacan’s Theory of the Mirror Stage Still Valid?
Author(s)
Jorge Gonçalves
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5542/2012.07.005
Affiliation(s)
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
ABSTRACT
Lacan
defended that the mirror stage represents the genesis of the self and
self-consciousness in human mind. The self is formed from the image of other
and not by a way of an internal auto-development. Before this stage, a sense of
self as a unified entity and restricted from others and the environment does
not exist. In the past few years, several psychologists and philosophers of
mind have maintained that this model is wrong. According to them, the self
exists since birth, to a minimal extent, they called it the minimal self. Its
development is registered in the body itself, such that there exists, from the
beginning, an innate body scheme and body image. The author’s claim is that
there are no empirical bases to assert that Lacan’s theory is false. Some
recent psychological experiences, summarized in a paper of Talia Welsh, go in
order to indicate that there is no minimal self in newborns. The neuroscientist
Damasio supported that in evolution mind appears first than consciousness. So the
author thinks that Lacan’s theory (as the author interprets it), according to
which self-consciousness does not exist in the early stages of mind and appears
only in the mirror stage, seems to be true.
KEYWORDS
mirror stage, minimal self, imitation in newborns, no-self
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