Keywords: Lacan; Mirror image theory; Self; picture
China Library ClassificationNo.: B565.6 Document IdentificationNo.: A DocumentNo.: 167 1-8402? 2004 10-0036-03
About the author: Zhang Yibing, male, director center for studies of marxist social theory at nanjing university, professor of philosophy department, doctoral supervisor.
Jacques-Marie Emile Lacan (190 1- 1983) is a famous psychoanalyst and magical primitive thinker in contemporary France. Mirror image theory is a key link in Lacan's early thoughts. This paper briefly discusses the philosophical logic of Lacan's mirror image theory.
For Lacan, Hegel's relational self-consciousness-master-slave dialectics provides an important relational expression. The individual subject cannot establish himself, but only agrees with himself in the mirror image relationship of another objectified person. However, Lacan's new discovery is that this identity ends with the substitution of the other for the subject itself. We know that in Hegel's theory, desire and labor are the transformation elements of this replacement relationship. Lacan, as a psychologist, directly erased the labor when accepting Hegel's legacy, and temporarily put aside the desire to delay. When he replaced Hegel's realistic (labor) relationship with surreal mirror mapping, he gained a powerful weapon against Freud's core realistic egoism.
In his view, the self is not a conscious entity organized by Freud's "realistic principle" in his later years, but a surreal illusion, because it is just a series of false selves with alienated identity as the basic framework.
1936, Lacan put forward the "mirror image theory". This is a subversive view he put forward in Freud's psychoanalysis in the face of the logic of psychological occurrence and personality history construction advocated by the latter. Usually here, some Lacan biographers emphasize Lacan's basic role as a problem-oriented research on animal behavior patterns, mainly the mirror experiment of child psychologist Walloon on animals and babies. ? Some people accuse Lacan of relying on the outdated foundation of experimental psychology. I really don't think so. Because, for Lacan, the mirror experiment of scientist Walloon is at most an empirical support, and that's all. I also noticed that Freud himself directly talked about children's mirror games.
In my opinion, the main starting point of Lacan's mirror image theory is Hegel's reformed master-slave dialectics, and its core is an unconscious self-deception relationship. As mentioned above, Lacan's understanding of human ontology is exactly the Marx-Heidegger-style relational ontology. Marx believes that the essence of man (individual subject) is only the sum of all his social relations in reality; Heidegger only regards this existence (individual subject) as the existence of "living" (building the world first hand and being with others). Here, the existence of Marx's relationship has direct positive significance, while Heidegger's theory of life relationship has negative significance. I believe that the relationship ontology in the establishment of this discipline originated from Hegel. However, Lacan wants to further fundamentally deny the relational ontology of human existence. According to Lacan's mirror image theory, children aged 6 to 18 months (who can't effectively control their broken bodies) see their own unified image in the mirror, that is, produce a gestalt picture. The essence of this gestalt is the identity relationship of imagination. This is not another self-consciousness that Hegel said, but another image of "I". "Its counterpart" became its image-illusion from the beginning. I immediately mistook this picture for myself, which is exactly what Freud called the illusion of self-identity in the narcissistic stage. In Lacan's context, this is an ontological misleading. Lacan clearly realized the nothingness of the substantive subject, which includes both Freud's biological id (original desire) and self-sufficient conscious subject-psychological self. He affirmed Marx-Heidegger's ontological basis of human existence, but reversed it in the logic of falsification.
I think Lacan's pseudo-ego theory profoundly inherits the internal framework of Hegel's master-slave dialectics, but at the same time eliminates the "dialectics of self-consciousness realized from Socrates to Hegel". He himself said that the subject theory, once considered to be perfect and complete, is the "most fundamental assumption" of the whole historical progress: "In fact, he is called the mother of this progress; His name is Selbst bewusstsein, that is, self-consciousness, the existence of full consciousness. " It is in this sense that he said that the essence of Freud's psychoanalysis is that "only when the subject deviates from self-consciousness, the process of verification really touches the subject". Obviously, Lacan affirmed Freud's denial of the rational subject of self-consciousness. He thought that Freud's revolution was not thorough enough, and Lacan wanted to deny Freud's unconscious psychological self. He claimed that what he was most interested in was "self-righteous slave to the master"-self-righteous non-subject. Lacan wants to subvert all ideological and cultural traditions since Descartes. This includes his own teacher-Freud.
We already know that "self-consciousness is desire" in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, and desire is an objective relationship to another self-consciousness, and the dialectical relationship between master and servant deepened in reflexivity is the real basis of Lacan's mirror image relationship. Here in Lacan, he first fundamentally denied Freud's id, that is, the instinctive desire in the biological sense, which made the beginning of individual ego become nothingness. This coincides with Hegel's theory that it is a night of nature, or the absence at the beginning of logic. In this way, people without biological id first construct their psychological personality in their own images in the mirror with a false image relationship, and illusion becomes the master. Here, Freud's stipulation of narcissism-self-ideal, that is, "the kind of person that the individual subject expects himself to be", is recognized in the negative relationship of opposites, and Freud's narcissism becomes a false phantom love in the water, so the beginning of Freud's "living" self must be empty. This is not a self-consciousness facing another self-consciousness, nor is it the master of one entity conquering the slave of another entity. This is the enslavement of "I" by the relationship between illusion and emptiness, and this is the true face of Lacan's mirror image theory. At this point, Lacan is vicious. It is also here that Lacan, who is clever, distinguishes a non-verbal other, that is, the master of the "empty" self. Here, he is different from Levinas. In the latter's theory of the other, there are others as faces and languages, but Levinas does not distinguish between uppercase others and lowercase others. At first, this "other" is the image of the silent "I" in the mirror, and then the faces of mother, father and other relatives (Levinas' "expression"), as well as the behaviors and games that friends play together. It is in this non-verbal objective relationship with the other that the false self is actually constructed and affirmed. The non-language here is lowercase. And has been in contact with his future object A, not symbolized. The lowercase other is always associated with the emotional faces of others. However, we must not simply compare Lacan's Other with others. Of course, the "other" is based on image, but it is not another person or other people. In Lacan's view, is "the other" a lack of existence? Here, what the other lacks is the "it". In the future, the capitalized other (symbolic language) will be the absence and death of things and people.
Lacan called such a "hands-on world" based on the perceptual image relationship of others as the imaginary domain of ontology. This is not a positive description of the genetic construction process of the baby's psychological self. We must never regard the self as being at the center of the perception-perception system and not organized by the' realistic principle'. It is in the same intention of surrealism that Lacan denies that he regards himself as a perceptual entity that is constantly being constructed in real life, that is, the self in the "structuralism" that he and Dali reached a * * * understanding. On the contrary, Lacan reveals a truth in a non-constructive and critical way: the impossibility of true self-construction and the falsification of true self. Bo Wei said, "Lacan's" I "is a divided view, not a stable one". This is correct. Of course, different from surrealism, Lacan used surrealist images upside down here, and Dali's autonomy, freedom and revolutionary imagination to express his true desires were metaphorically regarded as a enslaved other. The essence of imaginary relationship is image-image construction. Image is not a simple external object here, but a configuration derived from human perceptual existence. Specifically, it is the non-self-imposed (or "aggressive") projection accepted from the mirror image of people and the expressions and behaviors of others. This projection forms a false self as the result of the image (image) of the other. Lacan said that he first realized this mirror image of the false self in a case study of paranoia. Image often means the self-identity (identity) relationship from the other, and this misunderstanding reveals the life deception drama in the imaginary domain. Lacan's imaginary relationship is actually based on misunderstanding.
Lacan's imaginary relationship here is an ontological binary split relationship. "This relationship becomes the basis of various relationships between people (and all' others')." It also indicates the inevitable alienation of madness in one's life. Obviously, Lacan's imagination here is defined in a broad sense, which is not only a misunderstanding of the mirror image and an associative recognition of other people's words and deeds. In a word, imagination is not only a subjective psychological activity, but also includes realistic imitation, analogy and unity in perceptual behavior operation. Different from Piaget, the process of a child's psychological construction does not start from the nothingness of the subject and object state (confirming the subject self and establishing the objective object of non-self); Different from Freud, he did not admit that human instinctive desire ("ID") was the basis of existence, which made the beginning of individual subject become nothingness, and the formation of self in the world became out of nothing. It is precisely the beginning of the great deception in life that people move towards the realistic self. It is just an "imaginative function" towards alienation. This so-called function of imagination is "the function of illusion as an object in different stages of psychological development in experience technology". This imaginary functional relationship is like a blown soap bubble, which is maintained by the shining image of others, while the illusory imaginary relationship is the empty "self" gas that is constantly blowing in here. Later, in the symbolic field, this fragile bubble became a hollow person woven by the immortal language hard shell, and the empty thing inside was called the subject. Lacan's things are very confusing, and I find that many scholars are confused by him. For example, Eagleton described Lacan's imaginary field as a process in which self and object are constantly transformed into each other in a "closed circle".
Another important internal logic of Lacan's mirror image theory is the pseudo-premise theory based on image-image-imaginary other. We know the heterogeneity between the rape characteristics of this pseudo-antecedent and Heidegger's antecedent. Lacan's antecedent, in layman's terms, is that something that is not me preempted my position, which made me unconsciously agree with him and that this thing that is not me is my own reality. So, I'm not here, he's here, and he pretends I'm here. Lacan's mirror image of the other, the face of the other, all have this forerunner. Whether it is my mirror image or everyone's face, its essence is the reflection of the other in an image. In this violent image relationship, the false self is based on the imaginary relationship of "narcissistic" false identity. This is a three-stage violent logic constructed by pseudo-self. Lacan said: "The history of the subject has developed in a series of more or less typical ideal identities. These identities represent the purest psychological phenomenon because they basically show the function of images. " The essence of image is the recognition of the pre-occupied other, and self is a psychological image pretending to be the mirror image of the usurped other. Image is a form that can be defined in the interweaving of time and space of imagination. Its function is to eliminate identity in a psychological stage, that is, the change of the relationship between an individual and his similarity. On the logical level, Lacan called this field an imaginary field, with the purpose of directly explaining the subjectivity and falsehood of self-construction. The pseudo-antecedent of the violence of the other is the essence of this imaginary field. Jameson once simplified this antecedent relationship to "image first". In fact, the context here in Lacan is much more complicated.
Walloon's psychological experiment mainly proves the intelligent advantage of reflecting the relationship in the mirror in the early psychological process of human subjects by comparing the different reactions of animals and children to the mirror. Its main point of view is embodied in the book The Origin of Children's Personality (1933). Lacan's approval can be found in Selected Works of Lacan, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 200 1 Edition, p. 109.