Jacques Lacan's Theory of the Mirror Stage

The mirror stage is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. It is based on the belief that infants recognise themselves in a mirror or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside themselves) from the age of about six months.
Initially, Lacan proposed that the mirror stage was part of an infant's development from 6 to 18 months, as outlined at the Fourteenth International Psychoanalytical Congress at Marienbad in 1936. By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved, as 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'.

The child's initiation into what Lacan would call the 'mirror stage' entails a 'libidinal dynamism' caused by the young child's identification with his own image and creation of what Lacan terms the 'Ideal-I' or 'Ideal ego'. This reflexivity inherent in fantasy is apparent in the mirror stage, since to recognise oneself as 'I' is like recognising oneself as other ('that person over there is me'); this act is thus fundamentally self-alienating. Indeed, for this reason, feelings towards the image are mixed, caught between hatred ('I hate that version of myself because it is so much better than me') and love ('I want to be like that image').

As the mirror stage concept continues to develop over time, the stress falls less on its historical value and ever more on its structural value. 'Historical value' refers to the mental development of the child and 'structural value' to the libidinal relationship with the body image. In Lacan's fourth Seminar, La relation d'objet, he states that 'the mirror stage is far from a mere phenomenon which occurs in the development of the child. It illustrates the conflicting nature of the dual relationship'. The dual relationship refers not only to the relation between the Ego and the body, which is always characterised by illusions of similarity and reciprocity, but also to the relation between the Imaginary and the Real. The visual identity given from the mirror supplies imaginary 'wholeness' to the experience of a fragmentary real.

The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification - the Ego being the result of identifying with one's own specular image. At six months, the baby still lacks coordination. However, Lacan hypothesised that the baby can recognise itself in the mirror before attaining control over its bodily movements. The child sees its image as a whole, but this contrasts with the lack of coordination of the body and leads the child to perceive a fragmented body. This contrast, Lacan hypothesised, is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with its own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens it with fragmentation; thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image. This primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego. The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery. Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. This identification also involves the ideal ego, which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_stage





The film that I shall be applying Lacan's mirror stage theory is Black Swan (2011), directed by Darren Aronofsky. Within the film, the audience is made to see through the eyes of the character of Nina Sayers, a twenty-eight year-old in a New York City ballet company, which is preparing to open its new season with Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. With prima ballerina Beth MacIntyre being forced into retirement, artistic director Thomas Leroy announces that he is looking for a new dancer to portray the dual role of the innocent White Swan and the sensual Black Swan. Nina auditions for the role and gives a flawless performance as the White Swan, but fails to embody the Black Swan. The qualities of the Black Swan are much better embodied by the new arrival, Lily. Nina is overwhelmed by a feeling of immense pressure when she finds herself competing for the part, causing her to lose her tenuous grip on reality and descend into a nightmare.

In terms of the theory of the mirror stage, whilst Black Swan does not begin with the protagonist as a child - which is the usual age for the stage to take place - it does begin with Nina in a childlike state. She has not yet become a woman, nor has she formed an identity apart from her mother. Thus, she is kept from being a true individual. A prime example of this is Nina's bedroom being decorated with wallpaper containing iconic visual representations of butterflies, ceramic statues, stuffed animal toys, and an overabundance of pink. To most people, the bedroom looks like it belongs to a small child, rather than a twenty-eight year-old woman. Nina's mother also dotes on and smothers her as if she were still an infant, calling her 'sweet girl', and even going so far as to undress her, as if Nina is incapable of doing so herself. In addition, the name 'Nina' has a relation to the Spanish word 'Niña', which happens to translate to 'little girl'. Within the company that she dances for, Nina is not so much treated as a child, as she is invisible, being seen as just another dancer among many - reduced and stripped of identity.

Black Swan opens on Nina dreaming - an act that, for her, serves the same function as looking into a mirror. Nina is able to externalise her image of herself, and consider her desires for said image. She acts as a spectator, watching herself dance her most coveted role: the Swan Queen. This role would not only make her the prima ballerina of her ballet company - a distinct individualistic position rather than one lost in the chorus - but would also help her to create a persona apart from her mother. Nina would no longer be just some aspiring ballerina following in her mother's footsteps. She would have reached the pinnacle of her craft, surpassing her role as daughter into her role as woman. This is the indeed the journey that Nina takes throughout the film. After being chosen to play the role of the Swan Queen, Nina starts maturing both emotionally and sexually. She defies her mother, confronts her predecessor, decides to leave her home, and has her first satisfying sexual experience. By all accounts, Nina successfully grows up, passing through Lacan's mirror stage, because she manages to create an identity that is her own, separating herself from her mother, and distinguishing herself among her peers.

According to Lacan's mirror stage, Nina does not actually create her new identity in the conventional way. Instead of only recognising herself as a distinct individual, Nina keeps hold of her infantile White Swan persona, and also manifests an opposite identity to her own: the Black Swan: an amalgam of the traits that she both fears and yearns for. At first, Nina has difficulty giving full form to her Black Swan person, and so she projects it onto the women around her. However, as Nina matures, so does her alter ego, as her Black Swan begins to manifest itself more frequently and aggressively both outside of and within the mirror.

In many ways, Black Swan is as much a case study for Lacan's theory of the mirror stage, as it is for the mirror stage 'gone wrong'. It poses the question of what happens when a person cannot reconcile the identity that they want with the one that they have. For Nina, she is constantly warring between her White Swan persona and her doppelgänger, so much so that her body seems unable to handle the two different identities at once. Throughout the film, Nina pulls and scratches at her skin, as if something beneath the surface were trying to break free from her body. However, Nina only acts in such a way when she is reflecting with both identities, either in front of a mirror or in her dreams.

The resolution of Nina's internal conflict occurs during her official debut performance as the Swan Queen. As her light and dark identities fight, they shatter a mirror both literally and figuratively, for Nina attempts to destroy the reflected darkness of herself. However, the violent, immoral act of killing her doppelgänger taints Nina's White Swan persona, corrupting it and allowing her to become both white and black. Instead of simply shattering her mirror image, Nina breaks through it, turning into both of the women that she created in her mirror stage. By subsuming two opposing forces, and holding them within one physical body, Nina has fragmented herself, allowing her desire and actuality to push against each other, fighting for control. This duality of character gives Nina what is required to dance the role of the Swan Queen, but also destroys her body in the process, for she cannot harbour two women in one vessel. By this point, Nina has broken the mirror between her desire and reality, mixing black and white together, fragmenting the identities created in her mirror stage, all in order to fulfil her reflected desire.

A crucial turning point in the film occurs when Nina goes out to dinner with Lily, leading to Nina willingly drinking a vodka cranberry spiked with what appears to be MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy. Afterwards, the two women take place with many strangers on the dance floor, in a sequence designed to be as hypnotic as it is terrifying. With the pulsing lights and merging images of bodies, this undeniably sexual scene acts as a visual climax to the film. It represents a moment that Nina has of liberation from her restrictive White Swan persona, and embrace of the Black Swan's primal impulses. The Chemical Brothers’ delirious song Don't Think blares in the club as red and green lights flash on and off in a strobing effect. The red represents Nina's passion and desire for becoming the rebellious Black Swan, while the green represents her envy of Lily's ability to personify such a character. In nearly every frame of this sequence, hidden imagery is manipulated within the frame, such as an object or image that recalls themes within the film. The moon set piece from the play, the character of Rothbart from Swan Lake, and Nina as the Black Swan permeate the sequence.
Momentarily, the electronic dance music lets up, replaced by Clint Mansell’s atmospheric and tense nightmare lullaby (which is Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake played in reverse at a slower tempo), and Nina looks around. For one frame, Lily’s face is superimposed onto Nina’s face, just prior to Lily joining in and dancing with Nina. This represents Lily's rebellious attitude slowly corrupting Nina, as if they are becoming the same person. Soon after, the music begins again. The inclusion of a tonal interlude in the sequence, one that further establishes the nightmare, is indicative of the subjectivity of the film. Only she experiences this moment, even while other people are lost in the din of debauchery, and only she somewhat realises the nightmare that she is enduring, what with the plethora of doubles within the sequence itself. Her obsession with Lily continues to corrode what little sanity she has left.

In the following sequence, Nina brings Lily back to her apartment, before locking her overprotective mother out of her room. The two begin passionately kissing, leading to them lying on Nina's bed, almost soiling the pink innocence which had previously ruled over Nina’s life, and Lily performs cunnilingus on Nina. The film presents a shot of Lily arching her back in pleasure and then looking up at Nina, cutting to Nina looking up at Lily. However, the face that comes up is not Lily’s, but an amalgam of Lily and Nina. As Nina panics and attempts to back away, in the next frame, Lily’s face is suddenly back to normal. As Lily returns to performing oral sex, the tattoo on her back mutates and grows, looking down from the same angle that Nina would see it. The audience, and Nina, see every sinew in Lily’s back, almost in admiration. These perspective shots are inherent to understanding that, even in ecstasy, Nina still has no control.

What is interesting about these hedonistic sequences is that they are so subjective that it is revealed that neither actually happened to the extent that the audience sees them in the film. Nina may have gone clubbing, but the nightmare that she endures is not the same story that Lily remembers. In addition, according to Lily, she and Nina did not have sex together. Nina is so fixated on competition that she may have begun to desire the same thing that she hates: herself. If Lily is indeed a manifestation of herself, to some extent, and what she needs to be, this strange process of maturation necessitates that she develop a monomania with discovering herself. Earlier in the film, Thomas suggests that Nina must 'touch' herself in order to channel the carnal elements of the character that she will play. However, this is something that Nina has done before, due to being kept in a childlike state by her mother. Therefore, such an act is seen by Nina as a piece of self-introspection that she has never had to in the past, and thus, is uncomfortable with. By following Thomas's suggestion, and fantasising about having sex with Lily, Nina's vulnerable mind fights the idea that she is incapable of becoming a woman, further deranging her mind in the process.