george manas

The myth of Narcissus, like most Greek myths, has been widely circulated in Western culture. Still, it has not lost its charm, and perhaps is today as wise a story as we know. But just what is its wisdom? What does the myth of Narcissus tell us? What is its secret? Most would argue that the myth tells of a flaw in human nature: extreme vanity. This is as common a theme in Western culture as greed. Society, for the most part, proclaims vanity or narcissism bad, and sometimes even evil, on the grounds that these traits situate the individual above or beyond society’s jurisdiction, for the narcissist is, by definition, he who finds an end in himself, he whose only reference point is himself. Narcissus’s death, then, is a reflection society’s triumph over the individual or subject who places himself outside the circle of society. Appealing as such a reading may be, it yet does not account for the near ubiquity of narcissism in society, evidenced most starkly and literally by the vanity mirror, which today is as common as floors and ceilings –so common, indeed, that we often overlook what it might tell us about our (narcissistic) selves.   

In his “The Mirror Stage,” Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst often and rightly hailed as Freud’s heir, has offered a compelling reading of the myth of Narcissus that seeks situate narcissism within the narrative of everyday (social) existence. Rather than reading narcissism as an aberration of human nature, Lacan reads it as constitutive of the formation of selfhood, a process common –like mirrors–to all. The “human child,” writes Lacan, “at an age when he is for a short while, but for a while nevertheless, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can already recognize his own image as such in a mirror.” [3] While this image may accurately reflect the physical unity of the child (we could say the child’s flesh), it belies the child’s psychological state, for at this age he “is still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence.” [4] “Poor foolish boy,” writes a Lacanian Ovid of Narcissus, “…the thing you are seeing does not exist.” The child, at this stage, is like a man learning to operate an unfamiliar machine, or like a drunkard on a bicycle – he is unable to get his body to do what he wants it to do.

Despite the disconnect between his body and his mind, the child assumes –by identifying with –the image of a unitary or whole being, and in so doing comes to know himself as an I or individual. “This (I) form,” writes Lacan, situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual.” [5] While the I affords the self its distinctness, its self-hood, it also alienates the self from itself, for the I emerges despite the subject’s anatomical immaturity. The image of the (unitary) body belies the subject’s pre-maturity, the discrepancy between his psychological and psychical apparatuses.

Attending the emergence of the ego, or what we have so far termed the formation of the I , is the repression of the subject’s dependency on others (the mother in particular, and the external world in general) as well as the drives of the body –for the child identifies himself as a unitary being even while he is unable to control such organs as his bladder, for example. This initial repression buttresses the logic of the cogito, which presupposes the autonomy of the thinking subject (read: ego).  Yet, for Lacan, the child’s identification with his image also prefigures the subject’s “alienating destination” –for to think of oneself in terms of the cogito is to cast oneself as being separate from one’s body and from the external world, it is to play into the image reflected in the mirror. [6] According to Lacan, then, “I think, therefore I am” is as alluring and as impossible a wish as Narcissus’s wish to “separate myself from my body.”   

Since, for Lacan, the image of the body symbolizes the (imagined) sanctity of the I or ego, images of the dismembered body symbolize the disjointed state of the self that is, as a function of the self’s very being, repressed by the ego. Images of the dismembered body abound in art, though perhaps no where more memorably than in the works of Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch, whose paintings depict, in eerie detail, severed and pierced limbs and torsos. Bosch’s dreamy images dramatize the chaos –the incongruity between body and ego –that underlies the self’s claim to autonomy, as well as the self’s inability to completely sublimate the drives of the body. As glimpses beneath the façade of the ego, Bosch’s works show that the ego is both the source and the result of the repression of the fundamental vulnerability of the body. Thus Bosch’s work is often considered as instances of the return of the repressed.

While particularly salutary for the study of art, the mirror stage also provides a framework in which to discuss such common “things” as clothes and cars. Extensions of the body, these items are also symbols or images of the ego, for let us remember that the ego situates and defines itself by virtue of its relation to the external world. The implications of the phenomenon are familiar to us. One’s clothes, for example, are often understood –by others and by oneself –to say something about oneself, much as one’s car is said to reflect one’s personality. Worn and torn clothes evoke a worn and torn spirit, just as a flashy car evokes a flashy owner. The imaginary link (imaginary because it is arises as a symptom of the I function) between subjects and objects is never more fully apparent than in the case of a car accident.

The hyperbolic reaction to car crashes, even to those of the most innocuous kind, for example, intimates that the dependency of the ego, for its very existence, on the outside world –thus every car accident is potentially fatal (to the ego). Though physically separate from its owner, an automobile is often the object of a psychological attachment, what Jean Boudrillard calls, in The System of Objects, a relationship of a projective (or, to use Lacan’s term, imaginative) kind. Thus a car is often regarded by its owner to be a part of himself, and himself a part of the vehicle. This interdependency is precisely what Roland Barthes has described in his “The New Citroёn”: one drives an automobile as if with one’s whole body; one is, or at least imagines one’s self as, part and parcel of the machine, and the machine as part and parcel of one’s self. The ego that is, comes to know itself only indirectly –through objects, like cars. A wrecked car, like Bosch’s depictions of mutilated bodies, evokes the ego’s self-deluded understanding of itself as invulnerable, as whole, and thus it bespeaks of the fragility of the ego. A car wreck, then, can be understood in terms of Freud’s return of the repressed.

Lacan’s mirror stage, then, has ontological as well as phenomenological implications. The self, for Lacan, is not self-evident; it is not evident in and of itself but, rather, is known only in relation to the external world. In fact, the self relies for its very existence on something that is external to it, for its emergence is possible only by virtue of a differentiation between itself and the world. If the ego comes into being only in relation to the outside world, the outside world, then, comes into being only in relation to the ego: the one is a projection or mirror image of the other. For Lacan, the outside world, like the self, is a fiction: each is a metaphor for the other. We need not, therefore, take Lacan’s mirror stage literally, for, after all, it itself is nothing more nor less than an attempt to grasp the ever elusive relationship between subjects and objects, inside and outside, self and world. The mirror stage, like the self and the world, is a fiction.  

[2] Ibid. Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 83.

[3] Jacque Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink (Norton: New York, 2002), p. 3

[4] Ibid. Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” p. 4.

[5] Ibid. Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” p. 4 (my parentheses).

[6] Ibid. Lacan, “Mirror Stage,” p. 5.