1—
The Opening Chapters of the Psyche's Bildungsroman

Just as Hegel "started" his analysis of property with an account of the abstract will, so Lacan "started" with the infant. When viewed retroactively, the infant seems to exist wholly in the order of the real. In the real, the infant has no consciousness. Its relation to the world is immediate; it experiences itself as one with the object world, including its "Mother." Most specifically, it has no awareness of the separation of itself and the rest of the world. As Hegel stated, the infant has being-in-itself, mere implicit being.^[210] At this point the infant experiences itself and its Mother as one.

Or more precisely, it has no sense of itself as a self, and no sense of its mother as a person.^[211] It is, therefore, misleading to say that the infant

[207] In Lacanian usage, the "incest taboo" does not refer to the literal prohibition of biological incest but to the law of exclusion:

Thus, the incest taboo is not so much a biological "no" as it is a strong cultural injunction to boys to identify away from the maternal and the feminine, to substitute the name of a lineage to the desire of a mother. . . .

Ragland-Sullivan, supra note 182, at 50–51.

[208] "Law and desire, stemming from the fact that both are born together, joined and necessitated by each other in the law of incest . . . " Lacan, Names-of-the-Father Seminar, supra note 162, at 89.

[209] Salacel, supra note 203, at v.

[210] Hegel, The Lesser Logic, supra note 29, at 181. At least one commentator has previously pointed out the similarity between Lacan's concept of the real and Hegel's concept of "being in itself." John Muller, Negation in "The Purloined Letter": Hegel, Poe, and Lacan, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading 343 (John P. Muller & William J. Richardson eds., 1988).

[211] Which is why I am using the impersonal pronoun "it" to describe the selfhood of the infant in the first two stages.

The child forms a syncretic unity with the mother and cannot distinguish between itself and its environment. It has no awareness of its own corporeal boundaries. It is ubiquitous , with no separation between itself and "objects", for it forms a "primal unity" with its objects. It cannot recognize the absence of the mother (or breast).

Grosz, supra note 18, at 34.

"experiences" union with the Mother because as soon as it starts becoming aware of experience, it begins to be aware of itself as distinct from the Mother. Awareness is not experience but the interpretation of experience. It is entering the mirror stage that will bring it into Lacan's next order of existence, the imaginary.

The imaginary is the order of the image and, therefore, of identity and difference.^[212] It is the order of meaning, of captivation and ensnarement.^[213] Based on mirror images, the imaginary sees difference in terms of simple negation—the sexes are imagined to complement each other perfectly as yin and yang, active and passive, autonomous and connected, individualistic and nurturing, and so on. In this mirror stage, the child starts becoming aware of itself as separate through the mediating function of sexuality.^[214] This is the beginning of the subject/object distinction.^[215] The infant becomes aware of the Mother as Other—as radical alterity.^[216]

Note that the term "Mother" means the person initially recognized by the infant as the other, rather than his female parent. Consequently, it is sometimes written as "(M)other" by English-speaking Lacanians. In a patriarchal family structure, this person is also usually the child's mother in the usual sense, or a person socially recognized as a mother surrogate (i.e., nanny, nurse, guardian, widower, or whatever), hence the choice of terminology. The fact that the other, as second term, is identified with

[212] Rose sees Lacan as assigning unity to the imaginary in his earlier texts, but as identifying the fantasy of sameness within language (i.e., the symbolic) in his later work. I agree that it is not clear precisely what role the imaginary plays in late Lacan.

[213] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, The Psychoses 1955–56, at 54 (Jacques-Alain Miller ed. & Russell Grigg trans., 1993) [hereinafter Lacan, Seminar III].

[214] Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience [hereinafter Lacan, The mirror stage ], in Lacan, Écrits, supra note 14, at 1, 2.

[215] Grosz explains this as the beginning of the subject/object distinction. Grosz, supra note 18, at 35. Rose observes:

For Lacan the subject is constituted through language—the mirror image represents the moment when the subject is located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer. The subject is the subject of speech (Lacan's "parle-être "), and subject to that order. But if there is division in the image, and instability in the pronoun, there is equally loss, and difficulty in the word. Language can only operate by designating an object in its absence. Lacan takes this further, and states that symbolization turns on the object as absence.

Rose, supra note 160, at 31. According to Jane Gallop: "But Lacan posits that the mirror constructs the self, that the self as organized entity is actually an imitation of the cohesiveness of the mirror image." Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan 38 (1985).

[216] Grosz, supra note 18, at 42. Grosz explains, "It is by identifying with and incorporating the image of the mother that it [the infant] gains an identity as an ego." Id . at 43.

(m)other in our society (and that, as we shall see, the third term will be identified with father) will determine the positions of sexuality.

Lacan's punning and metaphoric terminology is intentional. The infant sees its mirror —thereby enters the image -inary—in the mirror stage .^[217] It recognizes itself by seeing itself reflected in Mother who functions as its mirror. The experience of recognition is primarily one of vision—it sees the Mother, it sees its hand and begins to recognize parts of its body.

This concept of the Feminine as alterity has been misunderstood by so-called different-voice feminist legal scholars, such as Robin West, who are strongly influenced by the works of Carol Gilligan and other object-relations psychologists. On the basis of the assertion that most empirical psychological studies of childhood have concentrated on boys, they conclude that theories that claim to explain the development of personality, generally, are, in fact, accounts of masculine personality, specifically. They presume from this that since mainstream theory asserts that personality (i.e., masculinity) originates in a recognition of difference from the Mother, then feminine personality must originate in a recognition of similarity to the mother. From this they conclude that although men (whose development is characterized by separation) may be the autonomous individuals of liberal philosophy, women (whose development is characterized by connection) are more interrelated, following an ethic of care rather than justice.^[218] This vision of an affirmative Feminine which is the simple negation or mirror image of the Masculine is, as well shall see, not merely imaginary, but a masculine fantasy. Moreover, this particular conclusion is a non sequitur which springs from a fundamental confusion about the level of differentiation on which the theory relies.

The initial differentiation which is the starting point of Lacanian per-

[217] In this stage the child becomes fascinated with actual mirror images. Grosz, supra note 18, at 36–37. This phenomenon is familiar to all of us who have seen infants squealing with delight at their reflected images, pictures in books, and other newly discovered "mirror images."

Lacan points out that the difference in capacity for language between human and ape first becomes apparent in this stage. Human and simian infants experience similar development up to this point. Both become fascinated with mirrors at approximately the same age. Eventually both the child and the chimp realize that the image in the mirror is itself, and not another animal on the other side. The chimp loses most of its interest. The child's fascination increases. Lacan, The mirror stage, supra note 214, at 1.

[218] I use the term "different-voice feminism" because the psychological study which has had the greatest influence on American feminist jurisprudence is Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (1982). This school of feminism is often called "cultural" feminism. See, e.g ., Robin West, Jurisprudence and Gender , 55 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1 (1988).

sonality is the awareness that I and the Mother are not literally the same person—that is, the ability to formulate the third person pronoun (which precedes the development of the first person, let alone the second person). This cognitive step of recognizing the existence of another person as different must take place before the ability to identify, let alone evaluate, similarities to and differences from that other person. The former—mere imaginary identification of identity and nonidentity—is purely dual in nature and must be the same for both the girl and the boy in the mirror stage. That is, in the mirror stage, all children, male and female, both identify with the Mother yet recognize their difference from the Mother.

Indeed, for the different-voice feminist to posit that the girl child initially recognizes her similarity to the Mother and the boy initially recognizes his difference prior to the oedipal stage is to presuppose a natural or biological sexual difference which does not explain the psychoanalytic and social significance of sexuality.^[219] The two-party mother-child dyad is an imaginary relationship. In the imaginary, one can identify "meaning," in the sense that one can identify that X is like or not like Y, but all meanings (i.e., differences and similarities) have the same valorization because there is no external standard of comparison. For example, the blue-eyed little boy would see himself as like his mother in that she has blue eyes and different from her in that she lacks a penis, and the brown-eyed girl may see herself different from her blue-eyed mother despite their similarity in genitalia. But neither specific difference nor similarity could have precedence over the other.

Signification is not imaginary but symbolic. In order for a child to learn to privilege a specific anatomic difference, he must identify a third term to serve as the basis of comparison—what Lacan will call the Father. Consequently, the creation of sexual differentiation cannot take place in the mirror stage but must wait until the oedipal stage.

In other words, although both different-voice feminists and Lacanians agree that femininity is identification with the Mother and masculinity is identification away from the Mother, their respective interpretations of

[219] Most different-voice feminists, including Carol Gilligan, present their theory as a psychological or social construction account of empirically observable gender differences. West is one of the very few who recognize that the theory implicitly requires a presumed natural, biological sexual difference. Unfortunately, her "connectedness thesis" uses bodily metaphor to explain supposedly psychic differences. She argues that women are more socially connected and interrelated than men, because women are physically connected to other human beings through childbearing, nursing, being penetrated during sexual intercourse, and through menstruation (which presumably reflects the ability to bear children). West, supra note 218, at 14.

this phenomenon are wildly disparate. Different-voice feminists believe that children identify with or away from their mother on the basis of their pre-given (i.e., natural) sexuality and that this difference causes gender characteristics. In contradistinction, Lacanians believe that sexuality is itself the decision to identify with or away from the mother. This decision can only be made when the child enters into the symbolic. Accordingly, one's sexuality is not necessarily correlated with one's biology.

Consequently, although the mirror stage is the child's first awareness of self, at this point it can only experience itself as that which it is not.^[220] It is not the "Other"—Lacan's term for radical alterity, which is identified with the role of the Mother, the unconscious, and the symbolic order.

The infant is not yet a subject, and to say the same thing, it does not yet recognize the Mother as another subject. She is just Other. Infant and other are merely negatives, oppositions. It is not an individual, it is not-Mother.^[221] It can now conceive of mother in the third person as "she" (or, perhaps at this stage, "it") but cannot yet think of itself as "I," let alone recognize "you."

The infant during the mirror stage, existing only in the real and the imaginary, resembles the Hegelian abstract personality—pure negativity.^[222] The mirror stage is consequently both a stage of great gain—the experience of self—and incalculable loss and violence. Since the child has no memory of alterity prior to the mirror stage, in the imaginary the in-

[220] Only at this moment [i.e., the mirror stage] does [the child] become capable of distinguishing itself from the "outside" world, and thus of locating itself in the world. Only when the child recognizes or understands the concept of absence does it see that it is not "one" complete in itself, merged with the world as a whole and the (m)other.

Grosz, supra note 18, at 35.

For Lacan the subject is constituted through language—the mirror image represents the moment when the subject is located in an order outside itself to which it will henceforth refer.

Mitchell, supra note 160, at 31.

[221] In the mirror stage the child develops an imaginary body-image.

This is the domain in which the self is dominated by images of the other and seeks its identity in a reflected relation with alterity. Imaginary relations are thus two-person relations, where the self sees itself reflected in the other. This dual, imaginary relation—usually identified with the pre-oedipal mother-child relation—although structurally necessary, is an ultimately stifling and unproductive relation. The dual relationship between mother and child is a dyad trapping both participants within a mutually defining structure. Each strives to have the other, and ultimately, to be the other in a vertiginous spiral from one term or identity to the other.

Grosz, supra note 18, at 46–47.

[222] The mirror stage both affirms and denies the subject's separateness from the other. If we look more directly at the privileged stage for acting out of the drama of the mir-ror stage—that is, at the mother-child relation, in which the mother takes on the position of the specular image and the child that of incipient ego, the mirror stage is an effect of the discord between the gestalt of the mother, a total unified, "completed" image, and the subjective, spatially dislocated, positionless, timeless, perspectiveless, immersing turmoil the child experiences.

Grosz, supra note 18, at 42.

fant retroactively imagines that it had once been one with Mother before the mirror stage (as opposed to having been merely unaware of alterity). Consequently, as we shall see, when the child enters the symbolic, he will identify his subjectivity (castration) as loss or denial of the Feminine.

In other words, the relation between the infant and the object world, like the relationship between the will and the object of property in possession and enjoyment, is ostensibly dual. Because the relationship between the infant and the Mother is not yet mediated by a third term, the infant can only imagine union as absorption and destruction of separate personhood.^[223] This binary system is unstable and looks forward toward, and presupposes, its own overthrow. The self in the imaginary is contradictory in the same way as property before exchange—the infant is now both separate from and dependent on the defining Other. This can only be resolved by the addition of a third term. Or, more accurately (as we are looking backward over our shoulders), the third term is not added but is revealed as being always already there. The very act of recognizing the third term is simultaneously the creation of the imaginary binary mother-child opposition in the mirror stage and the real mother-child union prior to the mirror stage, as necessary preconditions to the tertiary symbolic relationship of adult sexuality.