Reading Lead, Lacan Jaques. Écrits, Mirror Stage. Translated by Bruce Fink. W.W. Norton & Com

1. Artwork: "Crawl" by Pope L

• Questions about the artwork:

• How would you describe the artwork?

• What do you think the artist wants people to feel when they see his performance? How does it make you feel?

• How does Pop L’s work relate or differ from the concepts in Lacan’s Mirror Stage theory?

2. Bio of the writer: Jacques Lacan was born the 13 of April of 1901, he was a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist from France. He specialized in taking Freudian concepts and using them for his own work by merging them with concepts within anthropology and linguistics, mathematics, and topology ( The study of properties of spaces that are preserved under continuous deformation). His family were religious Catholics, but after studying philosophy and learning about Baruch Spinoza’s work (an early figure of the enlightenment), he became an atheist. Lacan went to medical school in Paris and specialized in psychiatry. In the 1950s, Lacan started to hold weekly seminars which he kept organizing until the late 1970s and was invited to give lectures outside of his home country. He lectured in Italy, Japan, and the United States. Although he could no longer continue with the seminars, Lacan taught until the early ’80s. With his health progressively decaying, Jacques Lacan traveled to Caracas for the opening of the Freudian Field Institute which was his last public appearance as he died on September 9 of 1981.

3. Historical context: When was this written?

• Written in 1966, when he gave lectures in France.

• English Edition translated by Bruce Fink in 2006.

What is the author’s intention?

• The Ecritis is a book explaining the significance of self-identity. By examining the child’s neurology and its biology, Lacan sought to explain the child’s ability to self-identify.

What historical forces have influenced the writing?

• Freud

Followed Freud's psychoanalytic work; involving children's repression manifesting in aggression and sexual desire. While Lacan did agree with Freud's teachings, Lacan wanted to discover a phenomenon diverging from Freud’s teachings.

• Henri Wallon

Henri Wallon was a French philosopher who first noticed the phenomenon of self-identification with animals.

4. Summary:

• Identity is artificial

• Every one of us experiences a time of “enlightenment” that Lacan has named The Mirror Stage

• We begin to recognize ourselves as physical objects, separate from other objects, and our effect on those objects

• The Mirror Stage is the basis in which identity begins

5. Discussion:

SPLIT CLASS INTO BREAKOUT ROOMS (2 people per group)

1 question per group - tell them to talk about the question and try to answer it (give 5 mins)

When the groups come back and the class is together: Each group talks about what they came up with. After that, Show question #7 and discuss it with the whole class.

1. How do you define a fragmented body?

2. Have you ever experienced/witnessed a baby going through the mirror stage? Describe that experience

3. Have you ever had a personal experience with the mirror stage, meaning, have you ever witnessed a baby experiencing it? If so, how was that experience for you?

4. According to Lacan what motivates identity; do you disagree/agree with his statement?

5. How does the mirror stage affect one's identity in social environments?

6. What does Lacan mean / what is he trying to say with in this quote → “ It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge (savoir) into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process”