El establecimiento de la pensión de alimentos en el Código de la

In this section, I would like to briefly compare Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage with Henri Wallon’s interpretation of this stage. On the one hand, I will put Lacan’s theory in perspective by reframing the context and the function of the mirror stage as a developmental stage and a metaphor. On the other hand, by changing the perspective, I will posit Lacan’s theory of reflection, as I have reconstructed it throughout this chapter, as only one version of psychological

theory of reflection, instead of treating it as the only one.345

As I have mentioned earlier, Lacan owes the concept of the mirror stage to Henri Wallon (1879-1962), although throughout his career Lacan “forgets” to acknowledge this fact and always

insists that it was he who introduced the term.346 In 1931, Wallon gives the name épreuve du miroir

(mirror test) to an experiment through which the child learns to distinguish his own body from its

reflected image between the age of three months and the end of the first year.347 _{Wallon relies upon}

the empirical observations made by Charles Darwin, William Preyer and Paul Guillaume, which suggest that children usually remain indifferent towards their own reflection before the age of three months, fixate and smile to it around the age of four months and understand that the reflected

image does not lead a separate existence by the end of the first year of their lives.348 Wallon is

344 _{Lacan 1991b:52}

345 _{Interestingly, it was Wallon who commissioned Lacan’s 1938 essay on “The Family Complexes.” Moreover,}

various empirical researchers from the 1970s onward have revisited mirror (and video) self-recognition phenomena in young children. For other usages of reflection analogy in psychology see, e.g., Vanheule and Verhaeghe

2009:399-402; Pines 1998:17-40.

346 _{Roudinesco 2003:27}

347 _{Roudinesco 2003:27; Nobus 2017:106} 348 _{Nobus 2017:105-106}

interested in the development of self-awareness in respect to one’s unified image of the body. He argues that the child does not recognize himself or herself at the first stage because during this period the child forms a unity with his or her own image. Recognition of oneself in a mirror must be preceded by recognition of the other, which implies a comparison of two images different in

nature.349 He speculates that the child’s engagement with his mirror-image and the progressive

mastery of it result in the child’s ability to distinguish himself or herself from the rest of the world.350

While early Lacan, as evidenced in his “Family Complexes,” shares with Wallon his interest in the mirror test as an explanation for certain developmental processes, he gradually distances himself from Wallon’s perception of the mirror test by recasting it in terms of the

unconscious.351 This is not surprising, as strictly speaking each of them works in a different

conceptual framework: Wallon primarily in the field of cognitive development (dominated by such figures as Jean Piaget); Lacan in psychoanalysis (essentially Freudian tradition).

Nevertheless, Lacan and Wallon share an essential commitment to non-reducibility of psychical life to natural factors, and seek to explain how social factors collaborate with and dominate the natural. In particular, both are interested in describing the internalization of social structures by the psychological subject, the process through which the external social dynamics turns into an individual psychical and cognitive activity. Like Lacan, Wallon utilizes the concept of reflection, not only in the particular context of the mirror stage, but metaphorically extends it to the description of the subject-other interrelations:

349 _{Voyat 1984:43} 350 _{Nobus 2017:106} 351 _{Roudinesco 2003:30}

“Man begins by being reflected in another man as in a mirror. Only when Peter develops an attitude toward Paul which is similar to the attitude he has toward himself, does Peter begin to become conscious of himself as a man.” This statement of Marx’s (Capital, Vol. 3) expresses very clearly the back-and-forth motion between self and other, and between the image perceived in the other and oneself – an interplay which not only has a moral or social character but is also an essential psychological process.352

Wallon accepts Marx’s comparison of human social nature to a mirror; human individuals form their self-image through treating other human beings as mirrors, and perceive themselves as mirrors reflecting, internalizing, and imitating the others.

Wallon, a relatively orthodox Marxist, probably inherits the framing of the problem of social internalization and his method from “cultural-historical psychology,” developed in the

Soviet Union by Lev Vygotsky, Alexei Leontiev, and others.353 The central factor in internalization

and psychologization of the social, in this school, plays human activity and practice. The process of learning and development involves social interaction with others, personal imitation of the activity of others, and further repetition of this activity through one’s own efforts. Language plays an important part in the process of internalization, as it serves both as a medium of social communication and as giving shape to thought.

In his study of imitation in early childhood, Wallon traces the developmental transition from practical (sensorimotor) intelligence, which serves the children’s learning through interacting with objects, to intelligence that operates via representations and symbols. When the infant is still incapable of intentional acts, after the eleventh week, he or she is able to stick his or her tongue out when someone else is doing it in front of him or her. At this stage, imitation is merely an

352 _{Wallon 1984a:127}

353 _{On the impact of Soviet psychology on Wallon see Wallon 1984b:256-257. It should be noticed that the later}

involuntary reflex. Around the seven months, however, the child knows how to stick his or her tongue out without an actual model present. This development demonstrates the transition to real imitation. The child first imitates the emotional expressions of others, such as the smile of the adult. In so doing, the child establishes a communication with an adult that has an integrating effect. At about three years of age, the child begins to achieve differentiation between the object and its representation and becomes capable of intentional imitation, in which the model, instead of being imposed on the child, is chosen by him. The desire to imitate is added to the ability to imitate.354

For Wallon, imitation is a necessary component of representation, which stands for the substitution of one word or object for another. Imitation takes place on the level of an action repeating the activity of the model, while the active substitution of the model by a different thing is responsible for the development of representational thinking. For instance, a child playing train

with a wooden block, imitates the action of the train and substitutes the train with the block.355

More recent researchers into these identificatory phenomena likewise emphasize the important

role of imitation.356

As I have mentioned earlier, Lacan locates certain “mirroring” qualities responsible for the internalization of social reality within the cerebral cortex. Wallon, following Pavlov, also considers the cerebral cortex a place in which the reaction of the reflexes to the external stimuli is taking place, and as a result develops “higher nervous activity.” Cerebral cortex, thus, is responsible for the interaction between organism and environment – not only physical but also social environment,

354 _{Voyat 1984:38-39} 355 _Ibid:39

on which we depend for our existence and which we create and shape through our own activity.357 Like Lacan in his fundamental article from 1949, Wallon cautiously relates the development of an awareness to one’s body-image, to the cortical activity, responsible for the synchronization

between the visual sphere of perception and the kinesthetic activity in the body.358 _{More recently,}

these claims have been substantiated in terms of neuroplasticity, following the discovery that the genetic functions may change as a result of external influences, and epigenetics, studying physical changes in the brain due to experience.

Wallon accepts Lacan’s characterization of early childhood as an experience of fragmentation and search for unity, but criticizes some of its tragic implications. I will quote him in some length:

There are nightmares and delusions which effectively demonstrate that this systematic combination of the parts of the body into a dynamic and harmonious unit is by no means there from the outset, and that it is always liable to break down once more. On the other hand, to speak as the psychoanalysts do of a return to the “abysses” of childhood, to look upon the child as a tortured soul in search of body wholeness, or like Lacan to evoke “dislocation, dismemberment, emasculation, cannibalism, entombment,” is to invent a tragic reality to which nothing in the child’s behavior actually attests. The child’s researches concerning himself and the objects about him are informed by the same lively and often joyful curiosity that he brings to his perceptual and motor learning. To feel dislocated, he would have to be endowed with some kind of foreknowledge of his future bodily unity, and there is no evidence to support this idea. Where could such an intuition come from at this stage, before the indispensable nervous maturation and the experiences to which this maturation will open the door?359

357 _{Wallon 1984c:243-244} 358 _{Wallon 1984a:130} 359 _{Wallon 1985a:123}

Lacan’s theory, in fact, is capable of addressing these objections. While it is true that the child has not experienced bodily unity prior to its anticipation during the mirror stage, he or she has already experienced the loss of unity at birth due to the violent separation from the mother’s body. Although the child cannot consciously remember, this event is registered in the unconscious as the primary traumatic experience. Furthermore, the fact that existential anxieties regarding one’s unity are not manifested in the child’s conscious behavior does not mean that these do not exist on the unconscious level.

It is not the purpose of the present study to take sides either with Lacan or Wallon on their interpretations of the mirror stage and their stands on the question of social internalization. The comparison between the two rather aims at clarifying their positions and underlining the variety of

theories of reflection existing in the field of contemporary psychological theories.360

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have examined Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, his model of two mirrors and a bouquet, as well as his concept of the intra-organic mirror related to the phenomenon of consciousness and located in the cerebral cortex. I have discussed the concept of reflection as explanatory of the interaction between nature and the society and constitutive of the ego, the “knot” between the two realms. In later writings, Lacan presents the ego as a different kind of “knot” connecting between the imaginary and the real by means of the symbolic.

Lacan’s second reflection in the cerebral cortex explains the internalization of social structures and the symbolic order by the subject. For Lacan, internalization is passive and is driven by the captivating power of the imagos (in early Lacan), as well as through the symbolic order

(Lacan of the 1950-s). Wallon challenges this notion of passive reflection and maintains that the subject internalizes social processes through active imitation of other human beings.

Lacan’s implementation of the concept of reflection is an example of well-developed theory of reflection as applied to the interaction between social and natural realms, between the real and the imaginary and to the formation of the psychical agency of the ego. Lacan’s theory of reflection shares with Indian theories the following features: 1. Reflection is an explanation of interaction between entities with distinct ontological statuses; 2. Reflection is responsible for the arising of the ego – an entity of a mixed ontological ancestry whose function is the illusory identity between subjective and objective contents; 3. Reflection is an account of internalization of external contents by mental faculty; 4.Reflection describes the essential openness of the ego towards identity with the contents and properties which do not originally belong to it (as in Advaita and Yoga), as well as the inseparability between the subject and the other (as in Advaita). These characteristics of the ego and the subject can be expressed by the formula “Thou art That!.”

Chapter 6: Phenomenology and Ontology of Self-Recognition in a Mirror: Towards