Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan's Anxiety Seminar

Abstract

We are eager to call attention to Jacques Lacan’s reconsideration of the mirror stage in Seminar X: Anxiety, recently published in English for the first time. In Seminar X, Lacan was finding a way to fuse his own earlier thinking on childhood development with a fresh analysis of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny.’ ” Given that Lacan’s influential 1949 essay “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” can be read as a rewriting of Freud’s 1914 essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” and thus can be understood as part of Lacan’s broad project of returning to Freud’s original texts, we will suggest that, in the sessions from Seminar X spanning late November through late December of 1962, Lacan was returning his own “return to Freud” to Freud. In the process, he was changing its import considerably. The concepts developed in “The Mirror Stage,” which is now an indispensible part of psychoanalytic theory and a staple of introductory courses in literary theory, are known chiefly via Lacan’s 1949 essay, which gained new prominence once it was republished in Lacan’s epochal Écrits in 1966. It is easily “Lacan’s most famous theoretical contribution” (Johnston, “Jacques Lacan” sec.2.2) and, even by its first publication, was “a pearl which he had carefully cultured for some thirteen odd years” (Nobus 104). Time/frame: Rewriting the Mirror Stage in Lacan’s Anxiety Seminar