The Birth of the Divided Subject: Ego / Self

      Few events have greater significance in the psychological
life  of a child than the acquisition of language. Between  six
and  eighteen  months  the  infant develops  the  capacity  for
psychic  representation and the ability to  separate  from  and
recognize  its own image as other. For example, the infant  who
has  previously shown no sign of recognition when looking in  a
mirror  suddenly begins to smile in seeing its reflected image.
This  event, perfectly normal in the life of an infant, signals
the  development  of the capacity to recognize  its  own  self-
representation.1[1] The process of  looking  at and recognizing
its own image as other, differentiates the psychic image of the
child  from its physical body. Prior to the mirror  stage,  the
child  lacks  the capacity to distinguish  the subjective  from
the   objective,  the  representational  from  the  biological.
Desire  and its object are indistinguishable. For example,   if
there is hunger, it is not the child's hunger for the infant is
incapable  of  conceiving a "self" separate  from  its  desire.
But during  the mirror stage, this unity of experience is split
and  the  child  develops  the capacity  to  differentiate  the
psychic  image  from biological experience. The differentiation
between the biological infant and the psychic image  with which
the  infant identifies is  only the anticipation of a far  more
profound  differentiation of the psyche that will occur  during
language  acquisition. The later process of acquiring  language
replaces the psychic image of the body with a linguistic image,
the first person pronoun.2[2] The visual  image is replaced  by
an acoustic image, e.g. "I" in English. With the acquisition of
language  comes  an   ontological rupture  between   word   and
body,  between description and event.  During the mirror  stage
the   human   subject   becomes  possible   when   neurological
development allows the  infant to distinguish objects, and  the
human  subject  becomes  actual when  the  child  develops  the
capacity for representation.
      The development of the capacity to identify with  a self-
representation  is  the action upon which all  subjectivity  is
based;  it  is  the  moment   human reflexivity  is  born.  The
infant's discovery of and identification with  its `own  image'
differentiates  the personality into unconscious and conscious,
experience  and   image,   literal and   metaphorical.  Viewing
its own image as other results in the realization that the self-
representation  actually `belongs' to the same  child   viewing
and  experiencing  the  psychic image  as  other.  Octavio  Paz
describes the subject's experience of otherness this way:

          "Otherness"    is    above   all   the   simultaneous
          perception that we are others without ceasing  to  be
          what we are and that, without ceasing to be where  we
          are, our true being is in another place." (Paz, 1975,
          p. 245)3[3]

     As the infant views its own image  as other, this very act
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of viewing simultaneously brings into being the subjectivity of
the  infant  doing the viewing.  Self-reflection is the  visual
experience  of the psychic image and the `real' separated  only
by the amount of time it takes the reflected light to return to
the  child's  eye.   The act of reflection  mixes  up  the  two
heterogenous subjects, the image and the real, "I"  and  other,
the fictional and the  autobiographical in a single event. This
infinitely  fast oscillation between the image and  the  `real'
constitutes  the birth of the divided subject (representational
self  /  experiential  self;  ego  /  self)  and  its  inherent
reflexivity.  The extraordinary economy of such a simple event,
a  child  observing its own reflection in the other,  perfectly
normal in its drama and staging, spontaneously deconstructs the
oppositional  logic  that  lies  in  the  Western   categorical
distinction  between the psychic image and   the  real.[4]  The
`first act'  of self-reflection produces the very drama it  re-
views.  It is the play and the re-play, the action and the  re-
action,  the  cognition and the re-cognition in  an  infinitely
fast  oscillation contained within a single event. The  child's
dramatic  performance of the  mirror stage consists  simply  in
producing it's self. It is a reflection that creates  the  self
of self-reflection by creating the drama in the very act of re-
viewing it.
      The mirror stage is a paradigmatic metaphor for the birth
of  self-reflexive  consciousness  and  the  mutual  dependence
between   the  image and the real. There can be  no  reflection
without  the   real child and there can be no consciousness  of
the  real  child  without the child imago.  The  real  and  the
imaginal  are  co-terminus: each co-implicates the  other.  The
realization that  human subjectivity is constructed through the
reflexive  creation of representations, leads to the  awareness
that we are in language and creating metaphors of ourselves, as
well  as  of our understanding of ourselves, all the time.  The
human subject is something constructed through metaphorizing in
every  dimension  of our psychic existence and  does  not  come
into being without the participation of an elaborate linguistic
environment.  Without the capacity for the  self  to  represent
itself, either as an image or as a word, and thereby look  back
at  itself  from  another  perspective,  the  construction   of
personality  and its characteristic capacity for representation
and self-reflection would be impossible.