Lacan’s Mirror Stage Theory or Chasing Lacan’s Phallic Jouissance

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Lacan’s Mirror Stage Theory Or Chasing Lacan’s Phallic Jouissance My first read of Lacan’s Mirror Theory was mentally challenging to say the least. Perhaps, this is because his work is a translation and the meaning is lost in the translation from French to English. After re-reading his theory a few more times, I compared his theory with that of Sigmund Freud’s ego theory. It seems that both Lacan and Freud focus on the ego or the “I” as representing the male penis in Freud’s case or the phallus symbol in Lacan’s case. I reflected on how difficult it must have been for Lacan to build on well-established Western World theories concerning the essence of what it means to be human when he addressed his peers at a Congress. Freud, along with his contemporaries, felt that it was consciousness and not the unconscious that establishes the essence of humanness. Contrarily, Lacan posits that it is the unconscious and not the conscious that establishes humanness. To muddy up the waters further, Lacan speculates that the unconscious is structured like language. At first, I thought that he stated that language comes from the unconscious. But, that’s not it at all. He posits that the unconscious is structured similarly to language, it is not a language or any language. I couldn’t understand why Lacan was banned from the Congress of Psychoanalysis just for expressing his disbelief in Descartes Cogito theory that states, “I think, therefore, I am.” It also seems that Lacan based the foundation of his theory on Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory of the ego. He went further than Freud and based his belief on his psychoanalytic experience and pseudo ‘scientific’ observances. He noticed that while most animals are able to function or walk soon after being born, that human babies are born unable to walk or take care of their basic needs. Lacan posits that a walking
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