Lacan and Imaginary

Jacques Lacan conceives of the imaginary as a basis of a misrecognized selfhood. For Lacan, the imaginary is associated with ideal, illusion, and misrecognition. According to Lacan, the self is a split self; the imaginary is an internalized image of an ideal whole self that young people, during their preverbal stages, derive from an unfragmented image that they have of their own selves. When an infant looks at a mirror and sees his or her image wholly present, the wholeness of the image establishes itself in the infant’s mind, where the image constitutes the infant’s ego, the concept of identity. In other words, this mirror image is an image of wholeness—of completeness and coherence—and reflects, for the infant, a complete and coherent internal self. Lacan argues that this line of reasoning in the infant’s mind leads to a profound misrecognition of what it means to be human. However, the mirror stage, which ends with a sense of the self as complete, has an important social function: by creating the subject (the self), the mirror stage enables the subject to recognize and to interact with objects (the external world). Media scholars, for example, use Lacan’s theory to explain how the subject identifies with screen images to fulfill his or her desire to achieve oneness, to replace our permanent lack with completeness.