39: It’s Not You, It’s Lacan: The Mirror Stage, Part I

Abby, Patrick, and Dan kick off their 2024 Lacan era by tackling his single most famous essay and concept: the mirror stage. Because Lacan is notoriously difficult, this is going to take multiple episodes, of which the first is devoted to stage-setting, demystifying, and unpacking exactly why Lacan is both so notoriously difficult, and also notorious in general. What shakes out of their ensuing conversation includes Lacan’s biography (in brief); Lacan as a reader of Freud and the description of his project as a “return to Freud”; the experience of reading Lacan; frustration, anxiety, the pressure of time, and the logic of the “short session”; and more. Then they turn to the essay itself, getting granular about Lacan’s relationship to phenomenology (and what that is), his opposition to Descartes’ cogito (and what that entails), and more, building to the famous scene of the baby jubilant before the image of itself in the mirror. What a charming scene of self-recognition and unproblematic joy! Or is it? Stay tuned for the next installment.

Texts cited:

Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton 2007. Translated by Bruce Fink.

Malcolm Bowie, Lacan.

Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method and Meditations on First Philosophy.

Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations

Bruck Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique

Kareem Malone and Stephen Friedlander, eds. The Subject of Lacan: A Lacanian Reader for Psychologists

Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: Death of an Intellectual Hero

Jonathan Lear, Freud

Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan

Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in The Garden of Forking Paths

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