Skip to main content

The Mirror Scene | FIRST


The mirror is a coated surface that reflects a clear image of reality as any dictionary may define. However, the image that is seen by one would not solely be the clear image of reality, when the psychological state of whom is taken into consideration. The identification of self and the image of oneself that is intended to be seen through reflection may not be overlapping in several moments, it can be even the opposite. The ideal self that one wants to become is described as “ego ideal” which is desired to be seen when one looks toward its reflection. This relationship of one and its ego ideal is depicted through mirror scenes in the cinema since the mirror is a powerful metaphor in the case of referring interrelation of these terms. In cinema many of the characters who are in depressive states are depicted as they are falling apart from their reflections by putting distance in between the mirror and the performer, or placing the mirror in an unreachable position, indicating the disconnection of their existing self and their ideal personas. On contrary, the over-intimacy of the characters and their reflections may indicate the manic state of mind concerning the unification of the self and the ego ideal. Now, I am interested in revealing the underlying psychoanalytic references that discuss the relation of self and ego ideal, since the act of looking at the surface and recognizing oneself from there is interesting in itself. 




Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Umbrella

The word umbrella derives from the Latin where “umbra” means shadow.    Similarly, “para” defines shelter or shield, and “sol” means sun and they construct the word “parasol” which is used with the term umbrella interchangeably, yet parasols have a straight shaft different than the curved handle of the umbrella. As their etymological roots suggest, the primal intention of creating this object was the protection from exposure to the sun around four millennia before today. The early materials used in the construction were the tree leaves and branches until the invention of paper in China. The paper predecessors of this object later oiled since then the function of them have expanded from sunshade to protection from the rain even though they were not totally waterproof. These oil-paper parasols as well as dry, silk parasols made their way to Europe around Renaissance and became a fashionable trend amongst women. In 1708 The Kersey’s Dictionary defined the umbrella as “a screen commonly us

Umbrella | Political References

The umbrella can protect people from various factors as well as the rain and sun. In 2014, umbrellas gained the mission of protecting the crowd from pepper spray and rubber bullets during the protests in Hong Kong regarding more transparent elections, which were later named “The Umbrella Movement”. The object, particularly the yellow ones, became a symbol for protests and in general used as a tool for passive resistance. In 2019, during the time of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement again in Hong Kong, the object carried the importance of collective expression, privacy, and self-defense for protesters in the same manner yet umbrellas have been labeled as weapons by police forces so that the ordering of the object from e-commerce platforms like AliExpress was banned. Beyond being a symbol of resistance, umbrellas were used as camouflage to provide privacy for protesters, as a shield and defense mechanism for protection against police forces as the people from protests clai

The Mirror Stage

I believe that cinema can be defined as an allegory of the mirror. This simile will not be built solely by focusing on the mirror scenes in the films but by comparing psychoanalytic aspects of both the cinema as an art form and the mirror. I will start with the emphasis on Lacan’s Mirror Stage since it is a formative theory about how the image of self is created before language and why it is crucial for a human being to function as a unified viable entity. Firstly, it can be claimed that humans are not born with an adequate number of instincts to make them conceptualize disparate bodily experiences. Therefore, the relation between the organism and its reality is needed to be established in order to differentiate the external and internal stimulants. In the mirror stage where the infants come across with their reflection, this “separation-individuation” is formed for the sake of ego subjectivity, since the baby observes its own body integrity in a full-length mirror. In the times that h