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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 human-made mirrors did not exist, humans were identifying other human beings as their images to understand how the body fits as a whole. In the case of mature humans who are psychotic subjects, this differentiation of inner and outer world is blurred, that’s why they identify their own thoughts as external voices or characters as if they exist in their reality. This pre-mature challenge of self-identification also holds for other species. For example, female pigeons are not attaining sexual reproductive maturity unless they see another pigeon as a reflection of themselves. 


The constitution of the ego is experienced in the same way while watching the films, especially the ones belong to mainstream cinema, since the depiction of the human form is anthropomorphic in terms of scale, space, and stories as Laura Mulvey describes.


“Here [in cinema], curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with, likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.” 


- Laura Mulvey


Topics that will be discussed: Scopophilia, ego-ideal, alienation


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