Regardez moi. . .

Blue Steel, Ferrari, Le Tigre, Magnum?: GenBub's latest bubble baron.

We at Generation Bubble are reminded of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who, in his landmark study, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” writes:

The human offspring, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. . .

This act, far from exhausting itself, as with the chimpanzee, once the image has been mastered and found empty, in the child immediately rebounds in a series of gestures in which he playfully experiences the relations of the assumed movements of the image to the reflected environment, and of this virtual complex to the reality it reduplicates the child’s own body, and the persons or even things in his proximity. . .

We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image — whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of the ancient term imago.

“Can you see the real me, doctor?”