“What is ideology if not simply the familiar, well known, transparent myths in which a society or an age can recognize itself (but not know itself), the mirror it looks into for self-recognition, precisely the mirror it must break if it is to know itself?” –Althusser
The following piece was initially composed for a 2006 course within the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, titled: “The Rhetoric of Psychoanalysis.”
Freud
For Sigmund Freud, a fantasy is constructed around multiple, often repressed wishes, and employs disguise to mask and mark the very defensive processes by which desire is enacted.
The subject’s desire to maintain distance from the repressed wish and simultaneously experience it opens up a type of third person syntax allowing for multiple entry into the fantasy.
Therefore, in fantasy, vision is multiplied — it becomes possible to see from more than one position at the same time, to see oneself and to see oneself seeing oneself, to divide vision and dislocate subjectivity.
This radical omission of the “I” position creates space for all those processes that depend upon such a center, including not only identification but also the field and organization of vision itself.
Lacan
A child’s initiation into what Jacques Lacan would call the “mirror stage” entails a “libidinal dynamism” caused by a young child’s identification with his own image, and creation of the fantasy of what Lacan terms the “Ideal-I” or “Ideal ego.”[1]
This reflexivity inherent in fantasy is apparent in the mirror stage, since to recognize oneself as “I” is like recognizing oneself as other (“yes, that person over there is me”); this act is thus fundamentally self-alienating.
Indeed, for this reason feelings towards the image are mixed, caught between hatred (“I hate that version of myself because it is so much better than me”) and love (“I want to be like that image”).
A type of repetition compulsion develops from this vacillation as the attempt to locate a fixed subject proves ever elusive. “The mirror stage is a drama…which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality.”[2] This misrecognition (seeing an ideal-I where there is a fragmented, chaotic body) subsequently “characterizes the ego in all its structures.”[3]
[1] Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1999. Pg. 2
[2] Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1990. Pg. 20
[3] Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 2000. Pg 88.
