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Let's pick up on that discussion regarding psychology and eRepublik, shall we?

Last time, as you loyal readers will remember -- no doubt with unbounded pleasure -- in "Oh, Mother!" we hit on the Oediupus Complex. Today let's take the next logical step and reflect on the convulsive beauty of the Mirror Complex.

Such an understanding of human psychological and emotional development, as its discoverer Jacques Lacan once put it, is all about how "I must come to the place where the id was."




Lacan was a great friend to the surrealist movement and was admired by people like Breton, Bataille, Dali and Picasso. He celebrated the role of irrationality and advocated using psychoanalysis as a foil with which to probe what is lacking in science and philosophy.

During the May events of 1968 he voiced his sympathy for the revolutionary students.

His final and perhaps most profound work looked at the concept of the Real as a point of impossible contradiction in the Symbolic order, a perspective that had an important impact on both feminist and post-modern thought.

See my article "The Will to Disappearance" for a dreamy exploration of that. It is quite an interesting topic and something I hope to return to again, because I think it lies at the heart of what appeals to us in fantasy worlds like eRepublik that mirror, to some extent, a real-world existence.

But for today, let's return to the very beginnging of Lacan's work and focus more sharply on the notions embodied in his theory of the Mirror Stage... as interpreted, somewhat loosely, by yours truly in a New World context.




Here is the precis:

In the imaginary order of our e-lives, our own image permanently catches and captivates us. The mirror stage has a twofold value. In the first place, it has historical value as it marks a decisive turning-point in the mental development of the new player.

In the second place, it typifies an essential libidinal relationship with the body-image.

It is that second, structural, phase which continues to inform our e-lives as long as we play the game and leads us to pursue our desires for the never-quite-attainable real. There is an on-going conflictual nature to that dual relationship between how we are perceived and how we feel; it is this misunderstanding that we continually refine as we pursue our desires for wholeness.




Lacan picks up from Freud, rescuing what he referred to as the capital of experience that legitimately belongs to object relations. But he offered somewhat less sexualized explanations. Echoing Freud in more structuralist terms, he spoke of the primordial enclosure formed by the image of the mother's body and of the genesis of fetishism in the re-focus on transitional objects.

He began to depart from a classical understanding of the Oedipus Complex by digging into the agency of language in subjective constitution. The unconscious, in this view, is not a primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious. Rather the "linguistic ego" is a formation as complex and structurally-sophisticated as consciousness itself.

One consequence of the unconscious being structured like a language is that the self is denied any point of reference to which to be "restored" following trauma or a crisis of identity.

Foreshadowing Sarte's Nausea, Lacan emphasized that there is no "going back to the womb". Once you have seen your image in the mirror, you can't un-see it. And also like Sartre's theory of existential angst, Lacan's stress on the fundamental importance of the Word as well as the Thing, takes us well beyond the narrowly didactic materialism of both Freudianism and the more vulgar schools of Marxism, which is probably why his work continues to generate interest in our complex post-modern world.




The core metaphor is: at the age of about six months in real life -- equivalent to about the second week of e-life, I'd say -- human infants and chimpanzees both seem to recognize their reflection in a mirror. While chimpanzees rapidly lose interest in the discovery, human infants typically become very interested and devote much time and effort to exploring the connections between their bodies and their images.

In Lacan's theory, the visual identity given from the mirror supplies imaginary "wholeness" to the experience of a fragmentary real.

Of course, we can't take all of this too literally. The mirror is a metaphor.




The Ego is built as a result of identifying with one's own specular image. Conflict emerges because the child sees its image as a whole, but this contrasts with the lack of coordination of the body, leading the child to perceive a fragmented body.

In game terms, "I have this character, this avatar, which seems to be whole, but I can't make it work properly. Argh!" The conflict is felt by the new player as a rivalry with his or her own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens it with fragmentation; thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image.

To resolve this aggressive tension, the child or the new player identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego. That moment of identification is a jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery. Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the Mother.

Or New World terms, when the new player compares his own wobbly sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the veteran players.



In short, the Ego is the product of a misunderstanding, a false recognition. The subject becomes alienated from itself, and thus is introduced into the imaginary order.

To resolve this misunderstanding, the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head toward the adult -- in our world, the veteran players -- who represent the big Other, as if to call on Mother (or a Mentor) to ratify this image. And so the symbolic order is introduced into our consciousness.

Lacan referred to the "image in the mirror", to the imaginary order of Ego, as other with a small "o" and to the big Other always with a capital "O".

The little other is the other who is not really other, but a reflection and projection of the Ego. The big Other designates radical alterity, an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification. Such Otherness is identified with language and law, hence the big Other is inscribed in the order of the symbolic.

We look to Mother, to the big Other, to give us language. And we encounter anxiety (more or less the equivalent to Freud's castration anxiety; or in Derrida's more nuanced version, to the hymen-phallus chiasmus anxiety) when we discover that She may may have some lack in this ability.




To summarize, and to take us a few steps down the road towards a discussion of the Real and the role of Desire:

* The funadmental anxiety of seeing ourselve in the mirror for the first time takes us into the Imaginary: a field of images and imagination, of deception. We are presented with the illusions of synthesis, autonomy, duality, and similarity. The Ego and the imaginary order are places of radical alienation, a relationship marked by narcissistic disruptions.

* We turn to the Symbolic realm to rescue ourselves from the Imaginary. Law and Structure are unthinkable without language, but the Symbolic is not equivalent to language. The main marker of the symbolic is the signifier — this is a dimension in which elements have no positive existence, rather they are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences. Thus the symbolic is a place of radical alternity, of separation. Concepts of death, lacking and the pleasure principle begin to regulate our distance from the Thing.





Which leads us inevitably to ponder...

* The realm of the Real, which is not the same thing as "reality". The Real lies outside of language; it resists symbolization absolutely. It is "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. The object of anxiety par excellence, our desire for the Real and how we manage our drives in pursuit of those desires, is, somewhat ironically, what promises to make us whole.










"Lacan was an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan." -- Noam Chomsky






xio,

PQ