Perseus and the Gorgon or the Mirror Stage

Two backgrounds and the same concept and progress, I will try to clarify in a third time.

1 – The Mirror stage.

(Describing the formation of the Ego).

{This identification is what LACAN called “alienation”.

At six months the baby still lacks coordination.

However, he can recognize himself in the mirror before attaining control over his bodily movements.

“Nausica Eyes”. Copyright Alice ODILON 2009. No clone is free.

He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a contrast with the real body which is perceived as fragmented.

This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with his own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens him with fragmentation,

and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image.

To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego.

It must be said that the mirror stage has also a significant symbolic dimension.

The Symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head towards this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image}.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jacques_Lacan).

2 – The Act: curtain opens in the cave of the Gorgons.

The snake-haired Medusa (“I bear terror”)is deeply sleeping in her cave.

Using Athena’s shield as a mirror to avoid the fell gaze of the Gorgon.

Perseus decapitates Medusa

Then, using Pluto’s helmet to make himself invisible, Perseus flees the wrath of the remaining Gorgons carrying Medusa’s head.

A) Let us resume the scene of the Mirror Stage: The Girl “a” confronts again with her “spéculaire” image.

She waits for a reaction of her reflection(this Other one)in the mirror.

And there this reflection seems to her, intimate and invasive.

Fortunately Mom is in the room behind her there, and the girl turns around towards her to cross her glance, then towards her words, to make sure of her intuition of identification in the “spéculaire image.”

The mother does not hold her in the arms, and is placed behind the girl, she decides not to name her, her image.

She does not say to her: “it is the image of your body, it is you whom we see in the mirror”.

But the Mother has a glance of Jellyfish which reflects but does not see, she lets sink the child into the fascination of the “reflecting eyes”.

The child never get the approving judgment of her blind Mother.

“Tournant le dos à la Gorgone pour ne pas être pétrifiée”. Copyright Alice ODILON 2009

{It is the negation of the future, the negation of the “that”, the negation of the unconscious.} J.M.FORGET (Anorexia symptom-out).

It is a categorical eye.

“Category” in Greek means proceeding to an accusation: – “you are A and not “no A”! You are static and not dynamics, you have more no right to speak that a corpse.”

The little Girl here is transformed into object.

“The Perseides dolls”. Copyright Alice ODILON 2009. no clone is free.

This “missed Mirror Stage” has a big symbolic valuin the psychic evolution of the girl there to become anorexic.

Mom sees her daughter as a fixed object, wants her daughter frozen in an immortal fate without becoming.

Mom wants to bury her daughter in the melancholy because she lives herself this terrible spell.

The girl wants to be named to be able to cross the test of the mirror.

Then the girl meets herself alone in front of this double who is not maybe her, and then, where is she, from which nucleus she arises?

The girl begins a new life with this double “spéculaire”, with a certain guilt  because the Mother did not give her agreement, namely does not have accepted that this reflection has the right to exist and represents her daughter.

The girl saw in the eyes of her Mother only the black and not the desire of her Mother for her, her life.

Instead of the black, the girl chooses the mirror with this double.

The girl is dying to play with this double which will not bring her the rest of the recognized unity.

And if the girl sees herself it is by piece and never in its entirety in the eyes of her mother.

She lives in a symbiotic relation with the Mother and confronts with her double “(image spéculaire)”.

Henceforth the girl is confronted with enormous problems of distinction between the “Me” and the others, the inside and the outside, and gets lost in her relationship with her “spéculaire image”.

And so her “body image” builds itself to and nevertheless, limited by a vague outline, and also by an uncertain size.

As we see it in this story, the glance of the little Girl (Perseus), which recovers from the “that”, don’t triumph over the eye (Gorgon), the static and mortifying material sphere,

the head of Jellyfish eyes of which stop any change “.

So the anorexic girl becomes the invisible Peeping Tom, the one who sees, unnoticed, the one who gets lost, unnoticed, the one who plays with copies, unnoticed.

I will clarify this word “unnoticed” in a next future post.

Alice ODILON. OCTOBER 2009