Before Freud, there wasn’t a subconscious and identity just meant your name and parentage. Once we found the key to our internal door however, it only took five minutes of poking around in there to realize it’s not that simple.
In the twentieth century, after Freud, identity came something else – your sense of self, the idea of yourself that you carry around with you. It’s your psychic skin – your mental avatar. It orients you and shapes you and it’s taken for granted.
But you’re not born with it. Babies don’t know who they are, picture themselves or have a sense of self… so how do we get it? Where does it come from?
French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan tells us a ‘just-so” story about how we first get our identity. It’s a story that strips things down to raw consciousness, and holds some fascinating clues to the human condition…
When a baby is born, it doesn’t know why it cries or why it suckles. it has no sense of itself as being discrete from its environment. Everything is one. Sensations may come from within or without – there is no difference because there is no within and without. There are no boundaries, limits, no identity and no subjectivity, there is just fluid experience.
At some point in a child’s development, this changes. The infant slowly awakes to the fact that there is an outside and an inside; a world separate from her, one that she can interact with and that can interact with her. She is torn out of her imaginary completeness and thrown into a world of difference and separation – this is the birth of subjectivity.
Subjectivity alone is not enough for identity. Subjectivity just tells us that we are not the world; an identity requires us to see ourselves in the world. In order to do this, you have to make an imaginary leap outside yourself, to see yourself as a whole person.
We can describe this step by using the example of the infant recognising her reflection for the first time. At around 18 months she can look in a mirror and, instead of seeing meaningless reflections of light and form, or even another child, she will see herself. The child can look into the mirror at this separate image of herself, and in a moment of recognition that takes place before she has any words to express it, she knows that ‘that’s me’.
It is a deeply conflicted phrase. ‘This is me’ makes perfect sense, but ‘That is me’ contains a deep, jarring disconnection. It is not just a linguistic shortcut to avoid saying ‘that is an image of me’; she wholly identifies with the child in the mirror. What’s more, because this identification is how she creates a sense of identity in the first place, the jarring disconnection is at the heart of human experience.
Let’s recap and think about how this thing called ‘identity’ has come about. There are several important aspects of the process to recognise:
• The first is that it happens at a price, and the price is the painful loss of the original, imaginary unity and completeness. Identity is born out of loss. The possibility of aloneness now exists.
• The second is that this painful wrenching out of imaginary completeness requires a massive fracturing of the psyche. The loss of unity means that what was once whole is now broken into “me” and “not me” or “self” and “other”.
• The third is that our identity is forged through the dislocating process of identification. The subject and subjectivity are created – paradoxically – by discovering the self in an image outside oneself. For the rest of our lives, we will locate parts of our selves in external identifications with people, things, images and ideas.
There are also two important qualities of this identity that should be noted:
• The initial separation of “self” from “other” is a massive fracturing, and the further process of identification is dislocating. Identity is therefore broken up, fractured along fault lines, often incomplete and has poorly defined boundaries. It can be described as a collection of identities, more or less tightly bound together.
• The thing that does the binding in this description is our illusory self-image, which in contrast appears whole, complete, intact and unique. We identify with these qualities, and so they mask the underlying instability.
The above is an attempt to set down my own understanding of what I lerant from my studies of Lacan’s theory of the Mirror Stage. It may not be an accurate reflection of his work. I wrote it for my own satisfaction; this is the sense I made of it, the sense that I’m happy with.
Lacan’s concept of identity is essentially a more sophisticated revision of Freud. Lacan took Freud’s narratives of Id vs. Ego and the Oedipal complex and recognized them for the metaphors that they were.
Our identities are metaphors as well – they are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Once you try to get behind the metaphor to see what it really is, you discover we are, in Douglas Hofstadter’s words, ‘hallucinations, hallucinated by a hallucination”. More on Hofstadter in Pt. 2.