Mirror Stage

In reviewing the entry for intimacy on Wikipedia several items struck my interest that started to connect with other recently read theories.

The passage was

“Intimacy is both the ability and the choice to be close, loving, and vulnerable. Intimacy requires identity development. You have to know yourself and your inner self in order to share your self with another. Knowing yourself makes it possible to stand for yourself in an intimate relationship without taking over the other or losing yourself to the other. This ability to be separate and together in an intimate relationship and being okay with that is called self-differentiation. Lacking the ability to differentiate one self from the other is a form of symbiosis. This too is different from intimacy though to some that kind of dependent closeness may feel the same.”

There are quite a few interesting comments in this paragraph that could be evaluated with regard to our intimacy with product or digital interfaces, however I want to focus particularly on a specific section - “Intimacy requires identity development. You have to know yourself and your inner self in order to share your self with another.”

This line stuck in my head as it resonated with another recently read passage. In the intro to Arthur Danto’s essay “The Artistic Enfranchisement of Real Objects: The Artworld”, Danto relays two quotes regarding the purpose of art; the first by Socrates, and the second from Hamlet.

“Socrates saw mirrors as but reflecting what we can already see; so art, insofar as mirror-like, yields idle accurate duplications of the appearances of things, and is of no cognitive benefit whatever."

“Hamlet, more actutely, recognized a remarkable feature of reflecting surfaces, namely that they show us what we could not otherwise perceive - our own face and form, and so art, insofar as it is mirror-like, reveals us to ourselves.”

There is an embryo of a thought here that I have not fully worked out, but in the two quotes, it appears that art, the mirror, reveals us to ourselves; a necessity for the creation of intimacy. Intimacy is not so much an indepth understanding or knowledge of someone or something else, but of our own self. Design is the tool through which we get to know ourselves better.

Interestingly, the concept of mirroring and knowledge of oneself is not a new one.

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan coined the term the “Mirror Stage“.

via wikipedia: (I have yet to read source material and try to wrap my brain around the concept)

The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of objectification, the Ego being the result of feeling dissention between one's perceived visual appearance and one's perceived emotional reality. 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. He sees his image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. 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.[4] The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of 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.[9] This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.

It is interesting how the concept of alienation once again appears within the discussion of intimacy, in this case the alienation and the intimacy being about one’s own self.

This is all very fragmented and will require some research and consideration, but there are some curious and intriguing patterns developing in this overlapping of statements.