Lacan´s Mirror Stage

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Lacans mirror stage

Self-recognition is fundamental building block for humans, we exist as individuals each with out own differences and recognition of each other is an important feature for us. Psychoanalytic theorist had attempted to understand the complexities of the human mind truth identity and agency in the world. Advance in technologies brought us an opportunity to create virtual worlds2 and in many ways artificial reality is bound by the fundamental rules of gravity, day night cycle, space distance and even living creatures to inhabit the virtual world. Focus will be drawn to users creation of avatars as a means of identification and constitution of self in virtual world. The avatar has the potential to bring a new dimension to the sense of self and might change boundaries between real and the virtual, the physical and the imaginary. In this essay I will attempt to question Lacan's mirror stage relevance in artificial world.
Artificial world avatars are primary visual entities, this parallels with Lacan's mirror stage.
Lacan's Mirror stage in this context is about self identification. Lacan explain it truth toddlers recognition of self truth the mirror. At first, baby will see the perfect image of self, the coherent, coordinated and also an object of the desire for another (mother), the “perfect other”. This moment is the first time when infant sees him self as a full entity. It is very likely that before he only known him self as seperate limbs. At this moment of the mirror stage toddler is pleased about self. But soon after, baby falls into a language and no longer sees self as an ideal I. Toddler recognise that there is a parent who is holding him and he very much depend on them, that ideal I does not have own...

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...can's mirror stage to psychoanalysis was that it specified the origins of the ego, a founding moment from which it is possible to understand self. Specular image may be without infants control, but the product of that experience is a composition and an act of invention accordingly the infant's self is constructed (Evans 1996). The behaviour in avatar customization suggest similar expierance whitch occurs in creation of ideal ego – the being assumed in the mirror stage. The elongated processes of estrangement and identification play out in virtual worlds through the altering and customising of the avatar aesthetic. As for the human subject, who throughout life will 'seek and foster the imaginary wholeness of an “ideal ego”' (Evans 1996), so the virtual world user continually strives to alter the avatar, searching for the comfort of succinct and whole representation.

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