The Mirror Stage and the Pastimes of Narcissus

Toward a Radical Psychoanalysis at the Threshold of the Real

Preface

I recently got together with my friend, Andrew Flores, Jr., to discuss Lacan’s essay, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” (video above). Our free-associative and wide-ranging conversation inspired me to write this essay about the mirror stage.

In what follows, I offer a textual afterthought to this conversation by tracing the chronological development of Lacan’s mirror stage, its confluence with the cultural context of surrealism, its parallels with Upanishadic Advaitism, and the implications for a radical psychoanalysis that approaches the threshold of the real. I ground my analysis in ample selections from Lacan’s works to give new readers a feel for his evocative, aphoristic style.

Psychoanalysis and Surrealism

“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” is published in Lacan’s Écrits, a collection of his written works, where it is placed as the second essay. Since the Écrits is not organized chronologically but conceptually, the early placement of this essay marks its significance as a paradigmatic foundation of Lacan’s articulation of psychoanalysis. However, Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage dates to 1936, predating the publication of this essay by thirteen years.

Figure 1. Salvador Dalí, The Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937, oil on canvas, Tate Modern, London.

Lacan’s exploration of the mirror motif arises in the milieu of surrealism, where mirrors and labyrinths were employed as tropes for the unconscious. In the Spring of 1937, Salvador Dalí painted the Metamorphosis of Narcissus, a double-image painting depicting the Greek myth of Narcissus. In Dalí's painting, Narcissus is drawn as a figure of stone whose head takes the form of a cracked egg. On the left side of the image, roots grow from the cracked egg, and on the right side, a Narcissus flower blooms from the egg.

The timing of Dalí’s painting (one year after Lacan presents the mirror stage) and the close friendship between Dalí and Lacan illustrate a confluence of considerations. In one sense, we can say that Lacan’s notion precedes Dalí’s painting, but this does not guarantee the genesis of the notion. The intermingling of psychoanalysis and surrealism in Paris is already evident in Lacan’s 1932 doctoral thesis, On Paranoiac Psychoses in its Relationship with Personality, where we see a confluence between Lacan’s notion of “paranoiac knowledge” and Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method”.¹

A Textual Chronology of the Mirror Stage

Marienbad Congress (1936) and La Famille (1938)

Lacan first presented his notion of the mirror stage at the IPA Congress in Marienbad in 1936, where he was famously interrupted by Ernest Jones. In Lacan’s own words:

. . . [T]he structure that is characteristic of the human world—insofar as it involves the existence of objects that are independent of the actual field of the tendencies and that can be used both symbolically and instrumentally—appears in man from the very first phases of development. How can we conceive of its psychological genesis?

My construction known as “the mirror stage”—or, as it would be better to say, “the mirror phase”—addresses such a problem.

I duly presented it at the Marienbad Congress in 1936, at least up to the point, coinciding exactly with the fourth stroke of the ten-minute mark, at which I was interrupted by Ernest Jones who was presiding over the congress.²

There is no apparent record of the presented paper, to which Lacan adds, “I did not submit my paper for inclusion in the proceedings of the congress; you can find the gist of it in a few lines in my article about the family published in 1938 in the Encylopédie française”.³ Thus arrives the first articulation of the mirror stage in print in Lacan’s article titled La Famille. The term “article” is misleading, since this piece is a significant essay that explores the Oedipal complex in relation to the “formation of the individual”. Early in the essay, Lacan presents the mirror stage:

Affective identification is a psychic function whose originality has been established by psychoanalysis, especially in the Oedipus complex, as we shall later see. But the use of the term at the stage we are studying remains ill-defined in the doctrine. That is why I have attempted to fill the gap with a theory of this identification whose genesis I describe by using the term ‘mirror stage’.

The stage thus designated corresponds to the final phase of weaning, that is, to the end of those six months during which the dominant psychic feeling of discontent associated with a retardation in physical growth expresses the prematurity of birth that underlies weaning in the human being. Now, the recognition by the subject of his image in the mirror is a phenomenon that is doubly significant for the analysis of this stage: it appears after six months and its study demonstrates the tendencies that at that time constitute the subject’s reality. Because of these affinities, the mirror image is a good symbol of this reality: of its affective value, illusory like the image, and of its structure in that it reflects the human form.⁴

Here, we find Lacan’s most basic definition of the mirror stage as a developmental phase, beginning at six months of age, and as reflective of a “prematurity of birth”. Lacan will continue to employ this phrase in his writings on the mirror stage, but his association of this with the final phase of weaning is notably explicit here. Lacan also makes clear that, in associating this phase with the phenomenon of a mirror, he is elucidating the affective and illusory nature of the egoic structure.

We can already see how Lacan’s mirror stage is an elaboration of the myth of Narcissus. And he proceeds to give direct commentary on this:

The narcissistic structure of the ego: The world appropriate to this phase is thus a narcissistic world. In so describing it we are not simply evoking its libidinal structure by the same term to which from 1908 on Freud and Abraham assigned the purely energetic meaning of investment of libido in the body. We also wish to penetrate its mental structure and give it the full meaning of the Narcissus myth. Whether this meaning is taken to indicate death—a vital insufficiency from which this narcissistic world grows; or the mirror image—the imago of the double is central to it; or the illusion of the image—this world, as we shall see, has no place for others.

Parallels in Adi Da’s Teachings

Lacan’s observation of the narcissistic structure of the ego precedes an identical observation by Adi Da, marking a significant parallelism between psychoanalysis and spirituality. To my knowledge, Adi Da was not familiar with Lacan’s teaching, though he studied Freud and incorporated the Oedipus complex into his considerations of spiritual development. In his earliest publication, The Knee of Listening, Adi Da presents his discovery of Narcissus as the “controlling myth” of human life:

Eventually, I began to recognize a structure in my humanly-born conscious awareness. It became more and more apparent, and its nature and effects revealed themselves as fundamental, inclusive of all the states and contents in life and mind. My own “myth”—the governor of all patterns, the source of presumed self-identity, the motivator of all seeking—began to stand out in the mind as a living being.

This “myth”, this controlling logic (or force) that structured and limited my humanly-born conscious awareness, revealed itself as the self-concept—and the actual life—of Narcissus. I saw that my entire adventure—the desperate cycle of Awakeness and its decrease, of truly Conscious Being and Its gradual covering in the mechanics of living, seeking, dying, and suffering—was produced out of the image (or mentality) that appears hidden in the ancient myth of Narcissus.

The more I contemplated him, the more profoundly I understood him. I observed, in awe, the primitive control that this self-concept and logic exercised over all of my behavior and experience. I began to see that same logic operative in all other human beings, and in every living thing—even in the very life of the cells, and in the natural energies that surround every living entity or process. It was the logic (or process) of separation itself, of enclosure and immunity. It manifested as fear and identity, memory and experience. It informed every function of the living being, every experience, every act, every event. It “created” every “mystery”. It was the structure of every imbecile link in the history of human suffering.

He is the ancient one visible in the Greek myth, who was the universally adored child of the gods, who rejected the loved-one and every form of love and relationship, and who was finally condemned to the contemplation of his own image—until, as a result of his own act and obstinacy, he suffered the fate of eternal separateness and died in infinite solitude. As I became more and more conscious of this guiding myth (or logic) in the very roots of my being, my writing began to take on an apparently intentional form. What was before only an arbitrary string of memories, images, and perceptions, leading toward an underlying logic, now proceeded from the heart of that logic itself—such that my perceptions and my thoughts began to develop (from hour to hour) as a narrative, completely beyond any intention or plan of my external mind.

I found that, when I merely observed the content of my experience or my mind from hour to hour, day to day, I began to recognize a “story” being performed as my own conscious life. This was a remarkable observation, and obviously not a common one. The quality of the entire unfolding has the touch of madness in it. But people are mad. The ordinary state of human existence—although it is usually kept intact and relatively calmed by the politics of society—is founded in the madness of a prior logic, a schism in Reality that promotes the entire suffering adventure of human lives in endless and cosmic obstacles.⁵

Adi Da arrived at the discovery of Narcissus through a process of writing, fueled by the inquiry, “What is Consciousness?” He describes writing everything that came to his mind throughout the day, in the hopes of uncovering the fundamental structure of consciousness, a practice that bears more than a resemblance to Surrealist automatism and Dalí’s paranoiac-critical method. Thus, the myth of Narcissus became central to Adi Da’s teaching, where it is featured in the title of his first (unpublished) work of auto-analysis, Water and Narcissus (1967), and as the central motif of his literary work, The Mummery Book (1969).

The Structure of Paranoia

In Adi Da’s description, we encounter Narcissus as the structure and source of madness. Lacan establishes the link between the mirror stage and madness as an intrinsically paranoiac structure:

In my view, this activity has a specific meaning up to the age of eighteen months, and reveals both a libidinal dynamism that has hitherto remained problematic and an ontological structure of the human world that fits in with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge.⁶

The structure of paranoia is evident in the gaze of Narcissus, which not only sees its own reflection but sees a mirage staring back. In Seminar XI, Lacan describes the “pre-existence of a gaze” as “I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides”.⁷ The paranoiac structure of the ego is also aphoristically articulated in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: “Wherever there is an Other, fear arises”. This parallels Lacan’s formulation of the encounter with one’s mirror image as the genesis of the Other, which echoes Lacan’s aphorism: “The unconscious is the Other’s discourse in which the subject receives his own forgotten message in the inverted form suitable for promises”.⁸

The Tripartite Mirror

In the aforementioned passage on the narcissistic structure of the ego, Lacan describes a threefold structure of the Narcissus myth:

1. death as a “vital insufficiency” that becomes the fertile ground of narcissistic delusion,

2. the mirror-image as the “imago of the double”,

3. the illusory image as a “world [that] has no place for others”.

These three aspects can be seen as constitutive of the self, Other, and world. The vital insufficiency of death is the mortal confrontation facing the specular self. In the mirror-image, the self encounters its double in the form of an Other. This illusory image conditions the existence of a world in which the mirage of subject-object relations remains bound to a narcissistic structure of imaginary identifications.

The tripartite structure of the mirror stage can also be seen in relation to the Buddhist ontology of the mirror: the essence of the mirror is primordial purity, or intrinsic clarity, which allows is to self-reflect phenomena; the nature of the mirror is luminosity, which allows it to reflect phenomena without being altered by the otherness of the images it reflects; the energy of the mirror is reflected image itself, which constitutes the world of appearances.

When we apply this to Lacan’s three registers of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary, we can trace the following correlations: The essence of the mirror itself is the real; the nature of the mirror is the symbolic; the energy of the mirror is the imaginary.

Now that we have grasped Lacan’s mirror stage as the ontological structure of Narcissus, let us continue the chronology of his articulation.

Presentation on Psychical Causality (1946)

After La Famille, Lacan gives a significant commentary on the mirror stage in his 1946 “Presentation on Psychical Causality”. This paper was delivered as a critique of Henri Ey’s organicist theories of psychosis and principally functions as a commentary on Lacan’s doctoral thesis. Lacan reintroduces the mirror stage by commenting on his earlier work in La Famille:

My aim there was to indicate the connection between a number of fundamental imaginary relations in an exemplary characteristic of a certain phase of development.

This behavior is none other than that of the human infant before its image in the mirror starting at the age of six months, which is so strikingly different from the behavior of a chimpanzee, whose development in the instrumental application of intelligence the infant is far from having reached.

. . . What I have called the triumphant assumption of the image with the jubilant mimicry that accompanies it and the playful indulgence in controlling the specular identification, after the briefest experiemental verification of the nonexistence o the image behind the mirror, in contrst with the opposite phenomena in the monkey—these seemed to me to manifest one of the facts of identificatory capture by the imago that I was seeking to isolate.⁹

Lacan is referring to the experiments of the French philosopher and psychologist, Henri Wallon, whose developmental theories influenced his conception of the mirror stage. Lacan then proceeds to survey “man’s prematurity of birth”, citing the origin of this notion in Louis Bolk’s theory of “fetalization”. The following passages detail this correlation and are among the most beautiful of Lacan’s writing on the mirror stage:

I have, in fact, taken my conception of the existential meaning of the phenomenon a bit further by understanding it in relation to what I have called man’s prematurity at birth, in other words, the incompleteness and “delay” in the development of the central nervous system during the first six months of life. These phenomena are well known to anatomists and have, moreover, been obvious, since man’s first appearance, in the nursling’s lack of motor coordination and balance; the latter is probably not unrelated to the process of “fetalization,” which Bolk considered to be the mainspring of the higher development of the encephalic vesicles in man.

It is owing to this delay in development that the early maturation of visual perception takes on the role of functional anticipation. This results, on the one hand, in the marked prevalence of visual structure in recognition of the human form, which begins so early, as I mentioned before. On the other hand, the odds of identifying with this form, if I may say so, receive decisive support from this, which comes to constitute the absolutely essential imaginary knot in man that psychoanalysis—obscurely and despite inextricable doctrinal contradictions—has admirably designated as “narcissism.”

Indeed, the relation of the image to the suicidal tendency essentially expressed in the myth of Narcissus lies in this knot. This suicidal tendency—which represents in my opinion what Freud sought to situate in his metapsychology with the terms “death instinct” and “primary masochism”—depends, in my view, on the fact that man’s death, long before it is reflected (in a way that is, moreover, always so ambiguous) in his thinking, is experienced by him in the earliest phase of misery that he goes through from the trauma of birth until the end of the first six months of physiological prematurity, and that echoes later in the trauma of weaning.¹⁰

Lacan is not only echoing Bolk’s embryology but furthering Otto Rank’s theory of birth trauma as the primal (and pre-Oedipal) source of repression.¹¹ There is another key elaboration in this passage: the relation between the mirror stage and suicidal aggression, which Lacan lays bare as “the fundamental structure of madness”.¹² Thus, Lacan places the origins of aggressivity in the narcissistic structure of the ego, as constructed in the mirror stage. This is why he places the essay, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” after “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”.

Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis (1948)

“Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis” brings another dimension of commentary on the mirror stage. Here, Lacan focuses on the imago of the fragmented body as “elective vectors of aggressive intentions”. These aggressive intentions originate through a “formal stagnation” in the dialectic of the mirror stage. Lacan writes:

Now, this formal stagnation is akin to the most general structure of human knowledge, which constitutes the ego and objects as having the attributes of permanence, identity, and substance—in short, as entities or “things” that are very different from the gestalts that experience enables us to isolate in the mobility of the field constructed according to the lines of animal desire.

Indeed, this formal fixation, which introduces a certain difference of level, a certain discordance between man as organism and his Umwelt, is the very condition that indefinitely extends his world and his power, by giving his objects their instrumental polyvalence and symbolic polyphony, as well as their potential as weaponry.

What I have called paranoiac knowledge is therefore shown to correspond in its more or less archaic forms to certain critical moments that punctuate the history of man’s mental genesis, each representing a stage of objectifying identification.¹³

On this basis, Lacan briefly explores Charlotte Bühler’s theory of transitivism in children, and then presents a fresh sketch of the mirror stage:

What I have called the “mirror stage” is of interest because it manifests the affective dynamism by which the subject primordially identifies with the visual gestalt of his own body. In comparison with the still very profound lack of coordination in his own motor functioning, that gestalt is an ideal unity, a salutary imago. Its value is heightened by all the early distress resulting from the child’s intra-organic and relational discordance during the first six months of life, when he bears the neurological and humoral signs of a physiological prematurity at birth.

It is this capture by the imago of the human form—rather than Einfiihlung, the absence of which is abundantly clear in early childhood—that dominates the whole dialectic of the child’s behavior in the presence of his semblable between six months and two and a half years of age. Throughout this period, one finds emotional reactions and articulated evidence of a normal transitivism.

A child who beats another child says that he himself was beaten; a child who sees another child fall, cries. Similarly, it is by identifying with the other that he experiences the whole range of bearing and display reactions—whose structural ambivalence is clearly revealed in his behaviors, the slave identifying with the despot, the actor with the spectator, the seduced with the seducer.

There is a sort of structural crossroads here to which we must accommodate our thinking if we are to understand the nature of aggressiveness in man and its relation to the formalism of his ego and objects. It is in this erotic relationship, in which the human individual fixates on an image that alienates him from himself, that we find the energy and the form from which the organization of the passions that he will call his ego originates.¹⁴

Here, Lacan references Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, emphasizing the capture of the subject by its specular image. Later in the essay, Lacan remarks, “The question is whether the conflict between Master and Slave will find its solution in the service of the machine”.¹⁵ He continues to describe the implications of this lure of spatial identification, drawing on ethology:

The notion of the role of spatial symmetry in man’s narcissistic structure is essential in laying the groundwork for a psychological analysis of space, whose place I can merely indicate here. Animal psychology has shown us that the individual’s relation to a particular spatial field is socially mapped in certain species, in a way that raises it to the category of subjective membership. I would say that it is the subjective possibility of the mirror projection of such a field into the other’s field that gives human space its originally “geometrical” structure, a structure I would willingly characterize as kaleidoscopic.¹⁶

Lacan is proposing that the subject’s spatial encounter with its own specular image represents its entry into the social world, a point he develops further in “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”, which we will now examine.

The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function (1949)

Lacan delivered “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function” in Zurich on July 17, 1949, at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis. This essay is succinct and dense with his aphoristic style, and it is here that we find Lacan’s most poetic and precise formulations of the mirror stage. Lacan associates the mirror stage with what he calls the “I function”. This relationship is explained in the following passage:

The jubilant assumption of his specular image by the kind of being—still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence—the little man is at the infans stage thus seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

This form would, moreover, have to be called the “ideal-I”—if we wanted to translate it into a familiar register—in the sense that it will also be the rootstock of secondary identifications, this latter term subsuming the libidinal normalization functions. But the important point is that this form situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming, no matter how successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own reality.¹⁷

Lacan describes the “I” as a “primordial form” that exists prior to the ego’s “social determination”, a vector which he regards as a “fictional direction”. And this fictitious structure and vector of the ego-“I” will “only asymptotically approach the subject’s becoming”. The term “asymptotic” means “a line that continually approaches a given curve but does not meet it at any finite distance”.¹⁸ Here, Lacan is invoking the spatial nature of ego-identification, and the fact that no matter which direction it decidedly moves upon, the “I” never intersects the axis of reality. The Greek root, asumptōtos, gives us yet another connotation: “not falling together”, or simply, “apt to fall”. The birth of the ego-“I” is thus a fall from the real, through a looking-glass, where the subject encounters the mirage of its form, and the fictional character of a so-called “self”.

Lacan proceeds to illustrate how the lure of spatial identification attains a temporal projection in the formation of a historical self:

This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the individual’s formation into history: the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an “orthopedic” form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure. Thus, the shattering of the Innenwelt to Umwelt circle gives rise to an inexhaustible squaring of the ego’s audits.¹⁹

The mirror stage is now presented as the inaugural drama of the human being, a “temporal dialectic” that moves from vital insufficiency to functional anticipation, in a process that marks the very production of fantasy. Lacan places the root of egoic fantasy in a perceptual discordance between its fragmented body that nevertheless assumes an orthopedic totality. This observation is analogous to Adi Da’s insight that “the ego is not an entity but an activity”, an activity he often describes as a “total psycho-physical” activity of “self-contraction”:

The ego is an activity, not an entity. The ego is the activity of avoidance, the avoidance of relationship.

Therefore, any thought, any function, anything that generates form, that appears as form, that seems to be form, is produced by the concentration of attention—or self-contraction. Thus, apart from “radical” self-understanding, all processes—even life itself—tend to become an obstruction. The root of all suffering is called the “ego”, as if it were a “thing”, an entity. But the ego is actually the activity of self-contraction—in countless forms, endured unconsciously. The unconsciousness is the key—not the acts of concentration themselves (which are only more or less functional). Apart from present-time conscious self-understanding, the self-contracted state is presumed to be the inevitable condition of life. That unconscious self-contraction creates separation, which manifests as identification (or the sense of separate self).

As Lacan points out, the ego functions as a “finally donned armor”, a reflexively protective mechanism that, in the presumption of its own separate identity, maintains perpetual alienation. This “rigid structure” gives rise to the “shattering” of the Innenwelt (inner world) and Umwelt (environment) in what Lacan terms a “primordial Dischord”. It is on this basis that Lacan says “the specular I turns into the social I”,²⁰ where the field of the Other becomes perceptible via aggressivity:

This moment at which the mirror stage comes to an end inaugurates, through identification with the imago of one’s semblable and the drama of primordial jealousy . . . the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.

It is this moment that decisively tips the whole of human knowledge into being mediated by the other’s desire, constitutes its objects in an abstract equivalence due to competition from other people, and turns the I into an apparatus to which every instinctual pressure constitutes a danger, even if it corresponds to a natural maturation process.²¹

Adi Da describes this dialectic of jealousy and fear as a hedge of enclosure, critiquing the mystical notion of “inwardness”:

Ultimately, all psycho-physical experience serves the separate being, the separate psycho-physical person that is “I” . . . Experience, or inwardness is the hedge around Narcissus, the enclosure of the self. The archetype of Narcissus, who avoids the world by gazing into a pond at his own image, is a metaphor for the ego, the independent self-mind. Like the pond, the mind is a reflective mechanism. Therefore, the ego or the self or Narcissus is a reflection, an illusion of independence. To enter into the realm of the mind, to persist in our flight toward subjectivity, our obsessive experience of separate self, is to be possessed of the self, not of God, no matter how profound the inward phenomena may seem to be at any time.²²

Adi Da’s criticism of inwardness as a function of the Narcissistic gaze extends not only to traditional forms of mysticism but also to Jung’s preoccupation with archetypal images. The pastimes of Narcissus leave us locked in traces of self-image, gross and subtle fantasms that function as primary haunts.

Psychoanalysis in the Real

Having traced the development of the mirror stage to its alienating conclusion in the locus of the Other, Lacan now brings us to the radical import of psychoanalysis:

At this intersection of nature and culture, so obstinately scrutinized by the anthropology of our times, psychoanalysis alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever.

For such a task we can find no promise in altruistic feeling, we who lay bare the aggressiveness that underlies the activities of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.

In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the “Thou art that,” where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins.²³

Lacan is referencing the Upanishadic utterance, Tat tvam asi,²⁴ a mahavākya which asserts the primordial identity of the manifest being (ātman) with the transcendental real (Brahman). In the context of Vedanta, Tat tvam asi functions as an oral transmission that awakens the subject from imaginary identification to the non-dual nature of the real. Lacan thus implies that psychoanalysis can serve as a dialectical reversal of the mirror stage, undoing the firmament of imaginary identification and thus untying the “knot of imaginary servitude”. Therefore, the transcending of the misrecognition of the mirror stage allows for the radical recognition of the real—it is at this ecstatic limit, where the subject sees the “cipher of his mortal destiny” that Lacan says “the true journey begins”.

With this, Lacan is effectively positioning psychoanalysis as a preliminary to the Eastern conception of awakening to the real. Lacan looks forward from psychoanalysis and sets his gaze on the Upanishads. Adi Da looks back from the real to psychoanalysis by emphasizing the Oedipal complex as a block to spiritual development.²⁵ How do we set our sights on the horizon of the unconscious and the real? How does a radical psychoanalysis proceed from its roots to a clinic of the real? We must await the foretold day of translation, when analysis not only meets its end but marks a passage to its future, where the hardened head of Narcissus cracks on the knee of listening, sounding its destiny to echo in the stone and mirror of the real.

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1. See Salvador Dalí, The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí (William Morrow and Company, 1976).

2. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 151.

3. Lacan, Écrits, 151.

4. Jacques Lacan, “Family Complexes in the Formation of the Individual” (La Famille), trans. Cormac Gallagher. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/FAMILY-COMPLEXES-IN-THE-FORMATION-OF-THE-INDIVIDUAL2.pdf

5. Adi Da Samraj, The Knee of Listening (Dawn Horse Press, 2004), fourth ed., 94-95.

6. Lacan, Écrits, 76.

7. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Seminar XI, The Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 72.

8. Lacan, Écrits, 366.

9. Lacan, Écrits, 151.

10. Lacan, Écrits, 152.

11. See Otto Rank’s The Trauma of Birth (Kegan Paul, 1929).

12. Lacan, Écrits, 152.

13. Lacan, Écrits, 90-91.

14. Lacan, Écrits, 92.

15. Lacan, Écrits, 99.

16. Lacan, Écrits, 99.

17. Lacan, Écrits, 76.

18. “Asymptotic.” New Oxford American Dictionary, s.v. “asymptote,” New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

19. Lacan, Écrits, 78.

20. Lacan, Écrits, 79.

21. Lacan, Écrits, 79.

22. Da Free John [Adi Da Samraj], Scientific Proof of the Existence of God Will Soon Be Announced by the White House! (Dawn Horse Press, 1980), 161.

23. Lacan, Écrits, 80-81.

24. Tat tvam asi first appears in the Chandogya Upanishad, a text dating from the sixth to eighth century BCE.

25. In a talk given on May 5, 1983, Adi Da comments on Freud’s conception of the Oedipal complex, originally published in The Treasure Consideration (1997):

Freud was not just philosophizing about the Oedipal complex. He thoroughly examined people, reported his evidence, and then made judgments and interpretations on its basis. His view of life was limited philosophically, but he did develop clinical evidence about the origins of our lives as sexual personalities. This evidence is confirmed in my experience, not only in my personal life, but in my observation of everyone. Everyone has a unique, characteristic way of demonstrating what Freud called the Oedipal complex, just as everything demonstrates the character of “Narcissus” in a unique fashion, through a unique history.

It was evident to me, even from my childhood, that there was an unconscious force in my reaction to my mother and father. This reaction had its source in the infantile situation, the early childhood situation, before I developed any kind of a mind. This reaction was not the product of thinking. It was the product of a very primitive situation wherein there was no analytical activity. It became very clear to me that my own freedom, the reality of my existence, depended on my being able to transcend this unconscious force and enter directly into relationships.