The Mirror Stage

Steven Z. Levine is the author of Lacan Reframed, which aims to provide a guide for the art student, to the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan. In my case, this is Lacan's developmental concept 'The Mirror Stage'.

The following are relevant (quotations and paraphrases):

• A summary of the story of beautiful Narcissus – spots his reflection in the forest pool, the impossible love of is own reflected image, the unbridgeable split between desiring object and desired object, resolved by his death and metamorphosis into the flower - at least that's the mythological resolution. 
• "I is another." (Arthur Rimbaud) The beautiful image of self exists outside of oneself, but we recognise it – 'narcissistic identification'.
• Lacan's contribution to the formation of the Ego (of Freudian theory): "Based on the alien but alluring images glimpsed in the mirror in childhood, the Ego was crystallised in response to the admiring behaviour of the Mother" (Levine) 'The Mirror of Mother and Child' 
• Which leads to: 'A lifelong conflict, started at childhood, between the Ego and alter Ego – Self and other – due to recognising the alter Ego in the eyes of the mother.' And hence: 'A stand off between 'the me I see myself as being' and 'the me I want to be and can never be.'
• "In his insistence on the dangerous duel of self and other, .. Lacan was extending Freud's formulations on the self-loving and self-loathing narcissism of the Ego"  

There were many more complex psychological explanations and suggestions of Lacan, all of which centre around a conflict between the self and other, and which relate back to the mirror stage. However seeing that I don't need to progress into those with any depth, I can take away the inference that the Mirror Stage plays a crucial developmental part in the notion of self, even if that notion is constantly fragmented and ill-defined.