ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan refused to read Freud's texts as isolated statements, preferring to revive their original meaning by placing them into their appropriate historical and subjective contexts. In the course of his ensuing theoretical constructions, Lacan frequently conjured up his mirror stage as a 'generic structure,' a 'paradigm' and a 'first strategic point.' When Lacan summarized his ideas on the mirror stage in his 1938 encyclopaedia article on the family, he clearly relied on the observational data reported by Henri Wallon, yet blowing up a number of details in Wallon's account. In The Mirror Stage Lacan invoked the specific effect of the mirror image owing to its inherent characteristics by referring to biological experiments with female pigeons and migratory locusts. When considering the mirror stage as a solution to the weaning complex, Lacan had to assume that the child experiences it as an ontological triumph.
