ABSTRACT
Lacanian infant’s misrecognition of itself in the mirror and the Winnicottian infant’s seminal experience of maternal mirroring towards awareness of difference, language can be seen as a basic mask of the personality. To be born an heir to language is a mighty inheritance. It is also to be an heir to masks, both forced and free. Significantly, the child’s first discovery of sexual difference occurs at about the same time that it is discovering language itself. All the mask of language, thus reveal by concealing, spanning both manifest and hidden, conscious and unconscious levels of experience. A suggestion of “forced masks” as endemic to the human condition appears also in Jacques Lacan’s myth of the Mirror stage. The child’s joyous first recognition of itself in the mirror as a whole, coordinated being, is seen as a trap and a trick.
