ABSTRACT

The conception of the mirror stage that author introduced at our last congress, thirteen years ago, has since become established in the practice of the French group. However, he thinks it worthwhile to bring it again to your attention, especially today, for the light it sheds on the formation of he was experience it in psychoanalysis. It is an experience that leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito. In fact, they were encountering that existential negativity whose reality is so vigorously proclaimed by the contemporary philosophy of being and nothingness. But unfortunately that philosophy grasps negativity only within the limits of a self-sufficiency of consciousness, which, as one of its premises, links to the misrecognition that constitute the ego, the illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself. At this junction of nature and culture, examined by modern anthropology, psychoanalysis alone recognizes this knot of imaginary servitude that love must always undo again, or sever.