ABSTRACT
The conception of the mirror stage that the author at our last congress has since become more or less established in the practice of the French group. We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image–whose predestination to this phase-effect is sufficiently indicated by the use, in analytic theory, of ancient term imago. The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society. In the light of this conception, the term primary narcissism, by which analytic doctrine designates the libidinal investment characteristic of that moment, reveals in those who invented it most profound awareness of semantic latencies.
