ABSTRACT
Lacan’s first important innovation in the field of psychoanalysis took place in 1936, when he was 35 years of age, practising as a psychiatrist and still in psychoanalytic training. At the fourteenth congress of the International Psycho-Analytical Association, held at Marienbad, Lacan presented a paper entitled ‘Le stade du miroir’, later translated into English as ‘The Mirror Stage’. ‘The Mirror Stage’ remains one of the most frequently anthologized and referenced of Lacan’s texts. It was translated as early as 1968 in the Marxist journal New Left Review and, as we will see, played a crucial role in the dissemination of Lacanian ideas in film and cultural studies. There is also something of a mythology that has grown around this paper that has been influential in constructing an image of Lacan as an outcast – a heroic figure battling for the truth against a conservative and reactionary establishment.
