ABSTRACT
The novelist Nicolas-Edme Restif (1734–1806), known as Rétif de Bretonne, relates that at the age of two, since no one was in a hurry to dress him in the morning, he was often left—much to his dismay and fury—stark naked. At such times his sister brought him a mirror to show him his grimaces. He grabbed the mirror and tried to break it in rage: “The cracks made me even uglier and in the fragments that multiplied objects, I believed I’d found a world behind the mirror. This phenomenon stopped my tears and I felt my first astonishment, my first admiration, my first reflection.” 1 This episode would find its place in a Lacanian scenario: the development of consciousness of the mirror image is integrated in the progress of symbolic activity. For the child who anticipates his unity by the mediation of the mirror, the kaleidoscopic fragments of the broken mirror reveal a protean self, with infinite virtualities. The unordinary world behind the mirror becomes the prism of the imagination and the dream.
