ABSTRACT
Lacan’s empirical sources have been multiplied in Anglo-American infant research. Prior to the mirror stage, experience is shaped by the conjuncture of the infant’s biological immaturity and an archaic image of the fragmented body. ‘Before’ incorporation with the mother body, the infant has already identified with its fantasies of bodily fragmentation and mutilation, attached to the mouth, eye, ear, anus, genitals. Lacan treats the infant’s grasp of its total body form in the mirror image as an event that is entirely premature and as prefiguration, so to speak, of an alienated destination. The mirror image constitutes a prospective/retrospective complex of identity and separation that prefigures all later separations, from weaning to castration. The infant flesh is destined from the beginning to embody the very inquiry that constitutes a living being. The exploration of its own internal and external boundaries and testing of all experience/information that enters/exits its orifices and skin surfaces entirely absorbs the infant in its own carnal knowledge.
