I'm starting with the man in the mirror

I find Lacan's description of the mirror stage very fascinating, not only for the idea that he proposes, but also the way he constructs it. In looking at some of the language he uses, it seems to me that he has in mind a very violent activity going on within the child itself. Two of the descriptions that he puts forth use employ word choices that suggest imagery of a battle:

1) "...the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes...to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure" (6).
2) "Correlatively, the I formation is symbolized in dreams by a fortified camp, or even a stadium--distributing, between the arena within its walls and its outer border of gravel-pits and marshes, two opposed fields of battle where the subject bogs down in his quest for the proud, remote inner castle whose form...strikingly symbolizes the id" (7).


Both citations are based on Fink's translation of Ecrits, emphasis added. I don't think that the war-related words were accidental at all. On the one hand, the infant has to confront itself as an other and resolve any anxieties that result from actually recognizing that it exists in some other sort of spectral form (the mirror image). On the other, since Lacan suggests that the mirror stage contributes to the onset of the Oedipal complex, it seems to me that perhaps as the child comes to recognize itself in the mirror, it also begins to recognize that it has to battle the father for the rights to be intimate with the mother. Maybe these are war games for the inevitable failed encounter that brings the child to submit to the father's right to primacy in sexual or desired contact with the mother?

What do you all think? If I didn't explain myself well enough, let me know..I've been known to do that.