Imago and the Mirror Stage

I had a great deal of trouble understanding what on earth Lacan was talking about, until I was able to link it to the concept of an Imago, which I am familiar with from various philosophy and theology classes. Hopefully, I can translate that concept into something more generally helpful in understanding the Mirror Stage.

Imago, loosely translated, means "image" or "likeness," but it has a specific connotation in Christianity, since in Genesis we read that mankind is made in the "image and likeness of God." Before we get bogged down any further, there is an essential distinction between the Imago, and an image. The Imago is much, much more than an image, especially for theology, and plays a very different role than a mere likeness.

The best way to describe the difference between what we mean by image and the meaning of Imago is to think in terms of casting or sculpting. Or, perhaps, take a quarter from your pocket. This quarter is in the "likeness" of a much larger engraving which has been quite accurately transcribed onto a die, and stamped out in batches by the thousands. The initial engraving is done by an artist, and cannot be re-created, much less mass-produced. This initial engraving is the "thing" that we see a likeness of when we look at a quarter. But, importantly, quarters are "images," not the Imago.

In this rather desperate analogy, the Imago is the die that is used to press thousand upon thousands of quarters every day. Each die is simply a reverse of the initial engraving, but it can also be thought of as inseparable from that initial engraving itself. They are fundamentally the same, serving the same purpose; one is made of clay, the other practically indestructible. The engraving, like the mind, cannot accomplish what it wants to do, nor impact the world outside itself, without recourse to an Imago: an externalized image of itself that is capable of interacting with the material world far more practically than the internal self is capable of.

If the coin example is still confusing, think perhaps of an artist in bronze, who may sculpt a figure in wax, create a plaster shell around that wax (this plaster shell would be the Imago) and finally use that plaster Imago to create in bronze a likeness of the original sculpture in wax. In each case, perhaps the most interesting part of this analogy is that the original work of art is in almost every case too fragile to interact with the world, or to reproduce its central idea without the help of a sturdy, external representation. This is part of what the mirror stage does when it externalizes the self; by creating an Imago, the interior self can interact with the world.