Lacan - The Mirror Stage and Imaginary, Symbolic and Real Order

Imaginary, Symbolic and Real Order

Imaginary Order
Of these three terms, The Imaginary was the first to appear. The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the ego in the Mirror Stage.  The Imaginary becomes the internalized image of this ideal, whole, self and is situated around the notion of coherence rather than fragmentation. The Imaginary can roughly be aligned with the formation of the ego which serves as the mediator (as in Freud) between the internal and the external world. It becomes, in Lacan, the space in which the relation "between the ego and its images" is developed.The relationship whereby the ego is constituted by identification is a locus of alienation, which is another feature of The Imaginary, and is fundamentally narcissistic. 

Symbolic Order
The Symbolic Order functions as the way in which the subject is organized and, to a certain extent, how the psyche becomes accessible. The symbolic opposition between "presence" and "absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from The Symbolic. In contrast to The Imaginary, The Symbolic involves the formation of signifiers and language and is considered to be the "determining order of the subject". Seeing the entire system of the unconscious/conscious as manifesting in an endless web of signifiers/ieds and associations.

Real Order
The Real refers to that which is authentic, the unchangeable truth in reference both to the Self and the external dimension of experience. This order is not only opposed to The Imaginary but is also located beyond The Symbolic. Unlike The Symbolic, which is constituted in terms of oppositions such as "presence" and "absence", there is no absence in The Real.
         The Real becomes that which resists representation, what is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary, pre-symbolic – what cannot be symbolized – what loses it’s "reality" once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language. It is the aspect where words fail, what is described as, "the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approached, but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic". This is perhaps the source of the most contention within theories of media in that media itself can only point at The Real but never embody it, never be it.  

The Mirror Stage

Lacan's mirror stage is based on his belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception (the turning of oneself into an object that can be viewed by the child from outside of himself) from the age of about six months. Later research showed that, although children are fascinated with images of themselves and others in mirrors from about that age, they do not begin to recognize that the images in the mirror are reflections of their own bodies until the age of about 15 to 18 months.
         By the early 1950s, Lacan's concept of the mirror stage had evolved: he no longer considered the mirror stage as a moment in the life of the infant, but as representing a permanent structure of subjectivity, or as the paradigm of Imaginary Order. 
         According to Lacan, when the infant stumbles upon a mirror, she is suddenly bombarded with an image of herself as whole, stable and autonomous self; an ideal image of herself that does not correspond with the infant's primordial reality of existing as a fragmented entity with libidinal needs. The image itself in the mirror is described by Lacan as the "Ideal-I", an identification that the infant spends a lifelong quest to correspond wholly with.  
       According to Lacan, this quest can never be fulfilled, because human existence is in essence a striving for a never-attainable perfection. Lacan does not put a positive spin on this observation: while the mirror stage allows human individuals to come to know themselves as "I", by establishing a permanent split within the subject's self-image, this process also lays the foundation for forms of psychic distress such as anxiety, neurosis, and psychosis. 
        It becomes a process of identification of internal self with that external image. The mirror stage thus represents the infant’s first encounter with subjectivity, with spatial relations, with an external sense of coherence, and with a sense of "I" and "You."