Before proceeding to Lacan’s pedagogical use of the mirror schema, we need to understand how reflections in mirrors function.

Normally, when I see a painting or a drawing, I correctly assume that it is where my eyes tell me it is. It would be logical to assume the same with reflections in mirrors. Wrong.

Plane mirror: as far as the visual cortex is concerned, the reflection from a plane mirror is not on its surface, but some distance BEHIND it.

Impossible, but true, as it can easily be verified in the following way: hold a book in front of your eyes, then gradually bring it closer until the writing goes out of focus, and measure the distance. Now stand in front of a mirror, and gradually bring your face closer to it until the reflection goes out of focus, and measure the distance. There you go.

This may explain why Narcissus drowned. His visual cortex directed his muscular apparatus beyond the water’s surface, where his reflection actually existed.

Spherical mirror: this time, and again as far as the visual cortex is concerned, the reflection is not on its surface, but some distance IN FRONT of it. What’s more, as you gradually move back, your reflection will become smaller and smaller, until a point where your reflection will become bigger and bigger, but UPSIDE DOWN.

As an illustration, here is a video of an apparatus combining 2 spherical mirrors. It is not an optical illusion nor a video special effect, it is what you would see if that apparatus was in front of you:

It is on those two properties of plane and spherical mirrors that the mirror apparatus presented by Lacan is built. He originally found it in Optique geométrique élémentaire ( Henry Bouasse, Librairie Delagrave, Paris, 1917). It is on page 40 of the original book, a fac-simile of which I found on the Net.

He uses it to explain the quality of the relationship between the subject and the Symbolic order, a deceptive one (Cf. in Séminaire 1-The Technical Writings of Freud-, Séminaire 10-Anxiety- and Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache, in Écrits).

I present it here simplified, notably with the eye (the subject) firmly place inside the apparatus, to insist on the fact that you simply cannot situate yourself outside of it, not even in a relative or imagined way.

Now let’s situate Dora and her identifications inside that apparatus:

Looking at her father and his impotence, Dora sees Mrs. K.

Looking at her father and Mrs K., Dora sees Mr K.

2 objects seem to me to play a special role in Dora’s psyche:

a)the jewel box (or schmuckkästchen), a present from Mr K., evoked in the 1st dream. It is empty and could be taken to represent her privation, i.e. the absence of a signifier for her femininity. Privation is a symbolic object which, in the Real, represents a hole. It is given as missing at its ordinal place in the symbolic order, much like the space “occupied” by a missing book on a shelf. Logically it should be there, but it isn’t. The box encloses a space, but that space is not occupied. Further, because it remains empty, that space or its enclosure has not been broken into or soiled (Cf. Freud’s note on “…the stress which the dreamer was so ready to lay upon her virginity…”). When she looks at Mrs K., there is no-thing in the box, which in turns produce a no-thing in the reflection.

b)the Madonna painting, at which Dora gazes for an entire 2 hours. Like the box, the Madonna has not been broken into or soiled. A significant fact is that when a male cousin offers to accompany her to the gallery where the Madonna painting is exhibited, she replies “I can sort myself out”, which is what the Madonna after all, managed to do.

From this, I would suggest, in agreement with Lacan, that Dora’s main issue is how to be part of the circuit of exogamy without going on the path of sexuality, or how to have a child without sex. There is also the mystery of her body’s femininity: what is a woman? How to be loved?

In support of the later assertion, I quote what I think to be an early formulation of the “pas-toute” notion:

“In order to acknowledge her femininity, she would have to realise that assumption of her own body, failing which she remains open to the division of function which makes up the conversion symptoms.” (Intervention sur le transfert, 1951, in Écrits, my translation).

In 1951, Lacan is still close to the mirror stage notion, not having yet formulated it with an equation derived from Logic.

Some remarks from Séminaire 1-The Technical Writings of Freud, 12 May 1954 (my translation):

-Dora doesn’t know if she loves herself, her image in Mme K, her desire for Mme K. It is a constant oscillation, and THAT is the issue. (My remark: that oscillation is to my mind caused by a weak Nom-du-Père, hence perhaps, the thinness of Dora’s mother presence throughout her analysis with Freud).

-She does not succeed in naming her desire (something Freud failed to get her to do), since the function of speech is a function of acknowledgement (reconnaissance), as a dimension through which the desire of the subject is authentically integrated on the symbolic plane.

-What is important is not that Dora identifies herself with Mrs K. but that she should pass on the other side of the mirror, that she becomes the cause of a man’s desire.

Some remarks from Séminaire 4 (The Object Relation), 23 January 1957 (my translation):

-the hysteric’s object is a homosexual object through a heterosexual identification. (My remark: could this too apply to Dora’s father, given the nature of the repressed homosexual pact on which patriarchy and its exchange of women is based ?).

-Mrs K. is Dora’s question: What is it my father loves in Mrs. K.?

-The love for her father is proportional to its deficiency.

- Mrs K. accomplishes what Dora does not know how to accomplish: to provoke love by her father.

To conclude this 3rd part, I shall address the issue of the lake scene, with some remarks drawn from a text by Véronique Voruz, The scene by the lake: when desire fails as defence (From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 3, 1999 : Love).

It is that incident which brought Dora to Freud’s cabinet, so it is worth looking at it in detail.

-Dora’s identification with Mrs K. is used to block the anguish resulting from the absence of a signifier for her femininity in the unconscious (Nota: not just Dora’s unconscious, but all woman’s unconscious).

-When Dora is confronted to the real of sexual demand, the question of her femininity can no longer be deferred. As a result, her identification collapses, and the encounter with demand can no longer be filtered by desire. In turn, this creates anguish.

-If the fantasy (my remark: of not being soiled) collapses, so does desire. When desire collapses, the object (of demand of the Other) becomes present (but without a signifier to represent it).

-Hence, desire is a defence against jouissance, as it creates a distance between subject and object.

-Dora’s reaction is to tear herself away from uncertainty by asserting the certainty “of the command of her muscular apparatus” (my formulation) through a passage-to-the-act, not an acting out, by slapping Mr. K. (my remark: is this particular reaction contingent to Dora’s psychological make up?)

-Dora represents privation as mode of jouissance: the hysteric can only exists if the Other is lacking, so she endeavours to expose the Other as castrated. Privation is therefore a condition of the hysteric’s desire.

It is the “21st century” part of the cartel’s theme which held my attention.

The Dora story is an account of a deal gone slightly wrong: a man offers his daughter to another man in exchange for this man’s wife. The daughter is herself complicit to the deal, but only up to a point. When she refuses to go through with what is expected of her, she is sent to Freud for re-education. It can also be seen as a case of incest by proxy.

Could such a situation happen today in the same cultural and geographical area, given our legal and social protection systems?

My answer is a resounding Yes! What then of the temptation of incest?

But before going further, let’s look at the taboo on incest as mapped out by Malinowski (Brownislaw Malonowski, The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia, Routledge & Kegan, London, 1968, p.416-433). Originally published in 1929, it is an account of the author’s extensive observations gained by living among and talking with the natives, an unprecedented methodology at the time. While he acknowledged that “sex is everywhere”, he disputed Freud’s assertion of the universality of the Oedipus complex.

Malinowski observes 4 different forms of sexual interdicts between members of a same tribe, each with a different strength scale. From weakest to strongest:

-grandparents/grandchildren: yes, there is a taboo, but it is not taken seriously, as youth is not attracted by old anyway.

-father/daughter

-mother/son-brother/sister. By far, this is the very strongest taboo, so much so that it is backed up by a myth which explains the origins of love attraction.

The grading of the strength of each taboo is itself a consequence of the matrilineal organisation of the tribes, whereby what count are the blood ties on the mother’s side, not the genetic lineage from the father, who himself counts for very little from a cultural perspective. It is therefore logical that the strongest taboo is between those who share the closest possible blood ties, brother and sister. Malinowski does not mention any taboos on homosexual sexual relations.

In support of my earlier “resounding Yes”, I presented a letter from The Sun newspaper’s Agony Aunt section (12 November 2009, p.54), where a young man complains that his mother has sexual relations with some of his mates: “I hate it when mum acts like a tart, and with my mates too! Why the hell does she do it?” Next to that letter is a photo-cartoon illustrating the situation, in the usual The Sun’s style. Whether this letter was real or concocted by the section’s team is unimportant. The theme of incest is barely hidden under the surface, and should the reader take to perusing that Agony Aunt column as regularly as I do, he will find that theme coming back over and over, in various guises.

Let’s note that the incest theme, in different variants, including between brother and sister, was openly treated in various European soap operas throughout the mid 1990’s.

Also, and most importantly, given the current fluidity of marriages and co-habitation patterns between heterosexual lovers, those bearing the names of father/mother/son/daughter do not necessarily have genetic or blood links, providing therefore more potential participants for an acting out of the phantasy of incest, as warranted by examples on The Jeremy Kyle Show (a British variant of The Jerry Springer Show). In those instances, it is often the case that at least one parent was complicit, whether passively or actively.

Among Western gay men, the fantasy of « father and son » sex is currently strongly present. The actual age of the participants has little bearing, and therefore that sexual constellation cannot be said to be derived from the Greek male homosexual model. it is the actual scenario and its Dad and Son labels that matter. More often than not, the scenario includes the father raping his son,but never the opposite (so far). Sometimes, the mother is evoked (in absentia), as one to whom nothing must be told. (Nota: this paragraph was added at the time of writing down this account).

The reason I included Anna Freud in the Freud tribe earlier on: Freud could have made a bargain with Jones, who for a while was the crown prince, by offering him his daughter, whose favours Jones was after, in exchange for preserving the theory after his death. Instead, Freud keeps Anna for himself, eventually co-opting her inside the Secret Committee.  At the same time, in his biography of Freud, Jones says that after the marriage of his eldest daughter, Mathilda, « …Freud confessed he had wished the previous summer, when Ferenczi visited the family (for the first time) in Berchtesgaden, that he had been the lucky man; his attitude toward him was always most fatherly ».