Man, animals and mirror. Genealogy of the human self according to Helmuth Plessner and Jacques Lacan
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/RF.2017.023Keywords
I, ideal I, dismembered body, mirror image, psychosis, narcissism, personalityAbstract
In the article I compare Helmuth Plessner’s concept of the human I that underlies his philosophical anthropology and the theory of „mirror stage” by Jacques Lacan. They have both been inspired by Köhler‘s experiment in which an examined child and a chimpanzee reacted differently to their images in the mirror. Yet, Plessner and Lacan drew different conclusions from that experiment. Plessner maintained that the child who recognizes the image in the mirror as its own takes into account the possibility of its replacement by another I on the level of the social roles and functions it plays. Yet, at the same time, it is very well aware that nobody will be able to replace its own individual I. While Lacan says the ideal image of the I bears the status of the defence-symptom that represents an alternative to the feeling of the dismembered body that the child experiences in the early phase of its life. This image of the I is not given forever but is always endangered by the possibility of destruction and regress on its early stage of the dismembered body. The telling testimony of this is the passage au acte by psychotics in which the outburst of aggression is accompanied by the destruction of the I. Or the cases in which the I assumes the pathologically exaggerated shape. This possibility of the destruction of the I that is inherently rooted in its structure has been misrecognized by Plessner.
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