Sigmund Freud And The Specular Self

Sigmund Freud, an Austrian doctor who developed a therapeutic method for analysing the unconscious, argued “that desire was the root of human civilisation” (D’alleva 2005: 89). Freud’s work revolutionised the way people thought about desire, the workings of the mind, basic human interactions and the human self. He stated humans must work to survive thus individuals repress some of their tendencies of pleasure and gratification. For the individual, managing repressed desires is difficult; the place where unfulfilled desires are stored is known as the unconscious (Sayers 2007: 9).

“The unconscious stands as the central pillar in psychoanalytic thought” (Knafo 2012: xxii). Freud emphasised that the unconscious processes played a much larger …show more content…
The child recognises the image of the person reflected in the mirror as him or herself gazing back, an independent human being with an exteriority separate and alongside other humans. This image of the specular self is distinguished from the ‘imago’, a psychoanalytic concept of the idealised image of a loved and important person, which is carried within someone as part of his or her developing individualism. The imago of a parent is a familiar and recurring image of a whole separate person with whom there is a continuous emotional connection, distinct from oneself and other beings who are perceived as also human and sharing similar motor, cognitive and perceptual capabilities (Dant 2012: 189). In the mirror stage, the encounter with the imago of a whole, stable, autonomous self presents the infant with an ideal image of him or herself that does not relate with the infant's present reality. In making a ‘connection’ to this ideal image through identification, the infant tries to correspond entirely with this Ideal-I throughout its life span. According to Lacan, the individual will never obtain this Ideal-I because society in it its existence is trying to strive for a never-attainable perfection (Lacan 1977: