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The mirror stage for Jacques Lacan functions as a founding myth, analogous to and replacing Freud's founding myth, elaborated in Totem and Taboo, of the band of brothers whose murder of the primal father condemns them to perpetual guilt. The first section of this paper will examine the philosophical agenda involved in Lacan's conception of the mirror stage, visible in the logical gaps of this argument; the second will show the ways in which Lacan deploys this conception to rearrange the Freudian landscape; and the third will discuss how Lacan's conception of language, integral to all his thought, is at odds not only with Freud's conception, but entirely undermines Freud's essentially Enlightment world views.
For both Lacan and Freud the founding myth involves circular reasoning, for the myth is posited to underwrite an already elaborated psychological theory. This circularity, however, is more crucially problematic for Lacan than it is for Freud. Freud's myth is cast as a hypothetical historical extension of an otherwise free-standing psychological theory. One can totally reject Totem and Taboo without rejecting Freud's arguments for the unconscious, infantile sexuality, and the Oedipus complex. In contrast, one cannot reject Lacan's existential myth without calling into question the psychology that Lacan bases on its assumptions because the scientific claims of the mirror stage assume the truth of this foundational myth.
In “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” Lacan sketches a conception of the ontology and epistemology of the human psyche which