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“After having opposed the names of Lacan and Winnicott,” writes André Green (2011), “today it is frequent to bring them together” (p. 29). As Green suggests, Winnicott and Lacan are thinkers whose ideas can seem antithetical. While Winnicott is concerned with the development of the self in the context of a “good enough” experience of care giving, Lacan's theory of the subject challenges the very idea of the self. In his introduction to a collection of essays on the two theorists, Lewis Kirshner (2011) wrote that together they are “two seemingly incompatible theories of the origins and structure of the human psyche” (p. xi). Yet Lacan and Winnicott are both profoundly psychosocial thinkers who shared an interest in the modern psyche and the alienation often considered endemic to it. From Freud, Lacan took the theory of narcissism (Borch-Jacobsen, 1991), which he developed into a wide-ranging critique of the psychosocial constitution of the modern subject. Winnicott, on the other hand, trained his eye on the environmental conditions necessary for feeling authentic, or “real,” and the experiences that might produce alienation from this “true” self, and encourage the formation of a narcissistic “false” self (Winnicott, 1990).
In this context, Lacan and Winnicott's shared interest in the metaphor and function of the mirror, which has long provided an entry point for clinical and academic comparisons of their work (Coulson, 2013; Eigen, 2004; Hirsch, 1997; Lebeau, 2009; Rudnytsky, 1991; Rustin, 1991; Wright, 1991), is a key point of orientation. Early on, the mirror is present in Lacan's thinking. He first presented the concept of the “Mirror Stage” at the 14th International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Marienbad, which took place in 1936. Winnicott, however, turned to the mirror at the end of his career, in 1967, prompted