Prologue

This issue explores the widespread uses in psychoanalysis of references to the mirror. Researchers use observations of infants in front of mirrors to draw conclusions about development. Lacan made a hypothesis based on his rendering of one such observation a pivotal part of his theory. As a metaphor, mirroring is mentioned in almost every account of mother-infant interaction. Kohut described mirror transferences as a principal finding in all psychoanalyses. Other theoreticians, such as Mahler and Winnicott, weave the concept of mirroring into their formulations, each giving it a different degree of significance. Sartre developed an epistemological position using mirror experience as a foundation. Clinicians have referred to mirror dreams and to the mirror in fantasies and memories. In studies of applied analysis, the mirror as it appears in painting and in literature has been a fertile stimulus for speculation about its deeper symbolic meaning.

It is interesting to note that this widespread fascination with the mirror has not always been with us. The total body of Freud's work reveals only a few uses of this rich source for metaphor: the mirror the analyst holds before the analysand, reflecting back to him only that which the analysand provides, adding no values or direction of his own (Freud, 1912); the association between the mirror, the double, and the sense of the uncanny (1919); and the mirror as part of a child's game of disappearing (1920). These historical beginnings of the mirror, actual and as metaphor, can easily be related to what has evolved since, but do not in themselves foretell of the depth of understanding plumbed, using the mirror as a point of reference. To explore these developments — many quite recent in origin — we have planned this issue around contributors who use the mirroring interaction of mother and infant as a point of departure for a discussion of the mirror and of mirroring.