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The experimental and observational study of mirroring in children contributes to understanding the developmental lines of self as subject, self as object, and self with object. To this widely recognized schema can be added the unusual tangential contribution of Lacan and the French school: self as other.
Categorization artifically separates the growth of the whole person into components, the person in relation to others. For some authors e.g., Lewis and Brooks-Gunn (1979), following Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934), self and object arise together. In the interests of clarity and convenience these categorizations will be preserved in reviewing the evidence on the role of mirroring in child development. As will be seen, the term mirroring is used in very different senses. Some authors use mirroring as a metaphor to represent the social responses of others to the infant. Others study the infant's actual response to his own mirror image, the “specular-image” of the French school.
The Papoušeks (1974) review the evidence of the earliest responses of infants to their mirror image. According to maternal reports, human infants start reacting to a mirror at 18 weeks and at 42 weeks, over 60 percent of them try to look at the back of a small mirror, as