>
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if you want to develop your understanding of this theme, I recommend "The
Mirror Stage" in Ecrits.
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Amazing how you Lacanians (and Derrideans etc) think that just reading your
idols will bring about a miraculous conversion. It does prove you're
sincere -and that you read in a very different way from me, since it was the
agonizing experience of trying to read these people that put me off them in
the first place. At any rate, reading The Mirror Stage doesn't help against
the charge that Lacan is a pseudo-scientist, since it raises some very
awkward questions about who exactly has observed and recorded the universal
childhood reactions to mirrors that he so relies on, and which he is
arrogant enough to provide absolutely no evidence for. It seems to me like a
deliberate rhetorical ploy, an attempt to go even further out on a limb than
Freud did in the dodgiest part of his own theory, the Primal Scene. Which
does make it an interesting literary device, a sort of psychoanalytic
burlesque - but it doesn't do much for his claims to scientific status.
Best wishes,
Matthew Francis
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Visit my website at http://www.7greenhill.freeserve.co.uk
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