The Membranes

by Chi Ta-wei

The discbooks mentioned the twentieth-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and quoted Lacan as saying that very young children cannot distinguish the difference between self and other. Only between six and eighteen months of age, when a child looks in a mirror (including symbolic as well as material mirrors), will she acquire an individual sense of self. By looking in the mirror, the toddler realizes that in the mirror world there is a child just like herself, whose every move is the exact mirror of her own, and yet who is not her. A child’s awareness of her own existence depends on the existence of this “other,” and this window between six and eighteen months is so significant it’s known as the “Mirror Stage.”