Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
THE SPECULAR
BODY: MERLEAU-PONTY
AND
L A C A N ON I N F A N T S E L F A N D O T H E R *
202
JOHN O'NEILL
.
Merleau-Ponty's treatment of the mirror image (1964a, 1964b) consists
of an extensive commentary on the work of Wallon (1949). In the
course of his critical evaluation of Wallon, he draws upon Lacan's views
(1949, 1970). The question we have to decide is whether the Lacanian
view of the body image at the mirror-stage is really as compatible with
Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the infant's corporeal schema as he
himself takes it to be. In short, as Dillon (1978) has observed, we need
to be careful with the "visual bias" in the specular image, and we shall
have to see whether in fact it faults Merleau-Ponty's better understanding of the mother/infant bond. A similar caution has been raised by
Henri Ey who considers the infant's intersubjective experience of
embodiment prior to the visual moment of self-knowledge at the
mirror:
On one level what has so often been repeated to us is true, that the self and the "body
image" become confused with one another. Though this is certainly not true for the self
which has unfolded in its history, it is true for the "I" appearing in its prehistory. This
body among other objects is mine. It is in effect the proto-experience of the subject in its
own space. It is as a spatial modality of a spatial property that the self perceives itself a s an
object in its first self-consciousness. This is the reason for the importance of the "mirror
stage." It would doubtlessly be naive t o pretend that in order for the self to become
conscious for itself it would be enough for it to "see itself" or to perceive itself in the
reflected image of its body. This is true precisely because the self cannot see itself unless it
knows itself. We should instead understand the necessity of the reflection of the self upon
itself as the absolute of a fundamental structure: that of the relationship of the self to
others. To see oneself appear "as other" which is the self, the mirror image of which sends
back its image to myself, is the objectification of the self, or as is often said. as its
"alienation". The self appears as a person opposite oneself, in the eclipsing of the subject,
in its "fading" (Lacan's term), and, as it were, in its disappearance. The self is grounded in
and through this negation of its absolute. (Ey 1977, p~ 271)
THE SPECULAR
BODY
203
4)
Thus the mirror image, as Lacan interprets it, constitutes a prospective/retrospective complex of identity and separation which prefigures
all later separations, from weaning to castration. The ego is constituted
in imaginary servitude for which the love of others is always an
intrusion upon the madness of the self project. It is beyond the scope of
this argument to trace Lacan's account of the oedipal triangulation of
the infant's desire for his mother as the primordial real object and his
father as an imaginary ideal self. Thus in-the-name-of-the father the
mother weans her infant on ~o desire, i.e., the discovery of absence, or
lack ruled by law. A point of controversy is whether we consider the
infant to be a "body in bits and pieces" (corps~morcel~) prior ;to the
mirror stage. On this interpretation, the event of the mirror image offers
to the broken body an ideal of integration and harmony, an ideal self,
Idealich. I shall argue instead that the mother's face is the original
reflecting mirror of what in the eyes of her infant she sees as the bond
which, because it is not yet ready for separation, is unquestioned
(Winnicott, 1967). The "Madonna" thereby constitutes a presence that
can become an absence, a plenitude that can be symbolized in the
separation and embrace of the other in the endless negativity or play
(jeu) of Discourse.
.
It must be remembered that the Phenomenology of Perception argues
that both the body and the mind are structures of experience in their
own right. In particular, then, the mind, so far from making sense of the
204
JOHN
O'NEILL
f/
205
1964, p. 115).
The cognitive troubles of this approach are evident. The monodological psyche, once assumed, is embroiled in an exhausting guessing game
with regard to the relation between inside and outside experiences of
the other projected on the basis of his own trust in his own correlations
of inside/outside experience. But in practice the infant short-circuits
this game of correspondences with a global body overlap, as when the
infant responds to a smiling face with his own smile. Here no judgement
is involved, no point-to-point correspondence, since the infant cannot
see his own face, except in the eyes of his mother. What he "sees" there
is not a reflection so much as a gesture which provokes a gesture
'within' or from him. This, means, however, that the infant's body is not
solidary with its own sensations. Its sensations are rather gestures
which flow from a "postural" or "'corporeal schema," the ability to
respond to the situated conduct of others with the very conduct elicited
in situ and as the embodied sense of interaction.
206
JOHN
O'NEILL
The process of identification involves a double structuration of identifying something or someone and identifying one's self in the same
THE SPECULAR
BODY
207
With each passing month, the infant's motor and perceptual comportment achieves increasing articulation and thereby engages a claim upon
identity and character whose linguistic and socially organized
achievement at this stage is closely bound to the pronominal and
oedipal systems. In other words, the infant embarks upon an anthropomorphosis which involves mutually articulated levels of structuration
that are
(i) motor-perceptual,
(ii) psycho-social,
(iii) linguistic-conceptual.
However, the phenomenological interpretation of these levels is radically different from what we find in textbook psychology and psychoanalysis. At the motor-perceptual level, we are not dealing with
mechanical drives, pushes and pulis, nor with instincts. Rather, we are
in the presence of a physical posture which is capable of empathizing
208
JOHN
O'NEILL
THE SPECULAR
BODY
209
It is this provision which enables the infant to deal with the loss of
omnipotence. Through the transitional object the infant creates an
objective environment. The good-enough mother at first allows the
210
JOHN
O'NEILL
THE SPECULAR
BODY
211.
.
I think it is important for a phenomenological analysis not to fall into a
narrow psycho-sexual schematization of the body image. We need to
consider the body image as a synthesis of physiological and psychological organization heavily mediated by family relations. In its
early months the infant's bodily experiences of food, hunger, warmth,
cold, pleasure, pain, and of gravitational swings are beyond his control.
Simultaneously, he has to explore this world, to solicit support in it and
continuous reassurance of love and care. His whole body communicates
with the mother who is the most immediate source and register of his
experiments with her and his probes into the outer world. At the same
time, the infant explores his mother's body as well as his own and must
also acquire a sense of the consistency, size, weight and texture of all of
the bodies that make up his environment. Security and gratification
212
JOHN
O'NEILL
alternate with fear and displeasure in the course of these bodily probes.
Adult attitudes will be vital in the mediation of the infant's bodily
inquiry, heightening and reassuring its positive experiences, rescuing
and removing from painful encounters. Of course, the parent may also
be an ambivalent participant, discouraging and disappointing the
infantile inquiry. All this registers in the infant's posture and movements associated with the face, mouth, eyes, fingers, toes and bodyarching. Thus the infant's search for security is not to be equated with
passivity. On the contrary, security underwrites the infant's mobility,
grasping, rhythm, gurgling and play. These in turn will underwrite his
efforts to achieve upright posture, to walk and to climb, despite falls.
The infant who begins with a strong attachment to his mother, seeking,
grasping and clinging will simultaneously explore the distance between
himself and his mother, continuously widening the circle of her
watchful care until he can enter and leave it without fear. Considered in
this fashion, then, there is a constant interplay between the infant's
achievement of psychosomatic integration, security and social separation.
For these reasons, Schilder argues that the infant fears for its whole
body, for its insides, its orifices and its outsides- and not just for its
sexual organs. Thus in the psychoanalytic literature the notion of the
castration complex has been widened to include any separation
experience, such as birth and weaning (the child's experience of
divorce?). Schilder's view, however, is that the integrity of the body
image remains central to infant development:
It is perfectly true that there is something in common in all infringements on the integrity
of the body, but the body is more than just an annex to the sex parts. It has a definite value
in itself, and it is arbitrary to view the integrity of the body merely as an aspect to the
integrity of the sex p a r t s . . . I prefer to speak about the wish for the integrity of the body and
the fear of being dismembered. (Schilder, 1964, p. 80)
THE
SPECULAR
BODY
213
214
JOHN
O'NEILL
with whom the infant then identifies in order to protect the good mother
from himself. What is fundamental in these processes is that they are set
in the flesh, so to speak, of the mother/infant body. Their goodness and
badness, their successes and failures are then translated into traces at
each higher level of biopsychological self-awareness and relationship.
The vital role of the mother's body is that its presence to the infant be
'good enough', as Winnicott says, not to raise prematurely the question
of separation from the mother. Thereafter, she may initiate the infant
into its own search for separation, without thereby prolonging the
trauma of birth.
I also think we should set aside the notion of passivity of the infant in
its relation to the mother as part of the retrospective myth of plenitude.
Even in the womb the embryo is active and the activity increases until
the cresendo of birth. Thereafter, of course, the infant responds to
auditory and tactile stimuli, as well as to taste and smell. Visual stimuli
increase and the infant's body becomes at once the source of interior
sensations and a perceptual object, at least partially, as a finger, or toe.
At this stage, then, sensation and perception are relativized, as we
subjectivize experience and the external world. If anything, the value of
the infant's milieu will be determined by its bodily sensations rather
than perceptions of external reality and its contact with the latter will
also be mediated by those larger human bodies which solicit, interpret
and requite the infant's wants. At this stage, infant libido remains with
the body but will develop beyond this primitive narcissistic level as the
oral, anal and genital levels of experience are organized and, so to
speak, familized (Sullivan, 1953). Thus the libidinal body is psychologically and sociologically organized to shift pre-oedipal infantile
sexuality into a secondary narcissism founded upon a family mediated
ego ideal.
The infant's response to others as potentially helpful or harmful is
quasi-postural. By the same token, it is not a constructed or conceptual
attitude. It is a corporeal response to a lived social situation. Moreover,
the infant is responsive to this social milieu more directly than to his
physical milieu (Guillaume 1971, pp. 152-153). Indeed, he seeks access
to the latter through his social world long before he learns to interact
directly with his physical world. In this 'parasitic' stage, psychological
reality pervades the infant's body so that it seems to resonate pure
pleasure and pain in its successes and failures with others and their
mediation of the things he seeks. Indeed, the infant appears to be a
215
natural social psychologist, moving the adult world around him, delighting and disappointing it according to the infant's register of smiles
and cries. It is to free themselves from this helpless tyrant, that parents
begin to impute motive, reason, cause and insight on the part of the
infant in their exchanges with him. In this way, they are able to draw the
infant into a contract from which they can responsibly withdraw. Thus
the pre-physical and pre-social world of the infant is gradually articulated into the two domains of the world of objects and the world of
persons. The hinge, so to speak, of this double articulation of the
physical and social world is the infant's own body.
The infant does not have a social world by means of a detour through
his own world, although this may be true of the child once he has
acquired language as part of the competent articulation of his relations
to others and his own interests. To the infant the social world is, so to
speak, physiognomic. His own corporeal world resonates the sounds,
smells, smiles, caresses, warmth, coldness and hurts with which he is
surrounded. But the infant does not project upon his mediators the
responses evoked in himself before the spectacle he enjoys or dislikes.
The infant's egocentrism at this stage is a bodily circuit rather than an
intellectual circuit of reflexivity or Verstehen. Yet the expressivity of
the infant's postural response, the way it seeks to prolong or to reject an
approach, already conscripts the other as a witness, an accomplice or
nuisance in the infant's world. Before language, the infant's body seems
already to be a text of pleasure and pain (Barthes, 1975; O'Neill, 1983)
with which its parents are obsessed, reading in every sound, in each stir,
smile or tear, their own fates. Thus each new generation of parents
willingly enthralls itself to the royal pantomime of its children.
NOTES
* A first version of this paper was presented at the Seventh Annual Meeting of the
Merleau-Ponty Circle, organized by Professor Martin Dillon at the State University of
New York, Binghampton, 7-9 October, 1982.
1 For a subtle analysis of the body boundary as a communicative texture between self
disclosure ( Selbstdarstellung) and self-centeredness ( Weltbeziehung dutch Innerlichkeit),
see Bakan (1976). She argues, however, that since self-disclosure is linguistically
mediated it is both thought-centered and feeling-centered. Moreover, since feelingcentered experience is shaped in the infant's early family environment, its communicative
mode may never quite mesh with its later public communication, and may need to be
repressed or else released in special ritual techniques such as poetry, religion and
216
JOHN O'NEILL
psycho-analysis. It is the task of critical social theory to bring together man's two bodies
(O'Neill, 1983), respecting in public discourse what cannot be said in the feeling,
embodied self.
REFERENCES
Amsterdam, Beulah Kramer and Morton Levitt: 1980, 'Consciousness of Self and Painful
Self-Consciousness', in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, vol. 35, Yale University
Press, New Haven, pp. 67-83.
Bakan, Mildred: 1976, 'Alienation and the Interpretative Framework', in Anna-Teresa
Tymieniecka (ed.), The Crisis of Culture, Steps to Reopen the Phenomenological
Investigation of Man, D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, pp. 219-226.
Barthes, Roland: 1975, The Pleasure of the Text, translated by Richard Miller. Hill and
Wang, New York.
Bettelheim, Bruno: 1967, The Empty Fortress, Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self,
Free Press, New York.
Bloom, Harold: 1973, The Anxiety of Influence, A Theory of Poetry, Oxford University
Press, New York.
Cooley, Charles: 1964, Human Nature and the Social Order, Schocken, New York.
Dillon, Martin C.: 1978, 'Merleau-Ponty and the Psychogenesis of the Self', Journal of
Phenomenological Psychology 9, 84-98.
Erikson, Erik H.: 1963, Childhood and Society, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., New
York.
Fisher, Seymour and S. E. Cleveland: 1968, Body Image and Personality, Dover Press,
New York.
Fisher, Seymour: 1970, Body Experience in Fantasy and Behavior, Appleton-CenturyCrofts, New York.
Freud, Sigmund: 1920, 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII, The Hogarth Press,
London.
Goffman, Erving: 1967, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-Face Behaviour, Doubleday
Anchor Books, New York.
Goodwin, Charles: 1981, Conversational Organization, Interaction between Speakers and
Hearers, Academic Press, New York.
Gorman, Warren: 1969, Body Image and the Image of the Brain, Warren H. Green, Inc., St.
Louis.
Guillaume, Paul: 1971, Imitation in Children, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
and London.
Klein, Melanie: 1932, 'Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict and of Super-Ego Formation',
in her The Psycho-Analysis of Children, The Hogarth Press, London, p. 123-148.
Lacan, Jacques: 1966, Ecrits, Aux Editions du Seuil, Paris.
Lacan, Jacques: 1970, 'The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I', in Jacques
Lacan (ed.), Ecrits, A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan, W. W. Norton and
Company Inc., New York, pp. 1-7.
Laplanehe, J. and J.-B. Pontalis: 1973, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, W. W. Norton
and Company, Inc., New York.
T H E S P E C U L A R BODY
217
Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis: 1976, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, translated with an
Introduction by Jeffrey Mehlman, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and
London.
Mead, George H.: 1967, Mind, Self, and Society, edited and with an introduction by
Charles W. Morris, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: 1964a, 'Resum6 des ses cours 6tabli par des 6tudiants et
approuv6 par lui-meme', Bulletin de Psychologie, x v m , 3-6.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: 1964b, 'The Child's Relations with Others', in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (ed.), The Primacy of Perception, And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, James M. Edie (ed.),
Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
O'Neill, John: 1970, Perception, Expression and History: The Social Phenomenology of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
O'Neill, John: 1973, 'On Simmel's "Sociological Apriorities" ', in George Psathas (ed.),
Phenomenological Sociology: Issues and Applications, John Wiley and Sons, New York,
pp. 91-106.
O'Neill, John: 1982, 'Embodiment and Child Development: A Phenomenological Approach', in Chris Jenks (ed.), The Sociology of Childhood: Essential Readings, Batsford
Academic and Educational Ltd., London, pp. 76-86.
O'Neill, John: 1983, 'Homotextuality: Fragments (RB)', in Gamy Shapiro and Alan Sica
(eds.), Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects, University of Massachusetts Press,
Amherst, pp. 165-182.
Schilder, Paul: 1950, The Image and Appearance of the Human Body, International
Universities Press, New York.
Shontz, Franklin C.: 1969, Perceptual and Cognitive Aspects of Body Appearance,
Academic Press, New York and London.
Stein, Conrad: 1966, 'Langage et Inconscient', in L'Inconscient, Vie Colloque de
Bonneval, 1960, sous la direction de Henri Ey, Desclte de Brouwer, Paris, p. 131-142.
Sullivan, Harry Stack: 1953, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, Helen Swick Perry and
Mary Ladd Gawel (eds.), W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York.
Wallon, Henri: 1949, Les origines du caract~re chez l'enfant, Presses universitaires de
France, Paris.
Winnicott, D. W.: 1967, 'Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development', in
Peter Lomas (ed.), The Predicament of the Family, A Psycho-Analytical Symposium,The
Hogarth Press, London, pp. 26-33.
Winnicott, D. W.: 1971, Playing and Reality, Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York.
Zaner, Richard M.: 1964, The Problem of Embodiment: Some Contributions to a
Phenomenology of the Body, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague.
Zaner, Richard M.: 1981, The Context of Self: A Phenomenological Inquiry Using
Medicine as a Clue, Ohio University Press, Athens.
Department of Sociology
York University
Downsview, Ontario
Canada M3J 1P3