The French analyst Lacan had proposed, in a seminal paper to which Winnicott refers, ‘Le Stade du miroir’ (1949),8 that when the child looked in the mirror he saw a unified image of his own disarray. Though he experienced himself as all over the place, in bits and pieces, he observed himself collected into an image. This disparity – this formative
... See moreAdam Phillips • Winnicott
“Perhaps, then, that Instagram shot or confessional tweet isn’t always meant to evoke some mythical, pretend version of ourselves,” he surmised, “but instead seeks to invoke the imagined perfect audience—the non-existent people who will see us exactly as we want to be seen.” “We are not curating an ideal self,” Alang added, “but rather, an ideal Ot... See more
Substack • LaMDA, Lemoine, and the Allures of Digital Re-enchantment
As the American sociologist Charles Cooley put it: “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am.” He dubbed this phenomenon “the looking glass self,” and the evidence for it is diverse, encompassing the everyday experience of seeing ourselves through imagined eyes in social situations (the spotlight effec
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The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing
... See moreNaomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
An image is a false conclusion or generalization about life. The idealized self-image (or mask) is a false front, or attempt to portray a perfect generalized picture of who we think we ought to be. Both the image and the mask are motivated by the attempt to avoid in the future certain specific, real hurts of the past. Thus the real feelings of the
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