Coursework Research: Notes

Laura Mulvey: The Male Gaze
Sigmund Freud: Scopophilia

Jacques Lacan: The Mirror and The Gaze

Lacan introduces the mirror stage, a developmental stage that he observed in infants from 6 to about 18 months.  In this stage, the infant recognises him or herself in the mirror as a whole entity instead of the fragmented movements and undefined boundaries between self and other (baby and mom especially) that have constituted his or her world up to that point. Lacan says this shows that the infant has desires to see him or herself as an "I." The vision in the mirror, which comes at a time when the infant doesn't have control over his or her own body yet, gives that image of the "I" as a "mirage" of control and "perfect self" or imago. Conversely, this imago has "the effect in man of an organic insufficiency in his natural reality"; it creates a permanent sense of being imperfect, but looking forward to perfection.

http://web.utk.edu/~misty/486lacan.html

This quote refers to the use of a mirror by a child, leading them to see the mirrored image of themselves as the 'ideal', and therefore pushing them to strive for an ideal which in a way, has already been achieved. This 'perfect self' mentioned in the quote above is similar to the ideal that children strive to achieve after first seeing their own reflection in the mirror, however at such an age, they are in no place to control their own body and it's developments yet anyway, leaving them unable to change their appearances. This takes place between he ages of approximately 6 and 18 months.

Jacques Lacan: ' The split between the eye and the gaze" (1964) In the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalogy.

Jacques Lacan derives the concept of the split by recasting central Freudian concepts such as unconsciousness and the compulsion to repeat.
The gaze alienates subjects from themselves by causing the subject to identify with itself as the objet a , the object of the drives, thus desiring scopic satisfaction. Yet, in constructing the human subject as this objet a , the gaze denies the subject its full subjectivity. The subject is reduced to being the object of desire and, in identifying with this object, it becomes alienated from itself.

http://csmt.uchicago.edu/annotations/lacansplit.htm

Here, Jacque Lacan's theory explains how 'the gaze alienates a subject from themselves by causing the subject to identify with itself as the object...thus desiring scopic satisfaction.' This is easily relatable to the two magazines that I have analysed (or any magazine) in which female models are used to advertise a product. In using females to present a product in an attractive and desirable manner, the models will become...