The Mirror Staged: Images of Babies in Baby Books

Abstract

For Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage is that key moment in psychic development when a views its image in the mirror and understands that the image is in some sense itself--but clearly, also, not itself. Understanding the image as its a perfect version of itself it takes to be superior to its actual embodied self, it strives from that point on to emulate that ideal image--constantly tries, and constantly fails, to achieve that supposed ideal. This essay focuses on the many baby currently available that consist mainly of photographs of of other images of babies, and considers how these images might represent replications or restagings of the mirror stage and function as versions of the Ideal-I for their implied viewers. As images of actual children, the photographs in these books represent what most adult viewers take to be the most realistic representations of babyhood possible--the way babies actually look, which, in the context of Lacan's Ideal-I, might better be understood as the way babies are actually supposed to look as currently understood. In terms of conventional adult assumptions about how viewers might look at and understand these images in relation to themselves, these images quite literally restage the mirror stage--show the an image of a to identify with and see as what it ought to be itself. In doing so, moreover, the images reveal how the mirror stage represents a move from egocentricity into a consciousness of others' ideas about who or what one is. As products of the marketplace, these images of babies represent currently powerful cultural ideals about babyhood. By considering the implications of a number of photographs and other images of of babies in books, the essay explores what these books tell their implied reader/viewers about what it means to be a baby, and about what is the right kind of to be.