Edinburgh Napier University

  The short essay ‘The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ is without doubt Lacan's best-known piece of writing. Over its dense seven pages, Lacan presents a repost to both Sartre's existentialism and developmental psychology and presents the basis of his own theory of the emergence of human subjectivity as an encounter with an image from the external world. This reading takes us, paragraph by paragraph, through Lacan's text, unpacking the allusions and obtuse references and shining a light on the details of his powerful and influential argument.