The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Phy ...

the primacy of language in the creation of the subject and suggesting that the human unconscious is structured like language. In his description of the structure of the psyche, Lacan divides the psyche into three orders. In drastically simplified terms, the Real order is the pre-linguistic, wholly need-based natural state and is fully experienced only by neo-natal infants who have not yet been exposed to language. The Imaginary order, which Lacan links to the mirror stage of infant development, involves the recognition of self as potential other and the resulting creation of an imaginary “I”. The Symbolic order is the realm of language, desire, and object relations in which the subject acquires the ability to communicate, to recognize social expectations and rules, and thus to interact with others. Interplay between these three orders creates the fundamental psychodynamic of selfhood.

Lacan's theories of identity development are of paramount importance to the field of disability studies and to cultural studies in general. His description of the mirror stage, with its emphasis on the specular act, stresses the significance of looking at the body. For Lacan, ego formation (development of the mental concept of “I”) is achieved through identification with one's own external image. This state must be reached through initial self-alienation in reaction to the otherness of one's image, as the image necessarily seems more coherent and complete than the infant's experience of the body and so comes to represent an imaginary ideal. Though an actual mirror reflection can be the source of this image, so can another person with whom the subject identifies and strives to emulate. In this context, identity is founded upon external relationships, acts of looking, and responses to the other. The importance that Lacan places on the role of the gaze—a tool for the formation of selfhood and differentiation between self and other—echoes in a variety of ways throughout critical theory, especially in the work of Foucault, as well as in feminist theory and disability studies. Within Lacan's mirror stage, the gaze is a dialectical exchange in which the conscious self or ego gazes at the reflection as a fantasy image of the ideal, while also imagining the return of that gaze by the object. Lacan later redefined the mirror stage, not as a temporary part of child development, but a permanent structure within the experience of subjectivity. ⁴