The child, at an age when he is for a time, however short, outdone by the chimpanzee in instrumental intelligence, can nevertheless already recognize as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry of the Aha-Erlebniss, which Köhler sees as the expression of situational apperception, an essential stage of the act of intelligence.

This act, far from exausting itself, as in the case of the monkey, once the image has been mastered and found empty, immediately rebounds in the case of the child in a series of gestures in which he experiences in play the relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child's own body, and the persons and things, around him.

This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child at the infans stage, still sunk in his motor incapacity and nursing dependence, would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.

It is this image that becomes fixed, the ideal ego, from the point at which the subject stops as ego ideal.

• Lacan for beginners - Carl's look at the mirror stage
• Lacan and the Mirror Stage - quotes from Grosz, with links to responses, at the Lacan interactive space
• perfume, Lutecium.fr and Lacanian links