The Lacanianism Theory of Personality.

Lacan's theory of the Mirror Stage is the psychological development in a child in which the child first recognises itself in the mirror for the first time and becomes conscious of their image and self hood. This stage happens between the ages of 6 and 18 months when the child first realises it is individual from others. At this time the child's identity begins to form, it forms one that is distinct from others but at the same time is inspired from the images of others in order to achieve their own personality. This theory inspired the idea of lack and the concept of desire. "Desire is relation to being to lack, the lack is the lack of being properly speaking, It is not the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby the being exists."

Sigmund Freud's theory of the Id and the ego forms the foundation of the Mirror Stage, a child forms a sense of identity and discovers separate I and other, by developing the ability to distiguish self from other the child understands that they are unique and not just reliant on others. This occurs before the linguistic stage of childhood. This is reference to the 'Id' structure of Freud's theory of personality as the child has only the most basic and innate human desires. As the child begins development in the linguistic stage, it starts to use language and construct their identity, therefore the child's 'ego' begins to develop as it learns what is socially acceptable and forms morals. It is in this stage that the child subconsciously suffers an initial identity crisis, the sense of identity gives the child a foundation on which they are going to develop their personality. If this fundamental identification is not recognised, the child will resort to using external influences as examples to base their personality upon. Additionally, this will limit the child's ability to develop it's own ego, and therefore result in the child acting more to satisfy the needs of the id structure.

As an additional note, in relation to how we live our lives, Lacan theorizes that throughout our lives after our linguistic development, we will never be satisfied, due to the fact that ultimately we desire to return to the simplicity and convenience of life before we discover our identity, and that as we grow older, we become more comfortable as we come to the realization that what we want will not occur, and so the desire fades.