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This paper aims to offer a theoretical contribution to understanding how identity formation is affected by the digital environment, drawing on psychoanalysis and philosophy of communication. It responds to recent studies, such as those by UNESCO and the Karolinska Institutet, that link declining student competencies in Europe to increased digital media use during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on Jacques Lacan’s concept of the “mirror stage”, the paper explores how human identity is initially formed through external reflections, emphasizing that the self is not a unified, autonomous entity but a fragmented one constructed through external images and illusions. The scientific objective is to reinterpret Lacan’s theory within the framework of contemporary digital culture – especially in the biocybernetic, image-driven context of the 21st century. The mirror metaphor is expanded to include media such as books, screens, and interfaces, all of which serve as “mirrors” that shape identity through symbolic and imaginary orders. In contrast to the fixed, closed structure of print media in the Gutenberg era, today’s interactive digital mirrors actively engage users in identity construction. However, these digital systems often manipulate desire and reinforce normative images, offering only the illusion of self-determination. Philosophers such as W. J. T. Mitchell and Kaja Silverman are referenced to explain the cultural shift from textual to visual representation – what Mitchell calls the “pictorial turn”. The paper investigates how identity is mediated through images and argues that the digital mirror, while seemingly flexible, often imposes constraints on self-perception and reaffirms external control over the subject’s symbolic positioning.

Narcissus without Narcissism - The myth of Narcissus is commonly believed to be about the punishment the title character received for being in love with himself. Taking into consideration the interpretations of the myth of Narcissus in Ovid, Freud, Lacan, Dalí, Blanchot, Girard, Kofman, and Nancy, the author shows that this interpretation is wrong, even if it does tell us something about the origins of the myth. The myth of Narcissus is not about self-obsession, because Narcissus, unlike today’s narcissists, does not recognize himself in the mirror and does not know that he is looking at himself. He sees this face that he finds beautiful, this face of such beauty that he passionately desires it and will ultimately lose himself in it. What he sees is a stranger.

People's waiting, which is related essentially to the idea of a Savior, is part of the collective consciousness that has developed itself to an archetype, and this archetype has become like a mirror against which people measure their chances of survival. In the twentieth century theatre, the process of waiting rarely spares Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot as an emblematic example, though the character of Godot has become prone to be manipulated into different characterizations that are basically deconstructing the idea of waiting. Therefore, the aim becomes how to excavate man's ability to make some change by one's own self through paths than passive waiting even if this aspiration for change was within the realm of death. The Iraqi playwright, Ali Abdul-Nabi Al-Zaidi employs in his play A Second Death, a similar dramatic archetypal inheritance. His use of archetypes cluster to constitute a Lacanian mirror through which humanity alludes itself for salvation. Al-Zaidi tries to smash this archetypal mirror, helping his audience to reconstruct themselves away from waiting for a savior.

This article addresses the theme of fragmentation in Louise O’Neill’s Asking for It (2015) by means of a reading and interpretation that is informed by Jacques Lacan’s thinking. The article argues that Asking for It is an example of the recent trend towards representations of fragmentation in twenty-first-century Irish writing, especially in terms of the female body. The article provides an overview of Lacan’s thinking on the mirror-stage and offers an analysis of the workings of desire, shame and fragmentation in his thinking, before showing how these notions help to articulate the experiences that Emma O’Donovan – the central character – goes through in the course of novel. The article offers a reading of desire in the context of materialism and the imagined self in the opening stages of the novel as well as the fractured, fragmented body in the latter stages of the text.

In Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat, it is mentioned about a life which can be considered as meaningful by being converted to a fiction by the protagonist, Osman. The cycle of journey occurs in the dark depths of Osman’s subconscious. This cycle bears the signs of rootlessness, desire for liberation, and desire to become a ‘subject’. The image of angel pursued during these journeys points to Osman’s desire to find his existential meaning through an imagined ‘other’ associated with innocence and childhood, to build his identity and to be complete. During these journeys, the angelic image, which appears continuously as a way of salvation, refers to the desire to return to the paradise lost and mother figure; as well as the purification of sin. Eventually, this vicious cycle points to the process of Osman’s self-realization, self-recognition and self-discovery. Thereafter, he completes his ego and become a ‘subject’. In this article, a psychoanalytic review on Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat with the help of Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s theoretical perspectives on anxiety, id-ego-superego, creative writers and day-dreaming, psychoneurosis and mirror stage will be expounded.

This article argues that the current critical consensus concerning Justin Torres’s We the Animals is mistaken in its assessment that the novel forges a liberatory pathway for queer individuals through radical displays of sexuality. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it argues that the unnamed protagonist of the novel begins and ends his bildungsroman in a constant state of misrecognition and confusion as to what his social role might be in a phallocentric symbolic order. The overbearing presence of the phallus, his unsustainable fantasies of the imaginary and his mother, and his inability to forge an identity apart from the dictates of the phallic signifier, culminate in the re-emergence of infantile neurosis and his seclusion to a mental facility. This article also offers an alternative vision of queer liberation, drawn from Lee Edelman’s No Future, when the queer subject eventually learns to embody the death drive and to dismantle structures of heteronormativity.

The mirror constitutes a significant image that recurs multiple times in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and it is mainly associated with Mick Kelly and Biff Brannon, who are reckoned in the novel grotesques in terms of sexuality. This article does not consider the mirror as something merely reflecting the subject in front of it, but as a media that occasions self-examination and self-reconstitution of the subject. It superimposes Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias onto McCullers’s depiction of the two characters’ construction and reconstruction of subjectivity as well as their search for identification. Nonetheless, the so-called identification with the mirror image, paralleled by what Lacan observes in the mirror stage, is but a misidentification, for the mirror is in essence a heterotopia of illusion.

How do people evaluate the transformation of a local music scene under tourism? Using Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage theory, Manuel Castells’ identity theory and Erik Cohen’s authentication theory, we build a framework to judge the authenticity of Naxi music in Lijiang, China, based on interviews, literature analysis and performance analysis. The conclusions are as follows. First, there are significant differences in authenticity among the three stages of Naxi music, as defined by Lacan’s theory. Second, we modify Erik Cohen’s authentication concept from the perspective of Lacan and read the spirit of persistence and innovation as “hot” authentication in the postmirror stage. Naxi musicians have clear project identity, as defined by Manuel Castells. Project identity means that they do not follow the mirror image of tourists blindly and pay attention to music and their own development. This research contributes to the sustainable development of intangible cultural heritage in tourism.

This essay involves a set of speculations concerning the role plant-granted visions play in the formation of the Shuar subject. It also reflects on the need for an ethnography of secrecy and the ineffable. In both these tasks I seek to engage psychoanalytic theory. Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic helps analyze the relationship between the discourse and the silence of the unconscious. His essay on the “mirror stage” is useful for thinking about bourgeois subjectivity. Nevertheless, I argue that premissionization Shuar did not go through the mirror stage. First, I argue that Shuar practices effected the colonization of the Symbolic by the Real, in contrast to bourgeois culture, in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Then I explore the role of desire, violence, and speech in the construction of different kinds of power. Pierre Clastres’ work helps to explore how these two cultures clash and articulate on the colonization frontier, while psychoanalytic theory adds to Clastres a theory of the subject. Ultimately, this article is an experiment in acknowledging the psychic unity of humanity—while at the same time illuminating the differences between the state and societies against the state.

Povzetek Mit o Narcisu velja za zgodbo o kazni, ki jo naslovni junak prejme, ker se zaljubi sam vase. Po svojih prvih delih, večinoma psihiatričnih raziskavah, posvečenih paranoji, je Jacques Lacan v teoretično psihoanalizo pravzaprav zares vstopil šele s svojim predavanjem na XIV. kongresu Mednarodnega psihoanalitičnega združenja (IPA) v Marienbadu leta 1936, kjer je predstavil nov pojem, zrcalni stadij (le stade du miroir).1 Tako je tudi prispevek, ki ga je Lacan pod naslovom »Zrcalni stadij kot oblikovalec funkcije jaza« (»Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je«) predstavil udeležencem XVI. kongresa Mednarodnega psihoanalitičnega združenja trinajst let kasneje v Zürichu,2 pomemben tako za sam Lacanov razvoj3 kot za umestitev strukture, ki premišlja združitev zrcala in nezavednega.4 Predlagani Lacanov pojem zrcalni stadij se na naša na funkcioniranje dvojne podobe. Kot vemo, je zgodba največkrat interpretirana kot strašna nesreča, saj se je Narcis pravzaprav zaljubil v samega vase. Pomembno je torej, da se ne zaljubimo sami vase, da ne podležemo temu, kar psihoanaliza imenuje narcizem. Narcis je bil kaznovan, ker se je zaljubil vase. Bleščeča podoba se, tako kot »bog snega«, prične »topiti od poželenja (désir)« v navpičnih slapovih taljenja, glasno izginjajoča med »ekskrementalnimi kriki mineralov (cris excrémentiels des minéraux)« ali v »tišinah mahu« »proti oddaljenemu zrcalu jezera«. Posredi je svojevrstni optični model ideala osebnosti, kjer je za subjekt - ki se nahaja na robu konkavnega - podoba v ravnem zrcalu ekvivalentna podobi realnega predmeta, kakršno bi videl opazovalec, ki bi bil na drugi strani tega istega zrcala.