Lacan reframed narcissism as a product of mirror and image technologies

Evidence

As part of his point about cultural conditioning, Freud locates the ego itself—the object of libidinal investment in narcissism—not as something innate but as a mediation, the product of a construction: “We are bound to suppose that a unity comparable to the ego cannot exist in the individual from the start; the ego has to be developed.” This development of the ego as a lived, contingent, and therefore social process becomes the focus for Lacan’s elaborations of narcissism, which hinge on image technologies. Narcissism fundamentally pertains to the image; the subject invests libidinally not in a substantiality like “ego” but in a speculative effect of the technology of the mirror. In the ancient myth, the image floats on water and might therefore be construed as naturally occurring. But in Lacan’s retelling, the mirror function encompasses glass, photography, screens. Narcissism becomes qualified as an attachment to the ego qua effect of the mirror, and the constitutive role of mirroring repeats in the narcissist’s concepts of development, growth, and action. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Core to her thesis: if narcissism depends on image/mirror technology, then ‘narcissistic’ immediacy culture is a technological-economic product, not a natural given.
• DEFINE: Defines narcissism in Lacan’s terms as attachment to ego-as-mirror-effect across glass, photography, screens.
• QUESTION: Worth tracing: how does Debord’s spectacle or Baudrillard fit her Lacanian lineage of image technologies?