Richard J. Leskosky asks: I assume there must be an obvious answer to the following question since the question itself seems so obvious to me, so I apologize in advance if I'm being obtuse. Since mirrors were not a part of human experience for most of the course of human evolution, and since even today most infants in the world do not have a chance to see themselves much or at all in mirrors, what is the basis for hypothesizing a "mirror stage" in infants? Lacan's point isn't that an actual mirror is needed in the process of ego formation, but that the sense of being, and the sense of being a unity, comes to the infant from the outside . In other words, he condends that the unity of the ego is first seen in a place where it (the ego) is not. Which brings us to Petra Hanakovawho wrote: To put it differently , Lacan refuses the Carthesian notion of the subject, described by the infamous phrase "Cogito, ergo sum". Lacan would probably shift it into "I'm being thought about by the other", or, rather "I'm being spoken by somebody else". Because subjectivity does not exist in its own discourse, but in the discourses of the others. Yes, Lacan says that the I who thinks is not the I who is. See FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHOANALYSIS pp. 35-37 and especially pp. 203-230. Louis Schwartz ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama.