Models of reflexive recognition. Wallon's Origines du caractère and Lacan's "Mirror stage"

Jacques Lacan drew on the empirical research of the psychologist Henri Wallon both in his 1938 theory of the mirror stage ("the intrusion complex") and in subsequent formulations. Yet, like Lacan's famous "return" to Freud, his recourse to Wallon is revisionary and, at times, antithetical. This essay examines the disparities between Wallon's and Lacan's work on the mirror experience, focusing especially on the status of the mirror and the identity of the reflected image. An analysis of these differences helps to clarify the meaning of the child's specular activity--"an ontological structure of the human world"--in Lacan's later view and the implications of reflexive recognition for his conception of parental agency.