Who am I when I look in the mirror?

Crime number one. If you’ve ever read anything about the mind and the body, you’ve probably met the phrase “the ghost in the machine.” It’s usually explained like this: Descartes believed the mind is a kind of ghost living inside the body, which is a machine.

That is, more or less, what Descartes believed. But he never called it that. The phrase was invented in 1949, three hundred years after Descartes died, by an English philosopher called Gilbert Ryle, specifically to make fun of him. Ryle even admitted he used it “with deliberate abusiveness.” It was an insult. A philosophical roast.

And then the roast became famous. A bestselling science book borrowed it. The Police named an album after it. A legendary Japanese manga and anime, Ghost in the Shell, took its title from it. Now people quote “the ghost in the machine” as if it were Descartes’ own beautiful metaphor. It’s like getting famous for a nickname your bully gave you.

Crime number two. Lacan’s most famous idea is the mirror stage: the moment a baby recognises itself in the mirror and gets very, very excited about it. It made his name.

But a few years before Lacan presented it, another French psychologist, Henri Wallon, had already written about how children react to their own reflection. He even called it the “mirror test.” And Lacan barely mentioned him.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve seen this movie before. Freud and Schopenhauer. Freud and Nietzsche. Freud and Spinoza. Big name, quiet borrowing, very little credit. Lacan always said he wanted to “return to Freud.” In at least one way, he absolutely did.

Of course, Lacan took Wallon’s observation and turned it into something much bigger and much weirder: a theory about how we all become “me” in the first place. But before we get to the baby, let’s meet the man who decided the real you is the one doing the thinking.

You met René Descartes in Level 1: the French philosopher who did his best thinking lying in bed until lunchtime, and who was eventually killed, legend says, by a Swedish queen who made him teach philosophy at 5am. A cautionary tale about morning people.

Quick recap of his big moment. He decided to doubt absolutely everything. His senses. His body. Whether he was awake or dreaming. Whether an evil demon was tricking him about all of it. And he found exactly one thing he couldn’t doubt: that he was doubting. Which means he was thinking. Which means he existed. I think, therefore I am.

But notice what that leaves him with. He’s sure he exists as a mind. He is not sure his body exists. You can imagine being a thinking thing with no body. You can’t imagine being a body with no thinking going on, at least, not while you’re thinking about it.

So Descartes concluded that you are two completely different kinds of thing stuck together. A thinking thing: invisible, non-physical, the real you. And a body: physical, mechanical, basically a very complicated machine made of tubes, pumps and levers, like the fancy moving statues in royal gardens he loved. He even thought animals were machines of this kind: complex, but with no mind inside.

He had a famous example to prove the mind knows better than the senses. Take a piece of wax, fresh from the honeycomb. It’s hard, cold, smells of flowers, makes a sound when you tap it. Now put it next to the fire. It melts. The smell goes, the colour changes, the shape changes, it’s hot, it’s liquid, it makes no sound. Every single thing your senses told you about it is different. And yet you know it’s the same wax. How? Not through your eyes or nose. Through your mind.

He did the same with people. He looked out of his window and saw hats and coats walking past in the street. Could they be robots in human clothes? Technically, yes. He judged they were people. His eyes only saw hats.

So, for Descartes, the face in the mirror? That’s not you. That’s the machine. You’re the one looking at it.

Which raises an obvious question, and the person who asked it best wasn’t a famous philosopher. It was a 24-year-old princess. Elisabeth of Bohemia wrote to Descartes and asked, very politely: if the mind is non-physical and the body is physical, how exactly does one move the other? How does a thought make your arm go up? Descartes’ answer was that it all happens through a tiny gland in the middle of the brain, the pineal gland. Elisabeth wasn’t convinced. Honestly, nobody was. Philosophers are still arguing about her question nearly four hundred years later.

And the final irony: after Descartes died, his body was eventually brought back to France and buried in a church in Paris. His skull, through a series of very strange events, ended up separately, and today it’s in a museum on the other side of the city.

The man who said the mind and body are two separate things was buried in two separate places. Philosophy has a sense of humour.

Meet Jacques Lacan. Paris, 1901 to 1981. Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and the most stylish man in this entire course. Velvet jackets, fur coats, flamboyant bow ties, and strange twisted cigars. For nearly thirty years, his weekly seminars in Paris were packed: students, philosophers, artists, celebrities, all squeezing into the room to hear him speak for hours in sentences so complicated that people still argue about what half of them mean. Think of him as a rock star whose lyrics nobody fully understands, but everyone agrees are deep.

He also owned one of the most scandalous paintings in art history, which he kept hidden behind a sliding panel with another painting on it. Very Lacan: even his living room had an unconscious.

In 1936, young Lacan went to an international psychoanalysis conference to present his big idea. About ten minutes in, the chairman, Ernest Jones, Freud’s loyal biographer from Level 1, cut him off. Time’s up. Lacan was furious. So he walked out and went to Berlin, to watch the Olympic Games. As you do.

So what was the idea he never got to finish?

Picture a baby, somewhere between six and eighteen months old. Developmentally, this baby is a mess. It can’t walk properly. It can’t control its arms. It wobbles, it flops, it drools. Inside, it experiences its body as a chaotic collection of bits that don’t quite work together.

Now someone holds this baby up in front of a mirror.

And the baby sees… a whole person. One complete, neat, coordinated little figure. And it gets incredibly excited. It laughs, it reaches out, it bounces. Lacan described the baby’s reaction as jubilant. A chimpanzee, by the way, recognises itself in a mirror pretty quickly and then gets bored. The human baby can’t stop looking.

Why so excited? Because, Lacan said, the baby is seeing a version of itself that’s much more together than it actually feels. And it falls in love with that image. It decides: that’s me. And that image becomes the foundation of what we call “I,” the ego.

And then often, the baby turns around to look at the adult holding it, as if to ask: is that me? And the adult smiles and says, “Yes! That’s you!” So from the very first moment, who you are is confirmed by someone else.

The “me” you fell in love with is an image. It’s outside you. It’s reversed, left is right. And it’s much more coherent and in control than you actually are. So, for Lacan, your sense of who you are is built on a beautiful misunderstanding. He called it méconnaissance: a mis-recognition. The ego isn’t the real you. It’s a very convincing picture of you, that you’ve been chasing since you were a baby.

Which explains a lot.

Why your voice on a voice note sounds wrong: it doesn’t match the image of yourself you carry around. Why thirty-seven out of forty selfies are “not me”: you’re looking for the one that matches the jubilant baby’s picture. Why the changing-room mirror feels like a personal attack: the image and the ideal have stopped agreeing. And why everyone checks themselves in the lift mirror: we never stopped looking.

And Descartes? Lacan took his most famous line and twisted it into one of his own. Roughly: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. Which sounds like a riddle from a fortune cookie, but it means something simple. The “I” that does the thinking, the confident Descartes-style “I,” isn’t the whole of you. A lot of what you really are is happening where you’re not thinking: in the unconscious.

Lacan once said, in a TV interview, that he always tells the truth, just not the whole truth, because it’s impossible to say all of it. Which is, honestly, the most Lacan way possible of admitting you’re not going to fully understand him. But the mirror stage? That one you can understand. You’ve been living it every time you open your camera.

Tonight: a man who did philosophy in bed, versus a man who did philosophy in a fur coat.

So who wins?

No winner. But a very useful way to look at the mirror.

Descartes says: relax, you’re not your face, your chins, your voice on a recording. You’re the one doing the thinking behind it all.

Lacan says something stranger, and maybe kinder: the version of you that you expected to see, the one your voice note and your selfies keep failing to match, was never real. It was an image you fell in love with when you were a wobbly baby who couldn’t hold its own head up. Of course reality doesn’t match it. Nothing could.

So next time the shop window catches you slouching like a question mark, or the front camera opens from below, remember: you’re not failing to look like yourself. You’re just failing to look like a picture a jubilant baby invented.

And maybe, after selfie number three, just post it. Winnicott would call that good enough.

The misquotes: “The ghost in the machine” was coined by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind (1949) as a deliberately mocking description of Descartes’ view; it is not Descartes’ phrase. The observation of children’s reactions to mirrors was described by the psychologist Henri Wallon in the early 1930s, before Lacan presented the mirror stage, and Lacan gave him little credit. In Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the line is “Magic mirror on the wall”; “Mirror, mirror” comes from English translations of the Grimm fairy tale.

René Descartes (1596–1650) on mind and body: In Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes argued that he could doubt the existence of his body but not of his mind, and concluded that the mind (a thinking thing, res cogitans) and the body (an extended thing, res extensa) are distinct substances. This view is called substance dualism. He regarded the body, and animals, as complex machines. In the wax example (Second Meditation), he argued that the mind, not the senses, grasps what a thing really is. Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia challenged him in 1643 to explain how an immaterial mind can move a physical body; his answer, involving the pineal gland (The Passions of the Soul, 1649), is generally considered unsatisfactory, and the “mind-body problem” remains debated.

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981): French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who called for a “return to Freud” while radically reinterpreting him. His weekly seminar in Paris (1953–1980) was hugely influential. His use of variable-length sessions led to his exclusion from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1963.

The mirror stage: First presented in 1936 and published in revised form in 1949 (“The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function”). Lacan argued that an infant, who experiences its body as uncoordinated and fragmented, identifies with its unified reflection in a mirror with “jubilation,” often seeking an adult’s confirmation. This image becomes the basis of the ego (moi). Because the ego is formed from an external, idealised image, it rests on a misrecognition (méconnaissance): the “I” we identify with is more coherent than our actual experience. Lacan placed the ego in the register he called the Imaginary, the realm of images and identifications. He reversed Descartes’ certainty about the self: “I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think” (“The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious,” 1957).

A note on science: Research using the “rouge test,” in which a mark is placed on a child’s face before they look in a mirror, suggests most children reliably recognise themselves at around 18 months. Lacan’s mirror stage is generally read today as a theory of how identity is formed through images and others’ recognition, rather than as a precise developmental timeline.

Where they meet: Both ask what the “I” is and how we know it, and both distinguish the self from the body as it appears.

Where they differ: For Descartes, the thinking “I” is the most certain thing there is and the foundation of all knowledge. For Lacan, the “I” is formed from an external image and others’ recognition, is fundamentally misrecognised, and is not where the truth of the subject lies; that truth is found in the unconscious.

Further reading:

• Descartes’ Meditations, the Second Meditation, which includes the wax and the hats and coats. Short and very readable.
• The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and René Descartes, edited by Lisa Shapiro, to read the princess who asked the best question.
• How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek, a short and lively introduction, and a preview of our final guest in this level.
• Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide by Darian Leader and Judy Groves, if you’d like Lacan with pictures. Honestly, recommended.