Self-Reflection: The Mirror Stage

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"What do you think behavioralists are describing about someone when they say "s/he has not stopped looking in the mirror"?"

In Lacanian psychology, the "mirror stage" is when an infant-turning-child recognizes him/herself as an "other" in a mirror.

The child sees himself as a complete person for the first time, "[T]he mental representation of an "I"", that is, the sense of self as a separate part than the environment, capable of agency and identity" (Zuern 1998). Lacan claims that this stage "establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other"(Zuern 1998), and claims the ego as object, not subject. "Lacan views the ego as thoroughly compromised and inherently neurotic to its very core, as a passionate defense of a constitutive ignorance of the unconscious" ("Jacques Lacan," 2013). A child is held up to mirror by parents and told to recognize himself; faces are made, pointing, gestures, prophecies to the child's future, and so on are elements of this characteristic ritual. This is followed by the development of the "Ideal-I", since an infant as yet has no comprehension of himself as a complete person and thus sees this image not as s/he is but as s/he could and might be; an ideal (Zuern 1998).  These expectations are embedded into the child's consciousness, his growing ego ("Jacques Lacan," 2013). Ego thus is not an independent, autonomous nature but rather that it is the place of reflected appraisal (cf. Adler 2015, p. 72). "the ego ultimately is an alienating foreign introject through which I am seduced and subjected by others' conscious and unconscious wants and machinations" ("Jacques Lacan," 2013). 

Because of this nurturing of the ego from an extremely young age, the ideal is created by others and projected onto the young child's mind. The startling discovery of wholeness and the subsequent creating of an ideal Other, compounded by the nurturing of what that person in the mirror is and is capable of, can, according to Lacanian theory, influence some to "spend their entire lives, beginning thusly, chasing in vain after an unattainable state of harmony and mastery first falsely promised by the mirror" ("Jacques Lacan," 2013).

So in answer to the question above, I would postulate that someone who is still "looking in the mirror" is someone who is still searching for that vague and perfect Other that they think they have to become. It seems rather to be an insecurity in the Subject, the ego, the person, as opposed to a vain narcissism. 

Does this theory also mean that the person is in fact already the fulfillment of all the image in the mirror means--after all, that is the function of a mirror? Can the reflection be more than the person creating it? 

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 Sources

"Jacques Lacan". (April 2, 2013). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Web. Retrieved from    
           http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/

Zuern, John David. (1998) Lacan: The mirror stage: Overview. CriticaLink. Web. Retrieved  
          from http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/