When Jacques Lacan coined the term “méconnaisance” or “misrecognition,” he was referring to the way in which a maturing subject comes to understand his or her encounter with his or her own reflection in the mirror—a psycho-developmental period also known as The Mirror Stage; this encounter, as Lacan ([1949] 2009) theorized, leads to the emergence of an idealized projection of who the subject is. This “Ideal I” that emerges from this encounter with the virtual Other, that is nonetheless the Self, produces both a recognition and a mis-recognition of this “I”.
On the one hand, it produces a recognition of the Self as a coherent body in which this “I” is located. On the other hand, it takes us to a misrecognition of the Self through this virtual image that both hides aspects of the subject—and, thus, misleads the subject in his or her own self-understanding—and also reveals...