The Mirror Stage & Ego Formation – 08.26.10

Student Comment: During the teaching, you talked about how the ego is formed early on. So I was wondering how it forms. It has to come from somewhere.

“Humans are like monkeys; we imitate the other. And so the infant takes in the mirroring from the parents—the mother, primarily—and begins to express that back, and that creates the first structure. It’s called the ‘Mirror Stage,’” delineates Shunyamurti, the founder of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “And then more and more elements get added and built around that, and as the child is called certain things . . . negative and positive signifiers, they get attached to the identity, and the structure builds according to the clues that the child picks up from the parents as to the role they want the child to play.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, August 26, 2010.