Compared to other animals, humans are born prematurely. A wildebeest calf, for instance, can stand within minutes of birth and run within a day, whereas it takes years before we can properly stand, walk, or handle objects. What’s true of the body is also true of the mind: an infant has no sense of self — it isn’t born with an ‘I’.
How does a baby who arrives in the world this way become, within just a few years, a person who speaks your language, shares your assumptions, can attend school, and answer to their own name when the teacher calls it out?
It is one of the most fundamental questions in thinking about the formation of identity, and one that therapy returns to again and again.
The mirror phase
One answer begins with a mirror.
Psychologists observing infants between six and eighteen months noticed something striking: when a child is placed before a mirror, they become captivated by their reflection.
The image seems to offer something the child does not yet have — a sense of wholeness, a coherent outline of themselves that their own body, felt from the inside, does not yet provide.
This moment of fascination — the child’s recognition of themselves in the reflection — is what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the mirror phase.
It marks an early and important step in the formation of identity: the child begins to identify an external image with themselves.
Notice the delight as the child interacts with their reflection — a kind of jubilation at finding themselves, gathered into a single image, looking back.
The rouge test
By around eighteen to twenty-four months, this sense of self becomes more stable.
In what is known as the mirror mark test — or the rouge test — a small mark is placed on a child’s nose before they are shown their reflection.
If the child reaches to touch the mark on their own nose, rather than pointing at the mirror, they have recognised that the reflection is a representation of themselves.
This marks an important shift: the child is no longer simply captivated by an image. They have begun to understand that the image is theirs.
The mirror in later life
For developmental psychologists, the mirror phase is a specific stage in infancy. But many therapists — and particularly those working in a psychoanalytic tradition — understand it as a process that continues throughout life.
We do not stop forming our sense of self in early childhood; we keep finding ourselves — or failing to find ourselves — in the images and words others offer us.
These images are not always literal. The “mirror” might be a word spoken at the right moment, a response from someone whose opinion matters, a role or label that suddenly fits.
Music journalist Paul Morley describes one such moment: the point at which broadcaster Tony Wilson told him, simply, you are a writer.
Morley describes the impact of hearing those words from someone established in the field.
We might notice in his account something that echoes the infant at the mirror — the same quality of recognition, the same sense of suddenly cohering around an image that has been confirmed by another.
When recognition fails
The mirror image does not always hold. Jeff Lynne describes the anticipation of seeing himself, for the first time, as a successful songwriter — and what happened when the reflection did not match the image he had formed of himself.
What Lynne describes is not simply disappointment. It is closer to what happens when the coordinates that once guaranteed your sense of place give way — when the image in which you recognised yourself is no longer available. The jubilation of the earlier clip finds its inverse here.
Who told you who you are?
There is a detail in the infant mirror videos worth returning to. Before the child fully claims the reflection as their own, they turn toward their mother, seeking confirmation: yes, that’s you.
Identity is not formed in isolation. It depends from the beginning on the response of the caregiver — their words, language, and what those words carry.
The child becomes bound to their image because their caregiver confirms it as theirs. And how they come to inhabit that confirmation — whose voice it carries, what it asks of them — will shape their sense of self in ways that persist long into adult life.
This is one reason why the identifications we form can be both sustaining and constraining.
Being told you are a writer, or you are the strong one, or you are not the marrying sort does not simply describe — it shapes. And what once made sense of a life can, over time, become the thing that keeps it narrower than it needs to be.
A common thread in therapy is the gradual recognition that many of the identities we carry — the roles we inhabit, the pictures we hold of ourselves — were formed in relation to others, and may be questioned.
Not in order to discard them, but to ask whether they are still a picture we want to live by, and whose picture it actually is.
Notes
The observation about how a child’s first years unfold is drawn from Anthony Easthope, The Unconscious, Routledge (1999), p. 59.
The mirror phase became central to psychoanalytic thinking about identity through the work of Jacques Lacan. For an introduction, see Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy, The Works of Jacques Lacan, Free Association Books (1986), chapter 2; and Darian Leader, Jouissance: Sexuality, Suffering and Satisfaction, Polity (2021), pp. 40–50.
Sources of all videos are given on the Therapy in Manchester YouTube channel↗
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Originally written July 2019, revised July 2026.
Continuous practice in Manchester since 2011.
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