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On Thinking Maps I would like to start of with the point that we are not what we are, during adolescence this is perhaps most important to remember, as we try obsessively to define ourselves. It is a time of conflicting ideas and of facetious ideologies. Jacques Lacan proposed the theory that he called “Representations” (Lacan 77). The basis for Representations starts in the mind of infants in the “mirror stage”, the stage that infants begin to have a notion of “self”. According to Lacanian theory, when a child is born he/she experiences an effectively euphorical oneness with the mother. To the child the mother “is” all that is, he/she sees the mother and himself, and the world around him/her as one entity. However, this notion does not last in the mind of the child for long. After a time the child is able to differentiate between itself and the world around it and, as a result, begins to describe itself. This is where the problem arises: around the time that the mirror stage comes, the child’s understanding of language is beginning to take form, and he/she chooses to describe him/herself with adjectives based in language.
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