TIME OUT:MIRRORS ARE magic. They mesmerise. They illuminate. They reflect our physical being and psychological presence. They provide our first visual encounter with ourselves. They may even determine when existence has ended – when no breath shadows the surface of a mirror held to the face.
We do well to reflect upon mirrors. They are objects of psychological significance in our lives.
When the Venetians perfected the art of mirror making they revealed previously inaccessible worlds: spiritual, scientific, optical and conceptual worlds, distant worlds through the telescope, metaphors for writers and self-portraiture for artists.
The mirror is a source of poetic imagination, philosophical investigation, psychological speculation and artistic inspiration summed up best, perhaps, in Dutch artist MC Escher’s Hand with Reflecting Sphere.
Mirrors advance the development of identity and individuality, and the integration of external and interior selves. As psychoanalytic adherents of the Lacanian “mirror stage” in infancy explain, the “jubilation” when a child first recognises its mirror image, heralds not only understanding of itself as a unified self, but also as separate and individuated from others. This sight of self is an important developmental milestone.
Mirrors may be our harshest critics and most vain admirers. Poet Sylvia Plath described the mirror as "not cruel, only truthful", yet artist Pablo Picasso's Girl Before a Mirrorrepresents the fragmentation of self in reflection, reminding us of the disjunction there may be between outer and inner experiences of self.
Mirrors reflect us only as accurately or inexactly as we are willing to see. In this, the mirror is both truth and illusion. It may turn our “inner worthiness into the eye” or distort what we contort. It may record what has befallen us or fail to portray the extent of sorrow etched upon our souls.
A potent illustration of anorexia nervosa is the emaciated body looking into the mirror in which it sees an obese body. The delusional dysmorphophobic belief of having a deformity, by those who objectively have no facial or bodily abnormalities, sends sufferers to endless mirror checking, total avoidance of mirrors, or quests for excessive unnecessary cosmetic surgery. We need to look beyond the surface of self into a self that resides within and know its worth.
Mirrors may also intentionally deceive. The smoke and mirror illusions of conjurers or the concave mirrors of carnivals provide cartoon likenesses of ourselves with weirdly enlarged or elongated bodies or diminutive or contorted figures that dismantle vanity, feed flights of fancy and validate the possibility of parallel worlds through the “looking glass”.
Nor is it surprising that many superstitions surround mirrors, not least the seven years of bad luck consequent upon breaking one unless the fragments are buried by moonlight to expiate that fate.
The Irish tradition of covering mirrors when a person died ensured that the soul would not take fright or lose its way when making its exit from the world.
Vampires have traditionally been identified by their absence in mirrors, and looking into a mirror holding lighted candles is meant to reveal more than we might want from “the other side”.
All of these myths must contribute to the phobic fear of mirrors, or Eisoptrophobia, which is the avoidance of reflections or representations of oneself.
When we scrutinise ourselves in a mirror, read its reflections, examine our emotions, dare to look deep into our own eyes, visually trace each outline in the face, follow its contours, discover our distinctiveness and accept our reality, then we encounter ourselves, the shards of our existence and the totality of our being.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is author of Living Our Times, published by Gill and MacMillan. Her weekly radio slot Mindtime is on Drivetime with Mary Wilson on Wednesdays on RTÉ Radio One