When Ants Meet Lacan
Mirror Stage Beyond the Human‽
What happens when an ant pauses before a mirror and wipes a mark from its head? In this LameSketches exclusive, we are about to explore the surprising science of animal self-recognition and weave it with Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic Mirror Stage. From ants to mice to cleaner fish, the mirror is no longer just a human symbol — it’s a crowded surface challenging our ideas of selfhood. Join us in rethinking consciousness across species.
In a quiet lab, an ant pauses before a mirror. It sees something strange.
Then, it reaches up, wiping a mark (only available in the reflection) from its own head.
It sounds absurd. Yet this scene, reported in a 2015 study, challenges much of what we assume about self-awareness. Add to that the curious case of cleaner fish rubbing their bodies after spotting marks in mirrored reflections, or mice scratching at colored smudges only when seen in a mirror, and we are suddenly confronted with a troubling, fascinating question:
What if the mirror, the very symbol of human selfhood, belongs to more than just us‽
The Scientific Turn: Mice, Mirrors, and the Hippocampus
The classic mirror test was introduced in the 1970s by psychologist Gordon Gallup, who used it to explore whether chimpanzees could recognize themselves in mirrors. This recognition was taken as a marker of self-awareness, a trait long thought to be uniquely human or, at best, limited to great apes.
But the list of successful candidates has grown in recent years.
Ants have been observed touching marked spots on their heads in front of mirrors. Cleaner wrasses have attempted to rub away marks on their bodies seen only in reflection. African grey parrots have demonstrated similar awareness. And in a 2020 study, mice exposed to mirrors showed behavioral changes suggestive of self-directed attention, though their capacity for self-recognition remains debated.
Intriguingly, some research points to neural activity, such as in the ventral hippocampal CA1 cells of mice, during mirror interactions. This suggests a possible biological correlate to reflective behaviors, though whether this equates to self-recognition remains an open question.
But what does this mean philosophically‽
Enter Lacan: The Mirror That Splits the Self
For Jacques Lacan, the mirror was more than a tool of reflection. It was a dramatic threshold. In his 1949 presentation of the Mirror Stage (Le stade du miroir), Lacan describes the moment an infant, somewhere between 6 and 18 months old, first recognizes its image in the mirror.
This recognition is not straightforward. It is a misrecognition (méconnaissance), a critical misalignment between the child’s fragmented internal experience — what Lacan called the corps morcelé, or "body in bits and pieces" — and the coherent image reflected back.
“This form situates the agency of the ego... in a fictional direction... that will always remain irreducible for the individual alone.”
— Jacques Lacan, Écrits
In other words, the infant’s "I" is not discovered from within but constructed through an external image, an idealized fiction. This ego-image becomes the first structure of the self, and the child becomes alienated, forever measuring itself against a wholeness it can never entirely embody.
The mirror does not simply reflect the self. It inaugurates its division. This marks the child’s entry into what Lacan calls the Imaginary Order, a realm structured around images and identifications. Later, the child is ushered into the Symbolic Order, governed by language, norms, and desire.
Lacan’s insight is that subjectivity is not the product of inner truth but of relational fantasy. We recognize ourselves only by first being deceived.
So when an ant or mouse sees itself in the mirror, Lacan would urge us to ask not whether it recognizes its body, but whether it enters this symbolic drama of misrecognition, alienation, and idealization.
When Ants Reflect, Do They Enter the Imaginary?
This is where things become truly strange. An ant does not speak (At least to us!). A fish does not desire (!) in the human sense. A mouse does not fantasize about a unified self (on the surface level at least). Yet these animals behave as though they register a distinction between self and other, and respond accordingly.
From a Lacanian view, the question is not simply whether these creatures see themselves, but whether they experience any rupture between what they are and what they see. Could their actions — wiping a mark, rubbing a body — hint at a proto-Imaginary moment, a fleeting alignment of body and image? Or are these behaviors merely instinctual, lacking the psychic depth of human misrecognition?
If Lacan argued that the ego is not innate but constructed through misrecognition, then these findings blur the boundary. While animals may not enter the Symbolic, they may skirt the edge of the Imaginary: a moment where body and image briefly align, prompting behavior that resembles our own psychic struggle.
But unlike us, the ant does not obsess over its reflection. It does not build an identity around the image. It simply wipes the mark and moves on.
(Or, does it not‽)
The Trouble with Neuroscience
(and the Temptation of Interpretation…)
Neuroscience provides us with beautiful data: heatmaps, neural spikes, and cellular activation patterns, such as those observed in the hippocampus of mice. But Lacan would caution against conflating these biological signals with subjectivity itself.
The self, in psychoanalytic terms, is not just a set of firing neurons. It is constituted by absence, by language, by the symbolic frameworks that impose meaning and desire. While a mouse may touch a smudge, Lacan might ask whether it suffers from the image it sees, whether it misrecognizes itself into a fiction it can never fulfill.
These are questions science cannot fully answer. Yet they remain worth asking, especially as we consider the limitations of the mirror test itself, which may favor visual species and overlook other forms of self-awareness, such as those based on olfaction or social cues.
Reframing the Mirror: Beyond Narcissus
What these studies suggest is not that ants or mice are miniature humans, but that the capacity for self-directed behavior might precede symbolic thought. The mirror, then, is not a uniquely human device but a surface where nature itself experiments with awareness.
The mirror once belonged to myth — Narcissus, lost in the shimmer of his reflection, unable to look away, drawn not to self-knowledge but to self-fixation. His death was not caused by ignorance, but by obsession: a closed loop of desire that could not move outward.
Lacan reimagined this myth, suggesting that the ego itself is born from a similar illusion, a mistaken identity with the image we see, an ideal we can never become.
But what happens when ants or fish or mice engage with the mirror differently? They do not stay to admire. They do not fall in love with their reflection. They touch, wipe, respond, and move on.
Perhaps this difference is what truly sets us apart. Where animals recognize and act, humans reflect and remain. We create stories, identities, anxieties around what the mirror shows. We invent entire selves to match the image.
In that sense, the mirror is no longer solitary, no longer reserved for myth or psychoanalysis. It is becoming crowded. Not because animals are becoming more human, but because we are beginning to see that selfhood is not ours alone.
We may need to rethink the mirror not as a boundary between human and animal, but as a shared surface — one that reveals how many forms awareness might take, and how many ways there are to move beyond the gaze.
Closing Mirror Reflection
What does it mean if an ant wipes its head after seeing its reflection?
It might mean that we must rethink the boundaries of selfhood. Or perhaps it suggests that the mirror, the one we thought belonged only to Narcissus and psychoanalysis, is more crowded than we imagined.
Perhaps the mirror stage never truly ends. We are still that child, still that mouse, still returning to our reflection, seeking wholeness in the shimmer of illusion.
In the end, it may not be the ability to recognize ourselves in the mirror that defines us, but the inability to walk away from what we see.
References
1. Gallup, G. G. Jr. (1970). Chimpanzees: Self-recognition. Science, 167(3914), 86–87. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.167.3914.86
2. Cammaerts, M.-C., & Cammaerts, R. (2015). Are ants (Hymenoptera, Formicidae) capable of self recognition? Journal of Science, 5, 521–532. [Note: This study is controversial, and further research is needed to confirm mirror self-recognition in ants.]
3. Kohda, M., Hotta, T., Takeyama, T., Awata, S., Tanaka, H., Asai, J.-y., & Jordan, A. L. (2019). If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals? PLoS Biology, 17(2), e3000021. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021
4. Ueno, H., Suemitsu, S., Murakami, S., Kitamura, N., Wani, K., Takahashi, Y., ... & Ishihara, T. (2020). Behavioral changes in mice exposed to a mirror: Implications for self-recognition. Behavioural Neurology, 2020, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/3927507 [Note: This study suggests mirror-induced behavioral changes but does not confirm self-recognition in mice.]
5. Lacan, J. (1949). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In Écrits (trans. B. Fink, 2006). W. W. Norton & Company.
6. Evans, D. (1996). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge.
So, what do you think? Can animals enter the “mirror stage”? Feel free to share your thoughts, and if you enjoyed this piece, consider subscribing to LameSketches for more quirky, mind-bending explorations!