[T]he look into the mirror can thus mean the attempt at recove | EN EREBOS PHOS

[T]he look into the mirror can thus mean the attempt at recovering what is lost and at liberating oneself from the experienced repression. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, like a “discourse” which is repressed when the individual enters the Symbolic order. Even though the unconscious (discourse) is repressed, it still exists and participates in the conscious discourse in ways the individual subject is not aware might recover through psychoanalysis or, also, mirroring.
In addition to mirroring, one way of recovering the unconscious is “doubling”: “The double alleviation of tension, which frees the victim from responsibility for his repressed desires and yet satisfies those desires, is countered by a new fear of attack from the outside.” The function of the double, in Sylvia Plath’s case, can become the definition of herself (Sylvia Plath) through others and the final suffering of what he [R.D. Laing] calls ontological insecurity, and what many women poets call nonexistence, invisibility and muteness: unable to feel their existence confirmed by others, they cannot affirm it for themselves.

—Carmen Birkle, Women’s stories of the looking glass: autobiographical reflections and self­ representations in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde