Jacques Lacan and Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed influential descriptions of the mirror stage in their early writings, based on Henri Wallon's book Les Origines du Caractère chez l'Enfant and then their theories were further developed – with different emphases – in the following decades. Between the 1950s and 1960s Lacan moved from an emphasis on the symbolic order with Sigmund Freud’s notion of the ego-ideal to a later focus on the real, which he articulated most explicitly with the notion of the objet a. Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, extended his early adopted Edmund Husserl’s theory of operative intentionality and his gestural theory of meaning, first by incorporating Ferdinand de Saussure's diacritical theory of language and Karl Marx's theory of praxis and later by reformulating his philosophy on the basis of Paul Valéry's description of the chiasmatic entanglement in an attempt to transcend the subject- object dichotomy. Despite occasional moments of overlap and some common interests, their intellectual projects eventually diverged, but in doing so they created two unique frameworks for the study of the complex relationship between the gaze and the body.
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