The Seba library treats Mirage in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Lacan, Jacques, Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, Campbell, Joseph).
La psychanalyse est la science des mirages qui s’établissent dans ce champ.
Lacan defines psychoanalysis itself as the science of mirages produced within the analytic situation, making mirage not a pathology to be overcome but the very object of the discipline.
, Écrits, 1966thesis
it is at this maximal moment that the mirage of tragic beauty appears… Desire in so far as it is attached, as it is captured in this mirage, this is what corresponds to what we have articulated as corresponding to the hidden presence of the desire for death.
Lacan argues that the mirage of tragic beauty captures desire and reveals its secret identity with the desire for death, making mirage the structural hinge between aesthetics and the death drive.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis
It is like mirage, deceived by which the animals make an erroneous judgment as to presence of water where there is really none; even so, all the doctrines in the Sūtras are intended to satisfy the imagination of the masses they do not reveal the truth.
The Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, as transmitted by Suzuki, deploys the mirage as its canonical illustration that scriptural language deceives seekers just as an optical illusion deceives thirsty animals, directing attention away from truth toward conceptual fabrication.
, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series), 1949thesis
when he shattered for himself the bounds of the last threshold (which moment opened to him the timelessness of the void beyond the frustrating mirage-enigmas of the named and bounded cosmos), he paused: he made a vow
Campbell employs mirage to designate the named and bounded cosmos itself — the entire phenomenal world as a system of frustrating enigmas through which the Bodhisattva must pass at the threshold of enlightenment.
, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, 2015supporting
having put education ahead of starting a family and having children, pursue a career, perhaps to the point where childbearing becomes a receding mirage.
Stein uses mirage to characterize a desired object — childbearing — that recedes as it is approached, illustrating how life-goals structured around deferred fulfillment take on the phenomenological quality of optical illusion.
, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting
Dubos, R. Mirage of Health. London, 1960.
A bibliographic citation in Hillman’s reference list registers René Dubos’s concept of health as mirage as an intellectual resource in the depth-psychological literature on the soul and human wholeness.
, Suicide and the Soul, 1964aside