Why speak of the “mirror stage” as an archive that has been obliterated? The reason is both simple and complex. First, there is no existing original of the lecture on this subject delivered by Jacques Lacan at the 16th congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA), which took place in Marienbad between the second and eighth of August 1936. After he had been speaking for minutes, Lacan was interrupted by Ernest Jones, the chairman, who considered that this French participant, of whom he had never heard, was exceeding the time allotted to each speaker. At this time, the rule regulating the duration of each spoken contribution was already being applied at international conferences. Lacan, who regarded the interruption as a humiliation, quit the conference and went on to the Olympic Games in Berlin to see at close quarters what a sporting event manipulated by the Nazis was like. One might well see some connection between the forceful manner in which Jones interrupted Lacan's talk and Lacan's notorious invention of “variable sessions” marked by radical brevity and a sense of deliberate suspension. All his life, Lacan would struggle with an impossible control over time, as evinced by the masterful analysis presented in his 1945 essay on “logical time.”