of the dialectic between the subject’s perception of his fragmented body and his
parallel vision of the completeness of the specular body:^24 it continues after the
constitution of the Ur-Ichand successively consolidates itself in concomitance with
the progressive reinforcement of the ego’s alienating identifications. In other
words, from the beginning of his psychic life, the subject both eroticizes and vies
with his own image, since it constitutes the ideal perfection which the subject
does not have. Narcissism and aggressivity are thus one and the same thing; in later
years, Lacan creates a neologism in which “being in love/enamored” (enamouré)
and “hate” (haine) are fused in a single term: he speaks of hainamoration.^25 Narcissism
can generally be defined as the (self-loving) relationship between the subject and
his own ideal image; aggressivity differs from sheer aggression, which is merely
violent acting: the latter is just one of aggressivity’s possible outcomes. Aggressiv-
ity itself is, rather, a precondition of the subject’s imaginary dimension, and can
never be completely eliminated.^26 “Aggressivity is the correlative tendency of a
mode of identification that we call narcissistic, and which determines the formal
structure of man’s ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world.”^27
As a consequence, the augmentation of aggressivity will be proportional to the
narcissistic intensity of the subject’s relationship with his own ideal image; this is
why Lacan writes that aggressivity (especially) “underlies the activity of the phi-
lanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue, and even the reformer.”^28 The subject who,
when considered as an ego, isnothing but the consequence of an alienating iden-
tification with the imaginary other, wants to be where the other is: he loves the
other only insofar as he wants aggressively to be in his place. The subject claims the
other’s place as the (unattainable) place of his own perfection. It goes without say-
ing that, for the same reason, this ambivalentrelationship is also self-destructive.
Lacan had already pointed this out in his doctoral thesis on self-punishing para-
noia: in certain forms of paranoia, by attacking an admired person with whom she
ideally identifies, the psychotic is actually attacking herself: in this way she pun-
ishes herself for not being able to achieve her ideal image. In self-punishing para-
noia, the psychotic “strikes in her victim her own exteriorized ideal.... With the
same blow that makes her guilty before the law, [she] has actually struck herself.”^29
As we have already seen, psychosis provides us with the clearest evidence of a
psychic process that is effectively operative, to different degrees, in all subjects.
According to Lacan, the ego is essentially paranoiac because it always necessarily
mistakes itself for the other. The same applies for all knowledge that is related to
the ego:^30 imaginary, ego-logical connaissance—which Lacan will later clearly dis-
tinguish from symbolic savoir—is in fact based on a structural misrecognition (mé-
connaissance) which precedes it. However, a nonpsychotic subject obviously differs
from a psychotic who remains caught in the mirror stage for the entirety of his life:
this is due to the fact that a nonpsychotic subject can also transcend the imaginarythe subject of the imaginary (other)