alienation of his ego—which will nevertheless always remain present in the back-
ground—and interact with other subjects through the mediation of a reciprocal
symbolic recognition made possible only by speech.
Some further points must now be developed:
( 1 ) The subject directs narcissistic and aggressive feelings toward his ideal image
both during and after the mirror stage: in other words, an ambivalent love‒hate
relationship between the subject and his ideal image is established independently
of whether or not he is able to recognize the other as other. After the formation of
an Ur-Ichin the mirror stage, the subject is still not able to recognize the other as
other: therefore he directs his ambivalent desire either toward the specular image
provided by the mirror or toward another subject of the same age who is actually
perceived as a mere mirror image (this is clearly observable in phenomena of so-
called transitivism: a child who slaps another child on his right cheek can then start
to cry while touching his own left cheek). Once a more developed form of ego
emerges through repeated introjections—through a more permanent stagnation
of the dialectical process between fragmented body and ideal image which con-
temporaneously allows the subject for the first time to superimpose on his ego
a sense of (fake) self-consciousness—the subject is finally able to recognize the
imaginary other as other. (This change, as I shall later specify, is highly problem-
atic and ambiguous in Lacan’s early thought.) From then on, despite this newly ac-
quired capacity, the ego will nevertheless continue to be involved in an ambivalent
relationship with the other. Despite recognizing the other as other, the ego will
nevertheless, to a certain extent, continue to confuse him with his ideal image. The
subjectqua ego continuously competes with the other by projectinghis ideal ego onto
him. The ideal ego always accompanies the ego. In everyday life, what I see in the
other is nothing but my own ideal image (ideal ego), which I both love and hate:
the eyes of the other indeed reflect my own specular image.... Lacan is particu-
larly interested in highlighting, beyond the mirror stage and the intrasubjective
phases of the subject’s psychic development, the intersubjective, sociopolitical di-
mension of aggressivity: in our preeminently aggressive society, “war is proving
more and more to be the inevitable and necessary midwife of all progress.”^31 As he
emphasizes in the concluding section of “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” ( 1948 ),
it is fundamentally in terms of radical narcissistic aggressivity that key political
events of the twentieth century such as the Nazis’ search for Lebensraumand the race
for the conquest of (outer) space must be understood. In one of the most intense
passages of Seminar I, Lacan thus concludes that, at the imaginary level, “every
human function would simply exhaust itself in the unspecified wish for the de-
struction of the other as such.”^32