Oedipal identification) has a “pacifying function.”^40 The highly sophisticated
functioning of this process cannot be described in detail here; it will be described
in Chapter 3 , where I shall analyze the importance of (the resolution of ) the Oedi-
pus complex as it is more rigorously reelaborated in Lacan’s later theory.^41 For the
time being, it must be noted that the ego-ideal necessarily remodels any further
projections of the ideal ego: if, on the one hand, the ideal ego is logically prior to
the ego-ideal,^42 on the other, it is inevitably reshaped by it. This is why Lacan, fol-
lowing Freud, says that the ego-ideal provides the ideal ego with a “form.”^43
( 4 ) The distinction between ideal ego and ego-ideal enables us to make some
points regarding narcissism and love. Commentators have often stated that Lacan’s
early works present us with a uniquely pessimistic notion of love, which is easily
reducible to imaginary narcissism. I would claim, rather, that, already in his first
theory of the subject, love transcends the imaginary order due to its proximity to
the emergence of the ego-ideal. More specifically, I believe that, even though it
is legitimate to speak of imaginary narcissistic love, it is nevertheless important
to point out how, for Lacan, the object of narcissism is not, strictly speaking, the
same as the object of love. This may be seen from the straightforward observation
that we do not indiscriminately fall in lovewith every imaginary other that we en-
counter.^44 Lacan manages to provide this empirical phenomenon with the outline
of an explanation. He suggests that the loved object does not merely correspond to
the object upon which I project my ideal ego (the latter is indeed projected onto
allobjects, since it constitutes them), it is not simply the object toward which my
aggressive narcissism is directed. On the contrary, the loved object is that object which causes
the ideal ego to be projected in a particular way.The loved object is introjected by identifica-
tion: it is thus connected to the ego-ideal which modifies the ego, adding a “new
stratum” to it and readjusting each of its further projections, each new ideal ego.
In Seminar I, Lacan states that the ego is an onionlike object which “is constructed
out of its successive identifications with the loved objects which allowed it to ac-
quire its form”: the pertinence of this metaphor is self-evident.^45 In the same
Seminar, Lacan also unequivocally suggests that there is an “exact equivalence” be-
tween the love object and the ego-ideal.^46 To put it in simpler terms, we could
conclude that at this stage, for Lacan, to love somebody means to expose one’s nar-
cissism to the influence of the beloved: in other words, the consequence of loving
is being narcissistic in a particular manner, that is to say, projecting our newly re-
shaped ideal ego onto all outer objects after it has undergone an alienating identi-
fication with the beloved.... It is therefore correct to maintain that love ultimately
superimposes a new ego-ideal onto a preexisting ideal ego (in love “the Ichideal,
considered as speaking, can come to be placed in the world of objects on the level