of the Idealich”).^47 For the same reason, it is also correct to maintain that love dis-
turbs the symbolic functions of the ego-ideal (“Love provokes... a perturbation
of the [symbolic, pacifying] function of the ego-ideal”).^48 Consequently, if, on the
one hand, love is not, strictly speaking, identical with narcissism, on the other, it
is nevertheless the case that the subject remains entrapped in a narcissistic psycho-
sexual economy (even after he has entered the Symbolic/Law). Having identified
with the beloved, the lover aggressively projects the image of the beloved—which
is never “pure,” since it is added to a preexisting ideal ego—onto all other objects,
includingthe beloved herself.
The entirety of Lacan’s imaginary dialectic should now be more intelligible; the
introjection of the ego as an alienating identification with the specular image is fol-
lowed by the projection of the unattainable perfection of this specular image as an
ideal ego onto all outer objects, which in its turn is followed by the introjection of
an ego-ideal (initially provided by the imagoof the father): the ego-ideal symboli-
cally reconfigures all successive projections of the ego. Clearly, the subject can then
be attracted by a new love object after he has entered the Symbolic/Law. Every
new love will correspond perfectly to the intervention—at the imaginary level—
of a new ego-ideal. The opposite is not true: a new ego-ideal is not merely loved
since it operates primarily at the symbolic level, and it is only because of its origi-
nal symbolic status that it can successfully reshape the subject’s Imaginary, which
would otherwise remain immutable. To conclude, we must note that the second-
ary identification provided by the father embodies only the first of several possible
ideals (according to Lacan’s later elaborations, any symbolic object can function
virtually as an ego-ideal—and as a love object). However, the first ego-ideal, that
provided by the father, remains a fundamental one—and all others depend on
it—in that it allows the subject to enter the symbolic dimension of the Law, to rec-
ognize the other through speech and, as a consequence, partially to transcend
imaginary (self)-destruction.
( 5 ) The notions of narcissism and imaginary love also serve as a background for
Lacan’s first resumption of the Hegelian‒Kojèvian dictum according to which “De-
sire is the desire of the other.” At this early stage, the formula can already be inter-
preted in a variety of ways. As one of Lacan’s students efficaciously points out in
Seminar I: “You say the desire of the other.Is it the desire which is in the other? Or the
desire that I have for the other? For me, they are not the same thing. [This formula
can relate to the] desire inthe other, which the ego can recapture by destroying the
other. But at the same time it is a desire which it has forthe other.”^49 Lacan promptly
acknowledges that the formula “is not valid in only one sense,”^50 and can mean
that desire is both (a) an imaginary desire on the basis of which the subjectqua ego
desires what the other desires,and consequently aims at aggressively destroying the otherthe subject of the imaginary (other)