ABSTRACT
The importance of what the mirror stage represents runs through the whole of J. Lacan's work, from his early, liminally psychoanalytic work on paranoia, to the last phase of his work, where he is searching for a clinical and theoretical strategy consonant with his three registers. They are the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real being equipotent. At the end of the 1950s, Lacan is beginning to shift the focus of his work away from the Freudian texts, to investigate the place of the object in analytic theory. Certain historical contingencies determined that the framework would have a profound, and in Lacan's view, baneful effect on the mainstream evolution of psychoanalysis from the 1930s onwards. Using the twin themes of persecution/punishment and grandeur, he specifies that, in cases of "punishment paranoia", the constitution of the ego is related to the narcissistic dynamic in connection with a privileged other. This theme is originally advanced in the context of a pathological dynamic.
