Imaginary Passion

Abstract

This chapter is an explication of the ninth section (“Imaginary Passion”) of “The Freudian Thing.” Lacan pursues, in pointed opposition to ego psychology, his recasting of the psychoanalytic ego. Lacan’s ego is most closely associated with his register of the Imaginary. The pathological “passions” of this register, to which this section’s title refers, are narcissism, rivalry, jealousy, paranoia, and violent oscillations between the extremes of love and hate, among other phenomena. For Lacan (and contra ego psychology), there is no healthy part of the ego with which the analyst can and should establish a “therapeutic alliance.” References to Rousseau’s “amour-propre” and Hegel’s master-slave dialectic are deployed so as to underscore the ego’s unsuitability to serve as the analyst’s privileged partner in therapeutic labor.