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(The [[phantasy]] of [[fragmentation]] may be found beneath the more celebrated [[phantasy]] of [[castration]]. (He developed the thesis that ''in [[paranoia]] we can witness a sort of decomposition'' which illustrates clearly the stages in the "normal" constitution of the [[image]] and of [[reality]] as such.
=====EditThe Construction of the Ego=====For example, the motifs of mirrored images, telepathic communication, observation and external persecution so common in [[paranoia]] may be understood as fundamental building blocks in the constitution of the [[ego]]. If the [[ego]] is constructed on an [[image]] outside ourselves, if our identity if given in an [[alienation]].... (The truth of the ego emerges precisely in [[madness]] where the world seems to dissolve and the difference between self and other is radically put in question.)
In our day-to-day relationship with other people, we are unaware of these criteria, even if many works of [[art]], notably those of Dali, try to capture this idea. ([[Lacan]] was thus led to the theory that [[human]] [[knowledge]] is in its very essence [[paranoiac]].)
It is in [[paranoia]] that we can see so clearly the components, the steps which go to make up the relation to the world which [[madness]] can remind us of.
(Although Lacan's theory of the image at this date is often explained in terms of the influence of surrealism, it owes much more to certain currents in French psychiatry such as the work of Joseph Capgras and those psychiatric thinkers interested in problems of recognition, doubling and the image. Lacan often returned to the notion of the mirror phase to reformulate it during his teaching. It never stayed static. There is no one theory of the mirror phase in Lacan's work, but several.)
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