Abstract
Under the influence of Lacan, recent psychoanalytic theory in France has stressed the strict structural relationship between narcissism and aggressivity. As Lacan wrote in Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (referring to the mirror stage of infancy), in the subject to be found in all the genetic of the individual .... This conception allows us to understand the aggressivity involved ... with each of the that the libidinal transformations determine in life, the crucial function of which has been demonstrated by analysis: weaning, the Oedipal stages, puberty, maturity, or motherhood, even the climacteric.' Lacan invokes dramatic conception of the life course with its great phases and transformations. But he also insists on its fundamental sameness: each of these repeats the narcissistic moment of the mirror stage which, he concludes, characterized by aggressivity. Aggressivity, he asserts, is the correlative tendency of mode of identification that we call narcissistic, and which determines the final structure of man's ego and of the register of entities characteristic of his world (Ecrits 16). If aggressivity involved in each of the great phases of life, so too in the Lacanian model the fear of castration repeated at all stages of development following the resolution of the Oedipus conflict. Lacan thus promises us an intriguing cumulative model of the life course: each stage of libidinal transformation will be accompanied by the specific fears or crises associated with all the previous stages. However, his work contains no extended commentary on the stages of puberty, maturity, motherhood, menopause, or old age; and elsewhere he explicitly rejects developmental model of the life course, offering instead an abstract trope. For Lacan the narrative of life figured in terms of regressive spiral: a retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each stage what he was before and announces himself-he will have been-only in the future perfect tense.2 Lacan also dismisses the possibility of any fruitful relationship between psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. For him developmental psychoanalytic theory would be contradiction in terms. The very originality of psycho-analysis, he insisted in 1964, lies in the fact that it
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