On Freud/Lacan's: Wo es war, soll ich werden (Where it was, I should be). 

Or Where I was the ego goes.

The threat of loss, or the displaced alter ego or ideal ego, is not the condition of the loss of identity, but instead the very condition required by subjectivity as such, as self-consciousness. The ''drifting'' self caught between a nostalgia of a past that held the site of greater authenticity is set vs. a current state of alienation from this ideal site.

But this gap is precisely what the subject is, is where it recognizes itself in  that site where it can no longer recognize itself, where it supposedly was. The pain is like mourning, but this pain where the condition of selfhood is betweeness or in medias res, where it is between an authenticity now image, and a current self foreign to itself, is jouissance. This loss is in fact gain, not of ousia but of the self alienated from itself, which is how precisely the ego arises in the site of perennial misrecognition. Exile is the ego's birth place. That is, the self recognizes itself where it no longer recognizes itself.

This écart, this gap, between a distant beloved image and an intimate but strange other is the dialectical tension that charges the energetic spark of self-arousal. The nostalgia, the pain of home, for the lost self, is expressed always as a non-total loss, for there is a remainder, residue that lingers. It cannot be full forgetting. It is expressed as a loss of fullness, a reduction to an image, to affirm the fullness of the moment of the enunciation of the pain of semi-loss.

This remainder is pale compared to this present state where I make the comparison, which becomes more real than the distant image, more real but less authentic because it is an other. Thus, the pain is the subject itself, enjoyed by the ego, as the gain in the gap between the pale image and the proximate other. The self is the gap, therefore, between one other and another.