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The author examines delusional megalomania, poorly studied in the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis alike. The term, coined by H. Dagonet a century and a half ago in 1862, came to replace the idea of “ambitious delusions” or “delusions of grandeur.” Megalomania was constantly compared and contextualized with delusions of persecution (indeed, it was considered by some—Magnan in particular—as a phase of “chronic delusion with systematic evolution,” a phase supposed to follow that of persecution) and with paranoia, precisely because of its systematic character. After laying out a history of this question from the psychiatric point of view (from the classics to H. Ey), we shall see that with the advent of psychoanalysis (K. Abraham, S. Freud), the concept of megalomania was theoretically enriched, and became more meaningful. The psychotic subject withdraws their libido from the external world, which would reintegrate the ego and fixate upon it (ego expansion, “I love only myself”, etc.). For Freud this is a “secondary narcissism.” This conception is perhaps not complete, or even satisfactory, in itself. From a Lacanian point of view, and contrary to the evidence that supposedly shows these subjects to be excessively “narcissistic,” megalomania will be considered as the delirious and necessary response of certain persecuted subjects who, in the absence of narcissism, make for themselves an omnipotent, delirious and grandiose self, in an effort to be the one, the unique, the elected one, exceptional, unassailable—a type of fortress set up against the will to enjoyment of the other. Here, therefore, psychoanalysis articulates the question of megalomaniac grandeur with the concepts of castration, the virile object, and the father signifier, foreclosed and compensated for by the real incarnation of an omniscient and omnipotent father.