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In continental philosophy, the Real refers to reality in its unmediated form. [1] In Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is an "impossible" category because of its inconceivability and opposition to expression. [2] [3]
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The Real is the intelligible form of the horizon of truth of the field-of-objects that has been disclosed. [4] [5] As the Real Order of the Borromean knot in Lacanianism, [6] it is opposed in the unconscious to the Imaginary, which encompasses fantasy, dreams and hallucinations. [7] [8] [9] In depth psychology and human geography, the Real can be described as a "negative space", analogous to a "black hole", a philosophical void of sociality and subjectivity, a traumatic consensus of intersubjectivity, or as an absolute noumenalness between signifiers. [17] Lewis states that the Real can be a presence or is a substance and cites Derrida's claim that the real is authenticity. [18]
Complete understanding, as in [,on the one hand,] the resolution after the period of mourning, represents [,on the other hand,] clear arrival at the Spinozan “impossible”. [19]
— Ian S. Miller
Even the word 'trace' is an appropriation of the real. [...] ' Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist [Derrida’s italics]. [...] (OG: 167, my italics)'[.] [20]
— Michael Lewis
Jacques Lacan defines the Real as a plenum , a nature beyond culture that is contradistinct from the ontic. [21] [22] [23] The Lacanian real is a section of the triadic, Borromean knot: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real; the center of the knot is the sinthome (monad-soul). [24]
Felluga states that Bill Brown's Thing is conceptually close to the Real, as it is a type of unreliableness of the relation between subject and object that is neither subject nor object. [25]
The Real is reality in its unmediated form. It is what disrupts the subject’s received notions about himself and the world around him. [...] as a shattering enigma, because in order to make sense of it he or she will have to [...] find signifiers that can ensure its control. [26]
— Judith Gurewich
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The drive divides the subject, who uses masters signifiers to cover up this lack, which will produce narratives. [27]
— Dries G. M. Dulsster
A master signifier (S1) organizes narrative (S2): a defensive form of discourse that is an ideological reaction to the Real: i.e., mythic explanation, hero's journey, storytelling, theme, pathos , ethos , plot, conflict, closure. [40] The real subject (as id) is repressed (via aphanisis) by the imaginary-signified ego's ideologizing overtop of the real instincts. [45] Narrative speech (parole) is an attempt to resolve the Real-Imaginary aporia (langue) concerning events. [46]
Felluga states that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's term antagonism, as a societal limit that sits outside of society's articulation, functions similarly to the Real. [47]
The therapist who feels threatened — threatened by excessive certainty, by excess beyond reason, by a discourse they do not understand, by activity that is not addressed to them or by a client who tries to take their place — might well be driven mad. [48]
Hurst states that, in principle, self-analysis (analyst's discourse) might prevent an analyst from retrogressing to the ideological position of the master's discourse (i.e., King in The Purloined Letter). [49] [50]
The crucial difficulty in self-analysis lies not in these fields but in the emotional factors that blind us to unconscious forces. That the main difficulty is emotional rather than intellectual is confirmed by the fact that when analysts analyze themselves they have not such a great advantage over the layman as we would be inclined to believe. [51] [50]
The ineffable, unary signifier of lack (phallus) stitches the unconscious drives to jouissance, dialectically bridging language and desire ( logos and eros , the Apollonian and the Dionysian). [60]
Barthes reflects that the inner voice of the subject is structured in a triad of "Presence" (frustration) created by the maternal Other, "Intermittence" (castration anxiety) over the loss of the phallus as an imaginary object taken by the real father, and "Absence" (privation) that occurs from losing the phallus from the imaginary father; (symbolic desire separates from real need and becomes imaginary demand) (q.v., Lacan's graph of desire). [61] [62] [63] [64]
Hurst argues that the Lacanian Real parallels Derrida's concept of différance. [65] Lewis states that lalangue is the arche-writing repetition that reveals the real subject through différance. [66] Guattari states that temporal différance is secreted from obsessional neurosis. [67]
The hysteric's discourse is driven by the Real, where object (a) is at an impossible-to-find truth. [68] [69] Neither individuation nor differentiation can happen in the stagnancy of the Real. [70] [71]
The three categories of hysteria — conversion hysteria, anxiety hysteria, and traumatic hysteria — have a basis in alienation, with an identification to those-without-the-phallus, and a self-sacrifice through displacement. [72] Hurst states that masculine libidinal hysteria breaches the paranoid-schizoid position of masculine fanaticism by attempting to make the Real appear, whereas feminine libidinal hysteria breaches the Nietzschean radical nihilism of Hegel's "eternal irony" by resisting the Symbolic Order. [73]
Artistic discourse is a pneuma of neurosis-psychosis hallucinatory hysteria, a poetic-real microcosm of the True-Real. [74] [75] [76] [77]
[T]he fantasm of a devouring orality or of a return to the maternal breast refers to a mother who is neither real, imaginary, nor symbolic but who is cosmic becoming; it is a Universe of processual emergence as much as of abolition. For all that, we are not in the reign of Jungian universal Imagos or mythological entities such as Gaia or Chronos. The Universes of which the mouth and the breast are the refrain-operators are constellated in a composite and heterogenetic way: they constitute singular events. [78]
The artist's sense of truth. [...] he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. [79]
The objet petit a is what falls from the subject in anxiety. [80]
— Lacan
These objects a take shape as the consequence of repressions, disguises, dissociations, fragmentations, deflections, intellectualizations, reductions, displacements, and discussions, which [...] cover over, and point to, the fact that the traumatic event cannot be assimilated [...] The Real [...] "appears" as failures, ruptures, and inconsistencies caused by the tuché. [81]
— Andrea Hurst
Tuché is an Aristotelian-borrowed term to describe the traumatic encounter-kernel of the Real and automaton to describe the repetitive transference process of symbolizing the Real. [82] [83]
Although the encircling of the Real (Lacan) or constellations (Adorno) tells us that we can never truly grasp the object, our approaching it from different angles of contextual perspectives takes place through a thinking subject who draws on concepts. [84]
— Claudia Leeb
The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the Real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things." Thus the Real emerges as that which is outside language, making it "that which resists symbolization absolutely". [85] The logos of the Symbolic creates the Order of the Real; the Real and kairos divide the logos, resist symbolization, and anticipate being symbolized. [90]
Signifiers of this experience are Lacan's jouissance , Marx's theory of alienation, the numinous , psychological trauma, transcendence, the sublime or a fractured ideology; particularly, it can be a narrative that separates signifiers from conscious desire-quest (i.e., narcissistic injury). [99]
[T]he real[...]is always in its place[...][the symbolic] carries it glued to its [metaphorical shoe] heel[.] [100] [...] The real is without fissure. [101] [...] There is no absence [or pleasure principle ] in the real [, concerning Freud's reality principle ]. [102]
— Lacan
Julia Kristeva, particularly in her 1980 essay Powers of Horror , posits that the super-ego's abjection facilitates a subjective traumatic limit between subject and objects, with the Real, through ego-object loss and castration of surplus jouissance. [110] Hurst references Žižek: for any event that converges on a collapsed Symbolic Order, is a where Antigone becomes the Thing. [111] Lacanian Being-for-death is a death drive for its telos (i.e., sublimity). [112] [113] [114]
Suicide is really intended as egocide. [...] if one loses this sense of connectedness [to other egos] [...] the foundation of interconnectedness, is described as 'empty' or 'nothing,' and at the same time as an infinite, 'non-empty' world. [115]
The unreal-unnameable organ called a lamella (or libido as a symbiotic, pre-Oedipal, pre-symbolic Real(1) before-signified-who-ness) is distinct from the Real(2) after-signifier-what-ness, which a subject experiences at the limits of the Imaginary and Symbolic. [123] Real(1) is a continuous, "whole" reality that is undivided by language, while Real(2) is the space of the possibility of abjection being raised wherever there is interference in the path of the object of the ego, including the experience of surplus jouissance which threatens to surpass a subject's boundaries; Kristeva remarks that this experience "takes the ego back to its source", i.e., the id. [103] [120] [124]
[O]bject shadows or things of emergence—contents of the first Yonder from which a first Here conceives itself [...] Objects that, like those we have named, are not objects because they have no subject-like counterpart, are referred to by Macho as "nobjects": they are spherically surrounding mini-conditions envisaged by a non-facing self, namely the fetal pre-subject[.] [125]
The real is the difference between a right glove inside out and a left glove (cf. SXIV: 19/4/67). [126]
— Michael Lewis paraphrasing Lacan
Malcolm Bowie interprets the Lacanian real as ineffable (i.e., uncanny). [131]
Fredric Jameson interprets Lacan's real through a Marxist-Hegelian lens as meaning "History itself", a narrative symptom of the event. [132] [133] [134]
Marriott examines Fanon: white people's gaze and dehumanization of black people through objectification, creating a desire for the absent object-of-identity in marginalized individuals that is destroyed through racist signification. [135] George states that race is an objet a confrontation with jouissance and lack. [136] George posits that the history of slavery in the United States and racism are within the Real (e.g., Beloved). [137] Crockett references W. E. B. Du Bois in relation to a Real critique of the Symbolic through a point of view from the angle of double consciousness. [138]
In practice, Lacanian psychoanalysis derives the event by gazing at the resistance and transference to identify the automaton mechanisms of the Thing (viz., foreclosure, repression, and disavowal) that are utilized to anamorphosically read where the signifiers are hiding the symptomatic objet petit (a) , rendering the real subject. [146]
Lacan finds in this sublimated image [of the object-as-Thing] the function of an Até, the 'divinization' of a 'limit' that simultaneously draws us toward and keeps us a safe distance from that which 'represents the disqualification of all concepts,' that which represents the void of the 'empty' Real (262). [147]
— Sheldon George
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The subject is always the missing signifier, the lack of a signifier, 'the subject is literally at his beginning the elision of a signifier as such, the missing signifier in the chain' (SVII:224). The barred subject, the essence of the human being of desire, can then only exist in the bar [of Signifier/signified]. [148]
— Michael Lewis citing Lacan
In the ordinary way, the study of "real" (i.e. social) space is referred to specialists and their respective specialties — to geographers, town-planners, sociologists, et alii. As for knowledge of "true" (i.e. mental) space, it is supposed to fall within the province of the mathematicians and philosophers. Here we have a double or even multiple error. To begin with, the split between "real" and "true" serves only to avoid any confrontation between practice and theory, between lived experience and concepts, so that both sides of these dualities are distorted from the outset. [149]
Lacan links the processes of displacement with metonymy and those of condensation with metaphor. [...] the process of realization of the subject parallels the action of metaphor that displaces literal levels of meaning in its production of new meaning. [150]
— James DiCenso
When Pascal writes: the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me, he speaks as an unbeliever, not as a believer. [151]
The void is what the subject finds through interrogation of oneself. The subject existentially navigates an inward, metaphorical and vacuous desert or ocean, unguided by the psychoanalytic metaphor of God's "Original Presence". [157] Premodern philosophers also thought up a formless chora, a pre-universal "chaos", and the experience of horror vacui; [158] these conceptions of an unguided ego confronting the void informed psychoanalysis. [159] It prefigured Lacan's outline of how the subject-as-metaphor, later the analysand, encounters the Real and how this experience is slated in analysis to give rise to pathologies, particularly anxieties and traumas. In psychoanalysis, the subject appears either as transference, repression or as the barrier separating the signifier over the signified. Subjective experience is a paradoxical extension inseparable from the experience of place, landscape, and body, which can be conveyed as utopia, dystopia, or pantheon. [168]
Philosophers reveal the Real engulfing the ego in a comparatively unfamiliar and defamiliarizing space, and the subject's dystonic feelings of confrontation. The geographical self as described in human geography, or alternatively the "makanthropos" as described by Schopenhauer, feels Cartesian anxiety, a confusion of certainty in reason, from the experience of this formless void. [173]
Consider Heidegger's example of the shoemaker's workshop as a totality of equipment—hammers, needles, and the like. The in-order-to "is constitutive for the equipment" [...] The toward-which of the equipment is the "work to be produced", (p. 99), in this case, shoes [and, ipso facto, shoe heels ]. [174]
An impasse is the resistance between the real and the imaginary that affects the therapeutic alliance, wherein the client is at odds with the Transcendent Function of the therapist's mind as mediation to the Symbolic Order by way of the Signifier-as-God (i.e., discrepancy). [179] Analysis reveals the kernel at the core of the Real through resistance. [180] The finite ego resists the unconscious's infinite lattice of signifiers. [181]
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[A] God is something one encounters in the real, inaccessible. It is indicated by what doesn’t deceive—anxiety. [...] God is the supreme Being. I equals Being. [182]
— Lacan
Lacan gave the name passe to the analysand's dualistic experience of uncertainty, becoming eclipsed and challenged by a subjective confrontation, that gives way to a feeling of certainty with the Real, e.g. in the temptation of Christ or the desolation of saints; it is "the moment of crisis in a speaking cure in which all subjectivity, the last imaginary residue [of the ego], all self-love falls away" and is replaced by acceptance from the analyst. [183] [184] [50] [185]
There is a 'barrier' of repression between Signifiers (the unconscious mind: 'discourse of the Other') and the signified […] a 'chain' of signifiers is analogous to the 'rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings' […] 'The signifier is that which [paternal metaphor] represents a subject for another signifier'. [186] [187] [188] [189]
— Lacan, paraphrased
Michael Eigen states that a paradox of faith comes from subject-attacking-object (such as in Jung's Answer to Job ). [190] The Real, as analogized as an aporia in experience or an encompassing black hole of reality, relates to the Jungian archetype of the Death Mother, the shadow of the Mother archetype, articulated in Neumann's The Great Mother . [191] [10] [11]
The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. [...] Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization of transcending all experience of form—all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void. [192]
The becoming produced under therapy sessions can lead to an ineffable and oceanic experience of the Thing (White interpreting Bion, Eigen, Ogden); [193] the analyst in the Bion school seeks to be an empty container, or empty subject of the void, of the client's projections. [194]
Lerner states that Spinoza's God may be interpreted as the real, with the attribute of Thought as the symbolic. [195] François Laruelle posits the Real as an immanent One. [196]
The experience of the Void is the unbeliever's mystic temptation, his possibility for prayer, his moment of plenitude. At our limits, a God appears, or something that serves his turn. [197] [11]
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What has been [, under primary repression,] foreclosed [via the un-barred subject's repudiation of the Name-of-the-Father and phallus] from the Symbolic[,] reappears in the Real. [204]
— Jacques Lacan
In my reading, a convergence occurs between Heidegger's term 'refusal' (Verweigerung) and the Freudian 'foreclosure' (Verwerfung). [205]
— Clayton Crockett
With Muller, psychosis has no word-thing symbolic mediation: figurative communications function as reified Real objects (e.g., projective identification and bizarre objects). [209] Marriott states that foreclosure is directly connected to ressentiment . [210] Brenner cites Laurent, claiming autistic foreclosure leads to Real castration through manifesting a synthetic mOther (The Death of the Author or barring the subject), as opposed to Symbolic castration within an organic nomos; [215] this existential crisis could theoretically lead to the emergence of a schizoid personality style (dissociation, isolation, and intellectualization); q.v., enantiodromia. [216] [217] [218] Under autistic foreclosure, the autistic subject is un-barred, wherein the signifier feels Real (q.v., synesthesia). [219]
In this joiner, Lacan tells us, "the subject can achieve nothing but some form of psychosis or perversion," where this psychosis is marked precisely by a fullness, in the presences of the Real, that eliminates the dimension of desire and all subjective aspirations (301). [147]
— Sheldon George
One crucial way in which Derrida describes the real is as an 'event' (évenément, an eventuating or occurrence). The absolute outside of the text [or, the real other] was named by Derrida from the very start as 'the unnameable' (OG: 14). [...] [O]ne can see that any understanding of the real as presence and as a transcendental signified will import a determination from something that has resulted from the real into the real itself. [20]
— Michael Lewis
Leeb conjectures that Theodor W. Adorno's concept of the non-identical and Lacan's Real fall under immanent critique. [220]
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[ Baruch Spinoza ] recognize[s] only three, or primary, affects: joy, sadness, and desire [and Deleuze interprets desire as the "reflection, derivation, and correlation" of the set of ideas that represent "all power" that "is inseparable from a capacity for being affected"]. [221] [222]
In critical overviews of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the Real has been identified, particularly in readings of A Thousand Plateaus , as the plane of defamiliarized and deterritorialized empty signifiers that approach the uncanny valley, destroyed signs of an imploding gaze, and a-temporal semiotic black holes of faciality. [227] In both the construction and destruction of the "face", a system that "brings together a despotic wall of interconnected signifiers and passional black holes of subjective absorption", there is a split in subjectivity and a confrontation with the Real. [228] The uncanny, the plane of empty signifiers, is found in relations between intersections of the interior-self and exterior-Other, a "return of the repressed" as an eternal return of the path of the objet petit a that disturbs familiarity and further deterritorializes the subject. [229] [230] [231]
Guattari, who throughout the development of his philosophy was critical of Lacan, wrote in the 1979 essay "Logos or Abstract Machines?" that:
[T]here is no meta-language here. The collective assemblage of enunciation speaks "on the same level" as states of affairs, states of facts, and subjective states. There is not, on the one hand, a subject that speaks in the "void" and, on the other hand, an object that would be spoken in the "plenum." The void and the plenum are "engineered" by the same deterritorialization effect. [232] [233] [234]
When the monad-soul finds inner stability, the autopoietic objet petit a does not lead to introjection (oral stage) nor projection (anal stage): this state is the body without organs, a virtuality of becoming within the plane of immanence. [239] The real is a diagrammatic virtuality of reality (or Nature), onticly surpassing all regimes of signs by the merging of content and expression in the body without organs. [240]
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As I see it, Derrida’s recourse to 'incoherence' is analogous to what Žižek understands by the Lacanian Real. [241]
— Andrea Hurst
Slavoj Žižek divides the gist of the Lacanian Real into "three modalities": [242] [243] [244]
Lewis states that the real-of-the-symbolic is the letter (referenced in Lacan's schemas), and the real-of-the-imaginary is objet petit a. [278]
Žižek cites, as literary examples of the Real which he identifies as "the primordial abyss which swallows everything, dissolving all identities", the eldritch experience of Pip in the ocean in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick , regression and the repetition compulsion of characterological desire in death drive within Poe's Maelström, [279] [247] [280] and the climax of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness where Kurtz is in the throes of death. [281] Meanwhile, in his use of film analysis, Žižek states that the real Real can be found in The Full Monty and surreptitiously in The Sound of Music .
Glyn Daly also provided a further elaboration of Žižek's three modalities through his pre-established examples from pop culture:
The real Real is the hard limit that functions as the horrifying Thing (the Alien, Medusa's head, maelstrom and so on) - a shattering force of negation. The symbolic Real refers to the anonymous symbols and codes (scientific formulae, digitalisation, empty signifiers...) that function in an indifferent manner as the abstract "texture" onto which, or out of which, reality is constituted. In The Matrix , for example, the symbolic Real is given expression at the point where Neo perceives "reality" in terms of the abstract streams of digital output. In the contemporary world, Žižek argues that it is capital itself that provides this essential backdrop to our reality and as such represents the symbolic Real of our age. With the "imaginary real" we have precisely the (unsustainable) dimension of fantasmatic excess-negation that is explored in Flatliners . This is why cyberspace is such an ambiguous imaginary realm. [282]
Editor's note: [...] The Real is reality in its unmediated form. It is what disrupts the subject's received notions about himself and the world around him [...] as a shattering enigma, because in order to make sense of it he or she will have to [...] find signifiers that can ensure its control.
The desire for an 'impossible' immortality ('impossible,' in the sense of ineradicably aporetic), he claims, 'is the real that governs our activities more than any other and it is psychoanalysis that designates it for us.'
The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. [...] [attention is] the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon.
[T]here is no antimony whatsoever between the objects I perceive and my body, whose perception is constituted by a quite natural harmony with those objects.
the Real [...] 'the Real Order'
[R]eality is first of all the opposite of fantasy—it is facts[...]it is the opposite of dreams, of hallucination[...]thus reality becomes the correlate of the consciousness, and then of the ego. [...] [R]eality has the same meaning at the end of Freud's life as it had at the beginning: reality is the world shorn of God.
[T]he human can only understand the human by transforming it into an object to relate to (psychology, sociology), while the human can only relate to the objective world itself by transforming the world into something familiar, accessible, or intuited in human terms (biology, geology, cosmology).
He [Merleau-Ponty] thus asserts that 'the philosophy of Freud is not a philosophy of the body but of the flesh—The Id, the unconscious—and the Ego (correlative) to be understood on the basis of the flesh' (The Visible and the Invisible, 270).
[T]he Lacanian real is a black hole, a negative space of non-sociality, indeed of non-subjectivity.
The real[...]is a kind of static whole as well as a kind of black hole void of internal relations. To 'live in the real' means then to experience not just 'loss of self' but an unbearable plenitude; the term 'jouissance' catches the ecstatic of it but not the horror.
Kevin A. Johnson wrote that the Real as Void is a 'radical nothingness' at the core of Burke's theory of subjectivity.
Reality remains predicated on the signifier, and the subject still inhabits an infinitely signifying universe; however, reality and subjectivity are both organized around a traumatic 'kernal of the Real.' [...] 'the real is[...]the product of a social consensus about the nature of reality' (Landy 1991, 4).
As much an expression of the ineffable ground of the subject's own being as that of the world beyond it, the real escapes all representation, even as its indeterminate force may be encountered in the experience of the uncanny or evidenced in the effects of the trauma.
The ontic Reality (which does exist, but is forever unknowable) [...] [t]here is a Kantian epistemological gap between the ontic Reality and the semiotic sign system that attempts to grasp that elusive Reality
The real parallels Kant's noumenal or Ding an sich as having both an internal and external status and in being only indirectly known.
This real is what Derrida refers to as 'authenticity' or 'propriety'[.] [...] The real is presence or substance.
Defining the real as a 'plenum', Lacan warns against fusing it with real in the ordinary sense of 'actual'[.]
Lundberg's skepticism is rooted in an interpretation of the Real that is carefully located in contradistinction with 'reality.'
Culture may be identified with 'the symbolic' and nature with 'the real'.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)It is...the passion of the soul par excellence, narcissism, that imposes its structure on all his desires[.] [...] In the encounter between body and mind, the soul appears as[...]the limit of the monad. [...] seeking to empty himself of all thoughts, advances in the shadowless gleam of imaginary space, abstaining from what will emerge from it, a dull mirror shows him a surface in which nothing is reflected. I think, therefore, that I can designate the imago as the true object of psychology[.]
['T]he thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.['] [...] 'an amorphous characteristic or a frankly irresolvable enigma['] [...] [']a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable' (4-5). Thing is thus at once that which is 'badly encountered' but also 'some thing not quite apprehended' (5), somehow outside of the relation of subject and object. [...] The Thing in this sense is close to Jacques Lacan's understanding of the Real, as Brown himself suggests (5).
Editor's note
[N]arrative itself is a form of defense against this real (Laplanche 2003; Frosh 2007).
S1 [...] These master signifiers are understood to structure and organize the narratives, and indeed the lives, of a subject. [...] S2 refers to the whole body of signifiers by means of which knowledge or messages are communicated.
In terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire.
Myth is the unitary mental construct which guarantees that the cosmic order conforms with the order that this society has in fact already established within its frontiers.
chronotope (literally 'time-space'—representation and conceptualization of the artistic time and space, derived by Bakhtin from Einstein's theory of relativity) [...] This type of narrative time-space [...] are associated with the trials, sufferings and tests one cannot avoid on a difficult journey.
Generally speaking, literary structure is not neutral with respect to philosophies of time. It strongly favors closed temporalities. It is therefore comparatively easy and common to make the shape of a work reinforce a fatalistic or deterministic view of time [...] Such repetitions happen forward, not backward, and they require no underlying structure; but once they happen, they can always be narrated as if a plan were simply revealed over time. In fact, the conventions of narrative favor such a presentation, because narratives are told after the fact. To repeat: narratives are predisposed to understanding in terms of structure.
Drawing upon French philosopher and literary critic, Paul Ricoeur, [J. Nicholas] Entrikin argues that the key element straddling this relationship — or 'getting between' place — is the process of emplotment (25). This is a form of narrative which gives structure to the particular connections people have with places [...] But all of this begins with a tacit assumption that place is dualistic to begin with
A text, writes Bakhtin, occupies 'a certain specific place in space [...and] our acquaintance with it occurs through time' (252). [...] In Bakhtin's words: 'Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history' (84).
[W]hat remains common to Freud and Jung: the unconscious [is] always measured against myths[.]
A myth is a symbolic or imaginary retelling of a beginning. A myth is something that the symbolic order finds it necessary to invoke in order to explain itself. [...] 'All myth is related to that which is inexplicable in the real' (SVIII: 67-8; cf. SVII: 143).
It is only through mythical narratives (religious, fantasmatic, etc.) that the existential function accedes to discourse.
Discourses align our social activities by shaping us into all manner of historically specific, socially recognizable, and culturally relevant forms: [list of roles]. [...] stories 'are directly constitutive of life' [...] and of identity.
The subject is singularity, the ego is individuality; the subject is real, the ego imaginary. [...] Singularity must leave itself, become alienated, in order to form our individuality. The ego represses the subject. [...] [A]dapting a term of Ernest Jones', ' aphanisis ' (cf. SIX: 4/4/62). This is used to describe the subject's characteristic of vanishing the moment it expresses itself [...] in which the real is 'present' within the symbolic order[.]
On the one hand, in the register of the Imaginary, what is called the subject's 'identity' consists in the narrative fiction built up for the ego or moi. [...] On the other hand, in the register of the Real, that which I 'am' consists of an unconscious, traumatic, singularizing desire.
The 'id' [...] [c]ognitively, it is preverbal, expressing itself in images and symbols. It is also prelogical, having no concept of time, mortality, limitation, or the impossibility that opposites can coexist. [...] 'primary process' thought. [...] The id is entirely unconscious.
Freud's 'ego' [...] declared in some writings, the organized part of the 'id,' the latter being the sum total of crude, unmodified instinctual needs.
[T]he Real and the Imaginary may be understood in terms of the relation between the so-called pure signifier (event) and the aporetic dis/order imposed upon it by the necessity of its narration from a particular point of view. [...] [I]n accordance with the structuralist division between parole (individual speech or narration) and langue (the conditions of the narration)[.]
The social, for Laclau and Mouffe, is nothing but a set of provisional ' nodal points which partially fix meaning ' (113), a process they term articulation [...] 'Antagonisms,' by this thinking, 'are not internal but external to society; or rather, they constitute the limits of society['] [...] In this way, 'antagonism' functions in a way similar to Jacques Lacan's notion of the Real.
[T]o the extent that one misrecognizes analytical mastery as being a matter of power over others, rather than the self-mastery that is the precondition for ethical action, one retrogresses to the subject position of blindness represented by the King [in The Purloined Letter]. This is the form of Lacan's warning to all analysts (institutional or otherwise). [...] Can one ever be vigilant enough as an analyst to prevent analytical mastery from devolving into ideological mastery? Perhaps one can, in principle, with a ruthless and interminable self-analysis. [...] What psychoanalysis in principle requires of an analyst, or aims at in any psychoanalytically realized subject, is a form of self-mastery, which is defined as the power of inventive self-renewal through the interminable labor of self-analysis.
In the passage from analysand to psychoanalyst, the analyst consents to become semblant of object a, cause of desire. [...] 'there might have been an analysis but there is no analyst.'
Editor's Note [...] In Lacanian theory, the phallic function is the organizing principle of the dynamic of the subject's desire. [...] the phallus operates as the signifier of a loss[.]
Lacan was careless about this word ['father'], as he was about the word 'phallus,' sometimes using them physiologically and sometimes psychologically or functionally (Macey, 1988, pp. 177-209; Sprengnether, 1990, pp. 181-223).
Lacan[... :] 'The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire (1977, p. 287). The phallus thus stands at that 'intersection of desire and language' which Ricoeur describes as the philosophically critical crossroads of psychoanalytic theory. [...] It also stands for jouissance[...which] cannot be satisfied by any object because 'the being of language is the non-being of objects' (p. 263).
Something ineffable[...]in Western society is known as the phallus.
In Lacan's imagery the phallus is a neutral signifier[.]
[T]he phallus is the signifier of lack [...] [that] constitutes the unconscious as language [...] [and represents] what the mother lacks. [...] the phallus—the signifier of the desire of the Other [...] [mediates] the dialectic of desire.
The real Thing of the drive is jouissance.
Object (a) is thus the real, unspeakable cause of desire, while the phallus is 'the name of desire' and thus pronouncable.
Underneath the figure, there is something of the 'verbal hallucination' (Freud, Lacan) [...] Frustration would have Presence as its figure[...]castration has Intermittence as its figure[...]Absence is the figure of privation[...]The discourse of Absence is a text[...][ Ruysbroeck's ] the raised arms of Desire[...]the wide-open arms of Need.
In frustration the lack is imaginary[, and ...] [t]he agent of frustration is the mother, at the level of the symbolic. [...] Privation refers to a real lack due to the loss of a symbolic object, the phallus as signifier. [...] The notion of privation implies the symbolization of the object in the Real[.] [...] The agent of privation is the imaginary father. [...] Castration is the symbolic lack of an imaginary object [...] the symbolic debt in the register of the law. [...] castration refers to the loss of the phallus as imaginary object. The agent of castration is the real father.
The drives, for example, appear under the register of the real as need, under the imaginary as demand, and under the symbolic as desire.
The dynamics of desire usually evolve in a threefold rhythm: desire separates out from need and then enters into demand.
These formulations of the Lacanian Real come so close to the formulations already offered of différance that one could without injustice argue for an accord between the two notions.
[T]he 'letter' is the real of the symbolic [...] Lalangue is for Lacan a symptomatic moment in the use of language where its real lettricity or trace-structure comes to the fore. It comes to the fore in repetition or similar phenomena in which language is evacuated of meaning. [...] Lalangue is the moment at which, by failing to make sense, language ceases to communicate. But by failing to communicate, to institute an intersubjective event of meaning, it manages to express the real subject of enunciation in language.
As for neurotics, they present all the variants of avoidance evoked above, beginning with the simplest and most reifying, that of phobia, followed by hysteria, which forges from them substitutes in social space and the body, ending with obsessional neurosis which, for its part, secretes a perpetual temporal 'différance' (Derrida), an indefinite procrastination.
The real driving force behind the hysteric's discourse is the impossible, the Real; the same goes for pure science, for quantified science.
[I]n the hysteric's discourse, object (a) appears in the position of truth. That means that the truth of the hysteric's discourse, its hidden motor force, is the real.
[I]n the real, the process of individuation is always incomplete, and it is only language which constructs the illusion that it is complete, that the river has stopped flowing and is now identical with itself.
In the real, it is supposed, entities do not depend on other things for their identity.
Masculine libido believes that jouissance lies in finally realizing the ideal whole, but its death drive toward retrospective illusion of this 'lost' ideal is inherently inhibited because it aims at a delusion, which, therefore, cannot ever be realized. Feminine libido, to the contrary, already knows that the world lacks any legitimate ideal that could ground, unify, and organize all of its parts. Feminine libido, in other words, remains open to Nietzsche's radical nihilism[.] [...] However, to try to force the impossible Real to appear will bring about, on the other side of masculine fanaticism, another kind of terror, namely the will to utter destruction or the will to a chaotic, schizoid state where nothing stable can ever take hold. [...] Those fixated to the feminine death drive compulsively and relentlessly resist any existing order. In other words, to become 'hysterical' is to become fixated to a nonplace in the community and to define oneself, mimicking Hegel, as its 'eternal irony.' [...] jouissance would entail her total exclusion from the world of the living.
Artistic discourse refuses to disavow either desire or reality and therefore represents 'a microscopic expansion of the 'true-real,' ' (227).
To these alternatives [on madness] Kristeva develops a notion of artistic discourse, which combines elements of neurosis and psychosis into a hallucinatory hysterical discourse, which she claims becomes 'a microscopic expansion of the 'true-real,'[.'] This language 'obliterates [conventional] reality and makes the Real loom forth as a jubilant enigma.'
Inspired by Bachelard's theory, [Juhani] Pallasamaa states that the forceful mental and emotional impact of a great work is connected to the real image, which touches the depths before it stirs the surface (Pallasamaa 2011, 64) [...] Bachelard's research of the definitions of 'real images' or 'poetic images' and their connections with imagination and memory is significant.
By creating, man makes himself independent of that which exists, or at least he makes a very considerable effort to do so; so far as speech is concerned we can see it in name-magic. [...] lived on in the Pneuma-doctrine[.]
Lacan introduces a term borrowed from Aristotle, 'the tuché,' to name this encounter, which may be described alternatively as the traumatic cause of the repetition compulsion or simply as the Real. The tuché is here contrasted with 'the automaton,' which designates the fabric of phenomenal reality that we humans tend to weave around the Real. [...] Lacan argues, the repetition compulsion is accurately seen to be the 'real cause' of what occurs in the transference[.]
tuché, or an encounter with the Real.
Lacan's attempt to encircle the Real is echoed by Adorno's concept of 'constellation.'
Seminar I: Freud's Papers on Technique
The Real is a featureless clay from which reality is fashioned by the Symbolic; it is the chaos from which the world came into being, by means of the Word.
Victor J. Vitanza[...states] 'the Lacanian Real ' is associated 'with the Gorgian notion of Kairos, both of which divide the Logos '
Bruce Fink clarifies, 'The real is perhaps best understood as that which has not yet been symbolized, remains to be symbolized, or even resists symbolization'
[I]t becomes clear that the Real par excellence is jouissance: jouissance does not exist, it is impossible, but it produces a number of traumatic events.
[A]lienation is 'real' as [a] gap in the symbolic, as a necessary contradiction that sustains the way we account for where we are in this political-economic 'reality'. [...] [And] spirituality as a call to the subject that is from way outside taken-for-granted reality, a call that assumes form as something traumatic to the subject that is quite close to what Lacanians might conceptualise as 'real'.
The analogy between horror and religious experience is often framed, explicitly or implicitly, in terms of the analysis of religious or numinous experience developed by Rudolf Otto in his[...]proto-phenomenological classic The Idea of the Holy .
Lacan associates the Real with trauma. [...] The Real naturally takes on what Glyn Daly identifies as a 'transcendental aspect'[.]
'[T]hose very objects so terrible to the will[...]he is then filled with the feeling of the sublime...' [...] Repression, like the movement to the Sublime, is a turning operation, away from the drive and toward the heaping up of the unconscious. Pragmatically, repression, like Schopenhauer's Sublime, exalts mind over reality, over the hostile object-world[.]
A reality is thus implemented by differentiation from another already recognized as existing.
[F]or Lacan[...]The Real lurks in [...] the very signifiers out of which the Symbolic is constructed [...] whose method consists in separating signifiers not from their referent (their referents are already symbols) but from the aim of satisfaction, from conscious desire [...] The story that narrates the act both of stopping the fiction-making machine [...] by examining both the impossibility of satisfaction, and ironically, simultaneously, its reality, makes a good narrative against narratives.
A. J. Greimas…has proposed…in narrative…desire (or the quest)[.]
For it can literally be said that something is missing from its place only of what can change it: the symbolic. For the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always in its place; it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from it.
(Seminar II:97)
[quote from] Seminar II:303 ... [and principles from] 1966:388
To each ego its object, to each superego its abject. [...] There is an effervescence of object and sign—not of desire but of intolerable significance; they tumble over into non-sense or the impossible real, but they appear even so in spite of 'myself' (which is not) as abjection. [...] [Abjection] takes the ego back to its source on the abominable limits[...]the ego has broken away[...]non-ego, drive, and death. Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego).
The breaching of the body, the gaze devouring the subject, the subject becoming the space, the state of mere similarity [or, the uncanny.] [...] If there is a subject of history for the culture of abjection at all, it is[...]the Corpse.
Naomi Schor writes: 'Otherness in Beauvoir's scheme of things is utter negativity; it is the realm of what Kristeva has called the abject.' [...] the abject must exist on the border between inside and outside – you generate fresh neither/nors: neither accepting a frontier nor breaching it. [...] [an] impossible, non-space. [...] neither subject nor object[.] [...] The abject is not the objet a
By extension of each person's fear of literally dying, with its unknown time and mode, would be conditioned by various modes of dying throughout life. Death and threatening death as absence, lack, alienation, separation, and loss enter in with the first imaging. Death symbolizes all of these, and all of these symbolize death. This is the meaning of castration.
Lacan's notion of castration focuses essentially on the renunciation of jouissance and not on the penis, and therefore that it applies to both men and women insofar as they 'alienate' (in the Marxist sense of the term) a part of their jouissance. [...] Limit, lack, loss: these [...] constitute what Lacan refers to as castration.
The high degree of anxiety about the loss of the good object frequently leads to a higher degree of submission to the rules of others. In that case the ego becomes fully dependent on the rules imposed upon it by the super-ego.
The ego is 'a particular object within the experience of the subject. Literally, the ego is an object' (SII: 44; cf. SI: 193).
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)[W]hen the Symbolic Order is suspended and the actual Antigone becomes the Thing. In this moment of collapse, she herself becomes singular, unfathomable, inimitable. To repeat Žižek's words: 'for a brief, passing moment of decision, she is the Thing directly.' Thus she is the one for whom there is no mirroring neighbor, and she excludes herself from the network of rules that constitutes communal life, becoming the traumatic cause of her own framework of value.
Lacan is also very close to Heidegger in viewing both the threat of death and the experience of anxiety as potential occasions for self-transformation.
Addiction thus enabled a certain enactment of, or engagement with, my constitutive lack—what Lacan calls 'being-for-death' (1977, 114).
[I]deal desire, which is, strictly speaking, impossible. Here the arc of desire is asymptotic in its approximation of the limit, God or death. This is the ideal form of desire, which sustains an unbelievable and impossible tension in its approach of its goal or telos.
David Rosen's Transforming Depression [...] introducing the key concept of 'egocide.'
We use the term pre-oedipal to define the baby's earliest awareness of [dyadic] 'otherness'[.]
[I]n the oedipal period, the father-function is added to the mother-child dyad of the pre-oedipal, [and] the semiotic triad is [then] completed[.]
[A] real before the letter, that is, a presymbolic real, which, in the final analysis, is but our own hypothesis (R1)[.] [A] real after the letter [...] (R2) [...] is generated by the symbolic.
Thus our self-relation, our understanding of who and what we are, is fully determined, at the level of both the imaginary ['who'] (which is to say the signified) and the symbolic ['what'] (which is to say the signifier). These are both alienations because our real singularity is neither a 'who' nor a 'what'. It precedes the determination of the individual subject (ipseity, whoness) and the determination of an essence (quiddity, whatness).
The semiotic, for Kristeva, is a pre-linguistic or pre-symbolic space, the realm of the 'unspeakable' or the 'unnameable', or what Kristeva following Plato calls the 'chora'. It is the site of energies and bodily drives [...] It is related to what psychoanalysts call the pre-oedipal, that is, [...] a symbiotic state with the mother in which it cannot distinguish between its own body and hers.
[T]he paradoxical khôral space/gap constituted by the 'lamella.'
'lamella' [...] this image and this myth seem to me apt for both illustrating and situating what I call 'libido.' This image shows 'libido' to be what it is—namely, an organ, to which its habit make it far more akin than to a force field. [...] This organ must be called 'unreal,' in the sense in which the unreal is not the [post mirror stage] imaginary and precedes the subjective realm it conditions, being in direct contact with the real. That is what my myth, like any other myth, strives to provide a symbolic articulation for, rather than an image. [...] Libido is this lamella that the organism's being takes to its true limit, which goes further than the body's limit. [...] This lamella is an organ, since it is an instrument of an organism.
The most elaborate narratives, myths and icons always return to this point of chaosmic see-sawing, to this singular ontological orality. [...] When I "consume" a work — a term which ought to be changed, because it can just as easily be absence of work — I carry out a complex ontological crystallisation, an alterification of beings-there. [...] Not only is I an other, but it is a multitude of modalities of alterity.
Malcolm Bowie writes, that the Real is impossible to distinguish from the Symbolic except in the fact that it is 'ineffable' (198, p. 135)
[T]he 'bad' nucleus of self-experience is ascribed to 'uncanny,' disturbing, or frightening experiences and is subject to later projective mechanisms.
Analysts have long described somatizing patients as characterized by alexithymia, or lack of words for affect (Krystal, 1988, 1997; McDougall, 1989; Sifneos, 1973), an observation supported by a recent, comprehensive study by Mattila and colleagues (2008). [...] Waldinger, Shulz, Barsky, and Ahern (2006) found that both insecure attachment and a childhood history of trauma are associated with somatization.
In Derrida's words: 'Something' took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it come, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the 'thing.' But this very thing, the place and meaning of this 'event,' remains ineffable[.]
[W]hat is meant by the real in Lacan[?][...]It is simply History itself[.]
History, as [Frederic] Jameson sees it, is an active force that every writer has to confront [...] choices to do with how they construct their characters, the shape of the narratives, down to the style of their sentences — are symptomatic of the times.
[T]he relation to the Real in the transference is expressed in terms of the automaton: such analysts [...] apprehend, an original event, a first encounter, the positively present 'real thing' that lies behind the fantasy. It is, supposedly, this determinable event in narrative history that the analysand repeats or acts out (in disguise) in the transference.
[I]t would be[...]absurd to think about the signifier without desire. [...] The object has to be symbolized as an absence[.] [...] The object leaves behind the trace in its passage to the signifier, and from those who mistake the sign for the object (the white philosopher who colonizes nature as absence?)[.] [...] In Black Skin, White Masks the imaginary forms of the ego and object loss are the same, the desire to see oneself as other than one is and the self-mutilating mimicry of object loss is the same.
[T]he racist Symbolic, emerging for many African Americans as the Real void into which all losses fall and the 'excluded' center around which all subjective meaning gather (Ethics 71). Race has concomitantly emerged for many African Americans as what Lacan calls the objet a, the fantasy object that promises to guarantee the fullness of an identity that is both individual and communal, a group identity that can return African Americans to the jouissance of that illusory wholeness which is figured as having been shattered by slavery in a primal, historical confrontation with lack.
[Sheldon George] read Morrison's Beloved as a textual representation of race and the racial past of slavery as sublimated representatives of the Lacanian Real.
In Lacanian terms, the Real would constitute the critique of symbolic, signifying categories and the shift toward an opacity of vision [...] one that would acknowledge the necessity of W. E. B. Dubois's double-consciousness.
[A]rgues Lacan, 'the real is[...]the return, the coming-back, the insistence of signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle' (53-4).
Lacanian analysis['s] [...] aim is to 'grasp real identity', to grasp the Freudian Thing that is 'in you more than you', albeit through the pure negativity of the subject's non-identity to himself.
Lacan's running metaphor of the text as labyrinth[...]Anamorphosis can therefore be produced by the traversal of a grid[...]the text-tapestry is traversed [...] The object a represented by the gaze is, like desire itself for Lacan, metonymic in structure, always slipping away from understanding.
The unembodied self becomes hyper-conscious. It attempts to posit its own imagos.
The imago is a primordial structure which makes us say yes, that is me, and no, that is not me. [...] In the imago meanings coalesce into incontrovertible representations (vorstellungen, or word and thing representations).
A symptom is a failed attempt on the part of the speaking subject to express itself in language. Thus the symptom is a symptom of our desire.
Like an analysand, a poetic speaker may belie the reality of his solitude by invoking an Original Presence (God or idealized parent) or some person or image, like the sea, that represents a fully idealized Presence.
The sea is the symbol of the collective unconscious, because unfathomed depths lie concealed beneath its reflecting surface.
If the anthropological demon (the human relating to itself) functioned via metaphor, and if the mythological demon (the human relating to the non-human) functioned via allegory, then perhaps there is a third demon[...]'meontological' (having to do with non-being rather than being).
[T]he desert is used to evoke the sense of a 'world without others'. [...] but in its [the desert's] hostility to organic life it also suggests the radical discontinuity of a world left bereft by a presence that has withdrawn to the heavens [...] For Nietzsche, a 'basic fact of the human will' is its ' horror vacui ', its fear of nothingness or emptiness (Nietzsche 1997: 8). [...] The ascetic ideal—the attachment to a 'spiritual' domain of values rather than to the physical here and now—emerges as a solution to this horror.
As Nietzsche so famously wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, 'When you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.' This is the horror within, the finding of oneself, the eternal return of the self and the inescapable prison of consciousness, in the searching of what lies beyond the veil.
The subject inhabits the 'holes in discourse' (E: 253)[.]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)It was the abyss, open to the thought that a thought might make itself heard in the abyss, that gave rise to resistance to psychoanalysis from the outset—not the emphasis on man's sexuality, as is commonly said.
[Leplanche and Leclaire] use the bar to express the double nature of repression: it is a barrier that separates the systems, and a relating that ties together the relations of signifier to signified[...]Metaphor is nothing other than repression, and vice versa[.]
Übertragen and metapherein are synonyms, both meaning to transfer, to carry over or beyond, and I. A. Richards pointed out a long time ago in The Philosophy of Rhetoric that what psychoanalysts call transference is another name for metaphor.
The connection between 'place' and 'metaphor' is evident. Paul Ricœur remarks that 'as figure, metaphor constitutes a displacement and an extension of the meaning of words; its explanation is grounded in the theory of substitution ' (The Rule of Metaphor 3; italics added).
[A]ffect, language, and atmosphere can be recast as the social milieu that enables the emergence of more complex forms of shared 'metaphorical abstraction'.
[M]etaphor turns its back on ordinary descriptive meaning, and presents a structure which literally is ironic and paradoxical. [...] In the anagogic aspect of meaning, the radical form of metaphor, 'A is B[.]' [...] Interpretation proceeds by metaphor as well as creation[.] ... As for human society, the metaphor that we are all members of one body has organized most political theory from Plato to our own day. [...] Plato's Republic[...][wherein] reason, will, and desire of the individual appear as the philosopher-king, guards, and artisans of the state, is also founded on this metaphor, which in fact we still use whenever we speak of a group or aggregate of human beings as a 'body.'
In archetypal psychology Gods are imagined. They are approached through psychological methods of personifying, pathologizing, and psychologizing. They are formulated ambiguously, as metaphors for modes of experience and as numinous borderline persons. They are cosmic perspectives in which the soul participates. They are lords of its realms of being, the patterns for its mimesis.
[A] becoming of the State: its internalization in a field of increasingly decoded social forces forming a physical system; its spiritualization in a superterrestrial field that increasingly overcodes, forming a metaphysical system.
Metaphor, in which one thing can substitute for another, is usually thought to occur only after the differentiation of image and object; of memory, percept, and anticipation; of the 'I' and the other.
Cartesian and cartographic anxiety would be, in [Edward] Casey's terms, the place-panic[.] [...] Chaos, with its material confusion and gaping character, also gives rise to 'place-panic' [the 'depression or terror...of an empty space'] ([Edward] Casey 1997 [6,] 10). Place is a presence that prevents the anxiety produced by absence, or horror vacui. [...] When the Demiurge confronts chora in this formless state, he 'is threatened' (Casey 1997, 37) [...] Chora is the thing on which things come to appearance.
[L]landscape and the body are effective epicenters of the geographical self. The one widens out our vista of the place-world—all the way to the horizon—while the other literally incorporates this same world and acts upon it.
But unlike ordinary equipmental breakdown, anxiety is a total disturbance. [...] it reveals the whole world as if from outside. It reveals the groundlessness of the world and of Dasein's being-in-the-world. 'That in the face of which one has anxiety is being-in-the-world as such' (230) [186].
Another Vedic tradition, preserved in the late hymn of the Rigveda, tells how the gods made the world from the dismembered body of the primitive giant Purushu [...] represents a cosmic extension of man into the universe: the foot which touches the earth is extended to be the earth itself, the head which stretches heavenward is raised and magnified to be the heaven itself—in a term of Schopenhauer's (which incidentally contains his whole teaching), we are dealing with a 'makanthropos.'
Dualisms in an impasse, like the oppositions between[...]the real and the imaginary, involve a recourse to transcendent, omnipotent and homogenetic instances: God, Being, Absolute Spirit, Energy, The Signifier[.]
The Transcendent Function is a rather complex Jungian concept that describes the capacity of the mind to bridge conscious and unconscious thought. [...] Describing the Transcendent Function as a 'third hand' applies to the Oedipal concept of the 'threeness'[.]
'[R]esistance.' [...] His associations become shallow, unproductive, and evasive [...] He may reject every attempt to help with a rigid feeling of hopelessness and futility. Fundamentally, the reason for this impasse is that certain insights are not acceptable to the patient; they are too painful, too frightening, and they undermine illusions that he cherishes and is incapable of relinquishing. [...] all he knows, or thinks he knows, is that he is misunderstood or humiliated or that the work is futile.
A discrepancy is an inconsistency, mixed message, or conflict among a client's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
[T]he most resistant resistance, the 'hard kernel' that puts a stop to analysis is also a seed, as disseminative as differance , as productive of new life.
The ego is that which resists the unconscious's acceding to consciousness. [...] The (unconscious) subject is pure speech, outside of all language.
Especially in this lonely prayer, Jesus prefigures the situation of the mystic who must go through the night of the senses, through a period in which God [Yahweh] seems to avert his face. Lacan sees something similar in the moment of the ' passe ', the moment of crisis in a speaking cure in which all subjectivity, the last imaginary residue, all self-love falls away. There, the defences of the 'I' (both in its [barred subject symbol]- and [petit objet] a-aspect, i.e. as a speaking subject and one who seeks the image of his self at a moment of crisis) are overruled and the [Big Other] A takes over; this is an experience which approximates the 'real I', the hallucinatory[.]
To him [patient] an undermining of his inflated notions means a destruction of his faith in himself. He realizes that he is not as saintly, as loving, as powerful, as independent as he had believed, and he cannot accept himself bereft of glory. At that point he needs someone who does not lose faith in him, even though his own faith is gone.
'One trains analysts so that there are subjects in whom the ego is absent. That is the ideal of analysis, which, of course, remains virtual. There is never a subject without an ego, a fully realised subject, but that in fact is what one must aim to obtain from the subject in analysis' (SII: 246, my italics).
For Lacan, there are no signifieds in the unconscious, only signifiers.
The Lacanian subject is 'strung along' by the unfolding of the chain of signifiers; its very being is conditioned by the organization of a linguistic code. ... For Lacan, the unconscious is 'the discourse of the Other.' Human desire is 'the desire of the Other.'
Editor's Note
In his study of faith in the works of Winnicott, Bion, and Lacan, Michael Eigen writes that 'It is [the] intersection of profound vulnerability and saving indestructability that brings the paradox of faith to a new level' (1981, p. 416) [...] The 'object' survives the attacks of the 'subject' just as Job survives Yahweh's attacks.
This grandiose Self-Great Mother construction has nothing spontaneous about it, and the only alternative to its stony embrace is the black hole: Nothingness. The Self is indeed the prisoner of the Death Mother. [...] That emptiness was filled by the negative pole of the combined Self-Great Mother archetype, i.e., the black unconsciousness of a Death Mother.
'I [Bion] shall use the sign O to denote that which is the ultimate reality represented by terms such as absolute truth, the godhead, the infinite, the thing-in-itself. [...] it can 'become,'[.' ...] For Bion, there is an original oneness that is split by the catastrophic divisions of birth and subsequent traumas[. ...] Fantasies of oneness can be found in the need for fusion or what Freud (1930) termed the 'oceanic feeling.' [...] Michael Eigen (1981) sees O as the emotional truth of a session. O, for both commentators [Ogden and Eigen], has luminosity; it expresses wonder and ineffability, a truth that cannot be reduced to facts.
The [Bionian] analyst ['refraining' from reactionary memory or desire] allows himself to become a pure container, into which flow the patient's projections and [Beta]-elements [or inner-object projections]. [... allowing for] the emergence of the unknown and formless void[.]
We may interpret Spinoza's God as the real, and the finite sum of the causally interconnected finite modes conceived under the attribute of thought as the symbolic.
[Laruelle] insists on a ' non-intuitive phenomenality,' which manifests the ' radical immanence or immanence (to) itself ' of the Real, or of what he calls 'the One' (Laruelle 1999, 141).
The category of the Real radically reorients the notion of 'reality' in Freud's text. Whereas Freudian 'reality' is constituted by 'symbolizing what ought to be symbolized (castration),' in Laplanche and Pontalis's revealing paraphrase (1973, 168), the Real is what can enter psychical experience only through hallucination. 'What has been foreclosed from the Symbolic reappears in the Real' (Lacan 1966, 388). Disavowal would then be a mode of access to as well as a mode of defense against 'history,' now construed as that which eludes symbolization.
[P]sychosis produces two holes where in the Other in the place places where the Name-of-the-Father and the phallus should be[.] [...] Lacan borrowed the term 'foreclosure' [...] to convey the exclusion of a signifier in psychosis [...and the term] roughly corresponds to the German Verwefung (repudiation) used by Freud [...and can be] defined as a process of exclusion of the primary signifier, marked by the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. Here is the origin of the Lacanian formula for psychosis as a hole, a lack at the level of the signifier.
Lacan states that in psychosis this split [barring/dividing] cannot be assumed to have occurred at all[.]
[I]t is primal repression. Lacan names this repression with the Freudian word, Verwerfung, which he translates as ' forclusion ', foreclosure.
In the psychotic state, there is no distance or perspective on experience, there is [...] no true signifier-signified relationship. The symptom no longer signifies but is lived, a metaphor lived as real. Words do not mediate, do not refer to what is absent, but function in the real as objects (akin to Freud's analysis of schizophrenia as cathexis of the Wortvorstellung in place of the Sachvorstellung [1915, pp. 197-204]).
Muller has explained the breakdown of normal language use in schizophrenia as a failure to use language in its mediating role between the subject and the unarticulated, unsymbolized world—what Lacan terms the Real. [...] indifferent things becomes an inexhaustible reservoir of gesture and meaning.
In extreme instances, a relationship [to the Kleinian object can be] dominated by projective identification [and] can trigger psychotic episodes.
Lacan knew, with genius, how psychosis reversed meaning, was ensnared in ressentiment, and in ways opposed to morality, to reason. Here the signifier is immersed in a mystical body in which it takes its root, an interiority that is foreclosed.
In the case of the foreclosure of the rim, this negativity would entail the presence of the void in the real. Facing this dimension of lack brings autistic subjects to experience unbearable anxiety that they associate with a 'pure presence of death' (Laurent, 2012a, pp. 67-69, 84). [...] In order to surmount this terrible anxiety or troumatisme, while having no access to symbolic castration, the autistic subject is disposed to achieve a 'castration in the real' (Laurent, 2012a, p. 67). [...] [T]he open synthetic Other [...] Some autistic individuals use these [synthetic, as opposed to 'organic'] intellectual models[...]to understand human behavior; others go as far as making their expertise into a profession[.]
By attempting to create a lack, the autistic subject attempts to create desire in the Other [...] the Leforts argue, the Other is reduced to an absence [...] (Lefort and Lefort, 1992, 1994).
What are symbolic relations? [...] [T]he Law [...or social] ideals [...] Symbolic relations include all the conflicts associated with what is commonly referred to in psychoanalysis as 'castration anxiety.' [...] [W]e see an[...]absence of the law in psychosis, and a definitive instatement of the law in neurosis (overcome only in fantasy), [and] in perversion the subject struggles to bring the law into being—in a word, to make the Other exist.
The elimination of the narrator [ not Dupin nor Poe ] is a blatant and highly revealing result of the way 'psychoanalysis' does violence to literature in order to find its own schemes.
I am often asked whether I see schizoid people as on the autistic spectrum, and I am not sure how to answer. [...] Perhaps schizoid psychology, especially in its high-functioning versions, can be reasonably viewed as at the healthy end of the autism spectrum.
The unembodied self becomes hyper-conscious. [...] The self in such a schizoid organization is usually more or less unembodied. It is experienced as a mental entity. It enters the condition called by Kierkegaard 'shutupness'.
The notion of enantiodromia (or reversal of [the] direction of psychic energy) following the mid-life crisis, became the foundation stone of Jung's later theory of the development of the personality.
Autism shows an extreme position of the fusion of the subject in the holophrase S1[:master signifier]S2[:Other] [...] [T]he signifier itself acquires the weight of the real.
There are only few attempts to read Adorno in conjunction with Lacan, and this is the first work that shows the affinities between the non-identical and the Real. [...] The Real and the non-identical are then consistent with Adorno's notion of immanent critique. In contrast to a 'transcendent critique' that critiques other theories from outside its own principles, immanent critique unfolds through internal contradictions, which it does not aim to erase. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 5.
Consciousness. [... includes] Reflection [...] Derivation [...and] Correlation[.] [...] Desire. Cf. Consciousness, Power [...] all power is inseparable from a capacity for being affected
The face signifies by refusing to signify. [...] [Deleuze's] Bergsonianism...predicated on the idea of the surface—the plane and the point—as opposed to the form—the shape and its interior. [...] The passage from Victorian horror vacui to the present is that passage, the passage from potentiality to instantaneity. If in the former blankness was not a sign, but rather the place for the sign, in the latter it has become signally characteristic of the surface of all the signs which exclude it with recognizability and narrative[...][l]ying outside of art it would have to be art's subject.
The face constructs the wall that the signifier needs in order to bounce off of [...] The [Sartre] gaze is but secondary in relation to the gazeless eyes, to the black hole of faciality. The [Lacanian] mirror is but secondary in relation to the white wall of faciality [...] there is a face-landscape aggregate proper to the novel.
The semiotic black hole is[...]the destruction of the whole sign[...]that radically transforms the socius, possessing a gravitational pull that has the power to massively reshape and remotivate [...] the semiotic black hole[...][leaves] little or no trace of its influence. [...] a collision of a fatal event and a perfect object[.] [...] Temporality is constant motion; to mark a point in time is to freeze only that moment, to celebrate impression and deny expression.
The mechanism of uncanniness doesn't leave you any space for uncertainty and hesitation. If there is a structural hesitation, or floating, attached to it, it comes from the impossibility of espousing the terrible certainty—it would ultimately entail psychosis, an annihilation of subjectivity.
[T]he source of the uncanny is the reappearance of a part that was necessarily lost with the emergence of the subject—the intersection between the 'psychic' and the 'real,' the interior and the exterior, the 'word' and the 'object,' the symbol and the symbolized—the point where the real immediately coincides with the symbolic to be put into the service of the imaginary. [...] the uncanny is[...]the recuperation of the loss
As an empty signifier, 'relation'[...][is found] between analysand and analyst, between infant and caregiver, between self and other, between individual and collective, between body and mind, between material and spiritual, between personal and political, and between clinic and world.
To experience the uncanny, then, is to experience something that is known, but something the knowledge of which has been hidden or repressed. Freud takes this to be a necessary, though not a sufficient condition, of the experience of the uncanny: '...the uncanny is nothing else than a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it, and that everything that is uncanny fulfills this condition.'
The term 'collective' should be understood in the sense of a multiplicity[.]
Production in the Marxist sense transcends the philosophical opposition between 'subject' and 'object', along with all the relationships constructed by the philosophers on the basis of that opposition. [...] All productive activity is defined less by invariable or constant factors than by the incessant to-and-fro between temporality (succession, concatenation) and spatiality (simultaneity, synchronicity).
The full body without organs is the soul animated by desire.
The body without organs is a complete and uncorrupted body. It is a body without a mouth and without an anus, a body that has given up all introjections and projections.
Against this [Lacanian] emphasis [of lack via Freud], Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative account of desire as self-generating production.
In Anti-Oedipus (1983), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari advanced a radical conception of desire, no longer shackled to absence and lack, but based on a productive process of presence and becoming. [...] one in which the conventional distinctions between inside and outside, actual and virtual, and even between self and other significantly blur.
transformations that blow apart semiotics systems or regimes of signs on the plane of consistency of a positive absolute deterritorialization are called diagrammatic. [...] An abstract machine [...] is diagrammatic [...] It operates by matter, not by substance.; by function, not by form. [...] The abstract machine is pure Matter-Function [...] A diagram has neither substance nor form, neither content nor expression. [...] Writing now functions on the same level as the real, and the real materially writes. [...] This Real-Abstract is totally different from the fictitious abstraction of a supposedly pure machine of expression. It is Absolute, but one that is neither undifferentiated nor transcendent. [...] there are no regimes of signs on the diagrammatic level, or on the plane of consistency, because form of expression is no longer really distinct from form of content.
Žižek...divides the Real into three different categories, which coincide with the imaginary/real/symbolic division: 'There are thus THREE modalities[...]the 'real Real'[...]'symbolic Real'[...]'imaginary Real'[...]On Belief 82
This [L] Schema signifies that the condition of the subject, S (neurosis or psychosis), depends on what unfolds in the Other, A. [...] a, his objects; a ', his ego, that is, his form as reflected in his objects; and A, the locus from which the question of his existence may arise for him. [...] The R schema, which represents the lines that condition the perceptum—in other words, the object—insofar as these lines circumscribe the field of reality rather than merely depending on it.
It is in this zone of intersection that subject and object fuse and establish their foundations. [...] one can say that psychoanalysis is born at this point of object-subject fusion that we see at work in suggestion, hypnosis, and hysteria.
'The real, which is to say impossible, Other of the Other' (SXXIII: 64) [...] [T]he phallus was already recognized as the hinge of the real and the symbolic. The phallus can occupy this position precisely because it has both a symbolic and an imaginary aspect. It is a product of the real, but it is an image of the symbolic.
[T]he scientific Real, the real of a formula that expresses nature's automatic and senseless functioning [...] [I]f we start with the Symbolic[...]we get language deprived of the wealth of its human sense, transformed into the Real of a meaningless formula[.]
[T]he analyst's abstention—his refusal to respond[...][m]ore exactly, the junction between the symbolic and the real lies in this negativity[.] [...] Thus we see another moment...in which the symbolic and the real come together: in the function of time. [...] Punctuation, once inserted, establishes the meaning[.] [...] [D]eath instinct [...] [or] repetition automatism [...] This limit is death...the subject being understood as defined by his historicity. [...] the past which manifests itself in an inverted form in repetition. [...] [that] corresponds rather to the relational group that symbolic logic designates topologically as a ring.
No concatenation of signifiers ever really grasps exhaustively the being of an object. Thus, all discourse is metonymic. It refers us from signifier to signifier, in an endless path in which the reference to the object is abolished. The real is thus 'the impossible.'
Historical reality is of course always symbolized [...] the horizon of an ideological field of meaning, is supported by some 'pure' ['Lacanian master-signifier'], [a] meaningless 'signifier without the signified'.
Dasein 'is' its past in the way of its own Being, which, to put it roughly, 'historicizes' out of its future on each occasion. [...] Dasein can discover tradition, preserve it, and study it explicitly.
Hegel insists that the individual who fails to recognize his own historicity and sets himself up as a pure, autonomous ego, independent of the customs and culture of his society and era, is a stranger to himself.
The differentiating action of [semiotic] demotivation is what Lacan refers to as symbolic castration. The task of castration[...]is to introduce a fundamental shift in the subject's relation to the image, that is, to relate the positional moment of the image to the dispositional horizon of a symbolic system.
Expressive, linguistic and non-linguistic substances install themselves at the junction of discursive chains (belonging to a finite, performed world, the world of the Lacanian Other)[.]
[A] permanent revisionism, so to speak, in which what is disturbing about truth is constantly being reabsorbed, truth being in itself but what is lacking in the realization of knowledge. [...] This is a real crisis, in which the imaginary is eliminated [castration] in engendering a new symbolic form[.]
('quilting points' or 'nodal points' in Laclau and Mouffe's rendering). The point de capiton is the signifier which 'stops the otherwise endless movement (glissement) of the signification'.
The real-of-the-symbolic as the infinity of traces is domesticated and rendered intelligible as the real-of-the-imaginary. The real-of-the-imaginary is the object a, the cause of desire, depicted in the fantasy, which thus makes the absolutely unreachable infinity seem like something that could one day be attained, and that is desirable. The infinity of the trace is given a positive (imaginary) form as the regulative ideal that is the object of desire. The infinity of the real is rendered accessible to us as the infinite striving of desire. [...] ['T]he object of desire has no image' (SIX: 30/5/62).
[I]ts status is purely phantasmatic [...] [T]he terrifying formless Thing[...][I]f we start with the Imaginary (the mirror-confrontation of Freud and Irma), we get the Real in its imaginary dimension, the horrifying primordial image that cancels the [dream] imagery itself[.]
When the analyst is viewed as an other like the analysand, the analyst can be considered an imaginary object or other for the analysand (Lacan writes this as a ' [...] Lacan puts it in italics to indicate that it is imaginary. In contrast to a ', the subject's own ego is denoted by a.) [...] When the analyst is viewed as the cause of the analysand's unconscious formations, the analyst can be considered a 'real' object for the analysand [...or] object a[.] [...] alter-ego, [is] a ' [.]
For Lacan, the uncanny is 'linked not...to all sorts of irruptions from the unconscious, but rather to an imbalance that arises in the fantasy when it decomposes' ('Desire' 22)[.]
Fundamentally, any psychological image is a complex and autonomous reproduction 'not of the object itself but of the adjustments proper to the action which incides on the object'; in particular, 'the intuition of space is not a reading of the objects' properties but right from the start it is clearly an action exerted on them' (Piaget & Inhelder 1972:342 and 523).
[T]he dream imagery (as the counterpart of conscious representation according to the causality of the automaton), puts together 'what happened' (as 'event,' 'trauma,' 'knot,' 'navel,' or the Real) according to the causality of the tuché, as the cause of the repetition compulsion.
The Thing is not the object (the vase) but the emptiness that is represented by the object in order for it to function in symbolic discourse. [...] This emptiness is a hole that marks the Real.
3.221 Objects[,] I can only name. Signs represent them. I can only speak of them. [...] 4.0621 [that] the signs 'p' and '~p' can say the same thing is important, for it shows that the sign '~' corresponds to nothing in [ontic] reality. [...] 5.44 And if there was an object called '~', then '~~p' would have to say something other than 'p'.
[O]bject (a) [...] as real, does not signify anything: it is the Other's desire, it is desirousness as real, not signified.
[I]t is not an external thing that resists being caught in the symbolic network, but the fissure within the symbolic network itself. [...] [F]or Lacan the Real—the Thing—is not so much the inert presence that curves symbolic space (introducing gaps and inconsistencies in it), but, rather, an effect of these gaps and inconsistencies.
In 'The Thing,' Heidegger develops an example[...]the earthen jug. [...] In fashioning the jug, the potter forms the clay around a void. It is this central void that makes the jug useful. [...] All emergence of truth thus occurs against a background of untruth. Alethia presupposes a prior lethe , or primordial forgetting.
[T]he analyst being identified as the one who knows (the full vase) whereas the analysand (the empty vase) knows nothing but what the analyst communicates.
To work and create 'for nothing,' to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.
[T]he Thing is an imagined sun, bright and black at the same time. 'It is a well-known fact that one never sees the sun in a dream[.'] [...] The melancholy Thing interrupts desiring metonymy, just as it prevents working out the loss within the psyche.
Lovecraft applies the term 'Outsider' to this thing or entity, the Thing, which arrives and passes at the edge, which is linear yet multiple, 'teeming, seething, swelling, foaming, spreading like an infectious disease, this nameless horror.' [...] a phenomenon of bordering.
The [Jungian] anima, like a rubber band, snaps back to the animus and the animus to the animal, who between S and a maintains considerably closer 'foreign relations' with its Umwelt than our own[.]
In Rank's words the transference object comes to represent for the individual 'the great biological forces of nature, to which the ego binds itself emotionally and which then form the essence of the human and his fate.' [...] The object becomes his locus of safe operation. [...] Angyal could well say that transference is...the experience of the other as one's whole world [...] this fear of looking the transference object full in the face is...the fear of the reality of intense focalization of natural wonder and power; the fear of being overwhelmed by the truth of the universe as it exists, as that truth is focused in one human face.
Plato's definition[...]of art—which is really but the reflection of his whole picture of life; for does he not explain daily life as the shadow of an actual reality, which he calls the Idea, and does not art therefore naturally represent for him only a shadow of that shadow, a copy of a copy? [...] Ideas, which leads him to interpret the soul's intuition of self-beauty[...]as the recollection of its prenatal existence[...]the prenatal—that is, a supernatural—state [...] a plane of illusion, which has its setting and its pattern in our own soul-life. [...] the feeling of oneness with the soul living in the work of art, a greater and higher entity. [...] This ideologization of inner conflicts manifests itself in the individual in a form which psycho-analysis has called that of 'identification'[.]
The art object, says Lacan in his definition of sublimation, 'raises the object to the dignity of the Thing.'
[T]he real-of-the-symbolic is the letter, while the real-of-the-imaginary is the objet petit a
[T]he fisherman's drama may be seen as a drama of the mirror stage in reverse, a regression from the symbolic phase to the imaginary. [...] instead of looking into the mirror, the fisherman looks around it at its silver backing, perceiving the mechanism by which the illusion of his self is created. [...] the return of mythical and imaginative knowledge. [...] It is a mystical quest for the Other[.] [...] The Maelstrom is the object of the fisherman's quest, but it is also a death object and the locus of the eternal slippage of meaning. [...] [it] cannot be reduced to a signified, to a referent.
Diagnosis can, like anything else, be used as a defense against anxiety about the unknown. [...] When any label obscures more than it illuminates, the practitioner is better off discarding it and relying on common sense and decency, like the lost sailor who throws away a useless navigational chart and reverts to orienting by a few familiar stars.
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse.
The mirror stage is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apperception from the age of about six months.
Jouissance is a French language term held untranslatable into English.
In the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, objet petit a stands for the unattainable object of desire, the "a" being the small other ("autre"), a projection or reflection of the ego made to symbolise otherness, like a specular image, as opposed to the big Other which represents otherness itself. It is sometimes called the object cause of desire, as it is the force that induces desire towards any particular object. Lacan always insisted that the term should remain untranslated, "thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign" (Écrits).
Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and health care, and philosophy.
Identification refers to the automatic, subconscious psychological process in which an individual becomes like or closely associates themselves with another person by adopting one or more of the others' perceived personality traits, physical attributes, or some other aspect of their identity. The concept of identification was founded by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud in the 1920’s, and has since been expanded on and applied in psychology, social studies, media studies, and literary and film criticism. In literature, identification most often refers to the audience identifying with a fictional character, however it can also be employed as a narrative device whereby one character identifies with another character within the text itself.
The Imaginary is one of three terms in the psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques Lacan, along with the Symbolic and the Real. Each of the three terms emerged gradually over time, undergoing an evolution in Lacan's own development of thought. "Of these three terms, the 'imaginary' was the first to appear, well before the Rome Report of 1953…[when the] notion of the 'symbolic' came to the forefront." Indeed, looking back at his intellectual development from the vantage point of the 1970s, Lacan epitomised it as follows:
"I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic ... and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real."
The Symbolic is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.
The graph of desire is a conceptual tool in Lacanianism.
Four discourses is a concept developed by French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. He argued that there were four fundamental types of discourse. He defined four discourses, which he called Master, University, Hysteric and Analyst, and suggested that these relate dynamically to one another.
In Lacanianism, demand is the way in which instinctive needs are alienated through language and signification. The concept of demand was developed by Lacan—outside of Freudian theory—in conjunction with need and desire in order to account for the role of speech in human aspirations, and forms part of the Lacanian opposition to the approach to language acquisition favored by ego psychology.
Sinthome is a concept introduced by Jacques Lacan in his seminar Le sinthome (1975–76). It redefines the psychoanalytic symptom in terms of the role of the subject outside of analysis, where enjoyment is made possible through creative identification with the symptom.
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis is the 1978 English-language translation of a seminar held by Jacques Lacan. The original was published in Paris by Le Seuil in 1973. The Seminar was held at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris between January and June 1964 and is the eleventh in the series of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. The text was published by Jacques-Alain Miller.
"The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud" is an essay by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, originally delivered as a talk on May 9, 1957 and later published in Lacan's 1966 book Écrits.
In Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic philosophy, lack is a concept that is always related to desire. In his seminar Le transfert (1960–61) he states that lack is what causes desire to arise.
In psychoanalysis, foreclosure is a specific psychical cause for psychosis, according to French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
A phallus is a penis, an object that resembles a penis, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. In art history, a figure with an erect penis is described as ithyphallic.
Lacanianism or Lacanian psychoanalysis is a theoretical system that explains the mind, behaviour, and culture through a structuralist and post-structuralist extension of classical psychoanalysis, initiated by the work of Jacques Lacan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Lacanian perspectives contend that the human mind is structured by the world of language, known as the Symbolic. They stress the importance of desire, which is conceived of as perpetual and impossible to satisfy. Contemporary Lacanianism is characterised by a broad range of thought and extensive debate among Lacanians.
In semiotics, signified and signifier are the two main components of a sign, where signified is what the sign represents or refers to, known as the "plane of content", and signifier which is the "plane of expression" or the observable aspects of the sign itself. The idea was first proposed in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, one of the two founders of semiotics.