#real symbolic imaginary

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

The Lacanian Real

Real, The (Lacan) The real, a category established by Jacques Lacan, can only be understood in connection with the categories of the symbolic and the imaginary. Defined as what escapes the symbolic, the real can be neither spoken nor written. Thus it is related to the impossible, defined as "that which never ceases to write itself." And because it cannot be reduced to meaning, the real does not lend itself any more readily to univocal imaginary representation than it does to symbolization. The real situates the symbolic and the imaginary in their respective positions. In 1953, in a lecture called "Le symbolique, l'imaginaire et le réel" (The symbolic, the imaginary, and the real; 1982), Lacan introduced the real as connected with the imaginary and the symbolic. The real, insofar as it is situated in relation to the death drive and the repetition compulsion, has nothing to do with Freudian reality (Wirklichkeit ) or with the reality principle. Lacan wrote, "One thing that is striking is that in analysis there is an entire element of the real of the subject that escapes us. . . . There is something that brings the limits of analysis into play, and it involves the relation of the subject to the real" (1982). Right away, Lacan raised the question of the real in relation to analytic training, and in 1953 more specifically in relation to the choice of candidates for training analysis. The issue concerned the fact that the real is defined not solely by its relation to the symbolic but also by the particular way in which each subject is caught up in it. Lacan was able to extract this notion of the real from his meticulous reading of Freud. In La relation d'objet (Object relations; 1994), his seminar of 1956-1957, Lacan, taking up the case of "little Hans" (Freud, 1909b), explained the boy's mythical constructions as a response to the real of sexual jouissance (enjoyment) that had erupted in his field of subjectivity. Thanks to his imaginary constructions and his phobia, little Hans avoided the issue of castration. In his seminar The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955 (1988), Lacan presented a detailed reading of Freud's dream of Irma's injection (Freud, 1900a). He emphasised that the terrifying image that Freud saw at the back of Irma's throat revealed the irreducible real and designated a limit point at which "all words cease" (1988, p. 164). Lacan returned regularly to The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a) to indicate how the real is located at the root of every dream, what Freud called the dream's navel, a limit point where the unknown emerges (1900a, pp. 111n, 525). It is here, at the dream's navel, that Lacan located the point where the real hooks up with the symbolic (Lacan, 1975). Lacan approached the real through hallucination and psychosis by careful study of Freud's "Wolf man" case (1918b [1914]), Freud's commentary on Daniel Paul Schreber (1911c [1910]), and "Negation" (Freud, 1925h). If the Name of the Father is foreclosed and the symbolic function of castration is refused by the subject, the signifiers of the father and of castration reappear in reality, in the form of hallucinations. Hence the Wolf Man's hallucination of a severed finger and Schreber's delusions of communicating with God. Thus, in developing the concept of foreclosure, Lacan was able to declare, "What does not come to light in the symbolic appears in the real" (1966, p. 388). Lacan re-conceived Freud's hypothesis of an original affirmation as a symbolic operation in which the subject emerges from an already present real and recognizes the signifying stroke that engages the subject in a world symbolically ordered by the Name of the Father and castration. In his seminar The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1978), Lacan took up Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920g) and approached the real in terms of compulsion and repetition. He proposed distinguishing between two different aspects of repetition: a symbolic aspect that depends on the compulsion of signifiers (automaton) and a real aspect that he called tuché, the interruption of the automaton by trauma or a bad encounter that the subject is unable to avoid. Engendered by the real of trauma, repetition is perpetuated by the failure of symbolization. From this point on, Lacan defined the real as "that which always returns to the same place" (Lacan, 1978, p. 49). Trauma, which Freud situated within the framework of the death drive, Lacan conceptualised as the impossible-to-symbolize real. The concept of the real also allowed Lacan to approach questions of anxiety and the symptom in a new way. While his early teaching was devoted to the primacy of the symbolic, in later seminars (from 1972 to 1978) he argued that the real (R), the symbolic (S), and the imaginary (I) are strictly equivalent. In effect, the symbolism that Lacan borrowed from logic failed to formalise the real, which "never ceases to write itself." Thus Lacan attempted, by borrowing from the mathematics of knot theory, to invent a formulation independent of symbols. By affirming the equivalence of the three categories R, S, and I, by representing them as three perfectly identical circles that could be distinguished only by the names they were given, and by knotting these three circles together in specific ways (such that if any one of them is cut, the other two are set free), Lacan introduced a new object in psychoanalysis, the Borromean knot. This knot is both a material object that can be manipulated and a metaphor for the structure of the subject. The knot, made up of three rings, is characterised by how the rings (representing the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary) interlock and support each other. From this point on in Lacan's teaching, the real was no longer an opaque and terrifying unconceptualizable entity. Rather, it is positioned right alongside the symbolic and tied to it by mediation of the imaginary. Thus, whatever our capacity for symbolizing and imagining, there remains an irreducible realm of the non-meaning, and that is where the real is located (see Lacan, 1974-1975). In the final years of his teaching, Lacan took up the question of the symptom and the end of the treatment (1975; 1976). If the symptom is "the most real thing" that subjects possess (1976, p. 41), then how must analysis proceed to aim at the real of the symptom in order to ensure that the symptom does not proliferate in meaningful effects and even to eliminate the symptom? For analysis not to be an infinite process, for it to find its own internal limit, the analyst's interpretation, which bears upon the signifier, must also reach the real of the symptom, that is, the point where the symbolically non-meaningful latches on to the real, where the first signifiers heard by the subject have left their imprint (Lacan, 1985, p. 14). According to Lacan, to reach its endpoint, an analysis must modify the relationship of the subject to the real, which is an irreducible whole in the symbolic from which the subject's fantasy and desire derive. This notion of the real has given rise to numerous misunderstandings. Some have interpreted its resistance to formalization as a slide into irrationality. Others, by identifying the real with trauma, have made it a cause of fear and anxiety. Yet we all have an intuitive experience of the real in such phenomena as the uncanny, anxiety, the non-meaningful, and poetic humour that plays upon words at the expense of meaning. Thus, when the framework of the imaginary wavers and speech is lacking, when reality is no longer organized and pacified by the fantasy screen, the experience of the real emerges in a way that is unique for each person. 

Martine Lerude. The Real. International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Macmillan Library Reference. 2005

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

I say, through language... as a semiotic practice open to the heterogeneity of drives: an enunciation,

I will focus on the place of language in sublimation, to show that it is through language that sublimation is intrinsically and inevitably cultural, in the sense that it is a bearer of creativity, which is precisely what distinguishes it from repression and idealization. I say, through language, and by this I mean language not as an object of such and such branch of modern or traditional linguistics, but as a semiotic practice open to the heterogeneity of drives: an enunciation, if you like, thanks to which the alchemy of pleasure transforms into jouissance, and the symbolic bond into creativity…..this blossoming of semiotic creativity among the speaking beings –

Julia Kristeva - “The Impudence of Uttering: The Mother Tongue.”

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

... the Unconscious as a process of “béance causale”, a gap with a causal function, in a typical movement of opening and closing.

If you have studied the famous eleventh seminar, you will recognise in this characteristic of the discourse the way in which he described in 1964 the Unconscious as a process of “béance causale”, a gap with a causal function, in a typical movement of opening and closing.

Paul Verhaeghe - From Impossibility to Inability; Lacan’s theory of the four discourses.  Originally published in The Letter. Lacanian Perspectives on Psychoanalysis, 3, Spring 1995, pp. 91- 108.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

As soon as man speaks, he is submitted to the question of his truth...

As soon as man speaks, he is submitted to the question of his truth and his most intimate identifications come to respond to the paradoxes of his link to what he says and to what has been said to him.  The materiality of the unconscious is made, not of learning, but of things said to the subject, that have hurt him, and of things, impossible to say, that make him suffer.  The opposition between the principles of the nervous system’s functioning, arising directly from the laws of biology and physics, and the register of another causality for founding psychology, is thus posed. Unconscious memory parasites the living [being] and alters its potency.

Laurent, Éric. Uses of the Neurosciences for Psychoanalysis. The symptom 11. Lacanian Ink.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

By committing himself, at the limit, to the drift of language, he is going to attempt, by a sort of immediate experience of its pure effect...

This is the aim of the rule. By committing himself, at the limit, to the drift of language, he is going to attempt, by a sort of immediate experience of its pure effect, to connect up with its already established effects. Such a subject, a subject defined as effect of discourse, to the point that he undertakes the trail of losing himself in it in order to find himself, such a subject… in a way puts himself to the test of his own destitution.

Lacan -  (Seminar XV, The Psychoanalytic Act. 07.02.1968).

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

...the somatic source of the drive, is something fundamentally alien to us subjects of the symbolic.

In the last phase of his theory, Lacan does not stop emphasizing that the real of the body, for example, the somatic source of the drive, is something fundamentally alien to us subjects of the symbolic. We would rather have an ex-timate than an intimate relation to its body. Actually, it occurs to Lacan that ancient, vague ideas about the existence of something like an unconscious emerged from this ex-timate relation. Indeed, both the unconscious and the body are intimate parts of us that are nevertheless totally alien and unknown. Who knows what’s happening in his/ her own body? Who knows what’s happening in his/her own unconscious? (Lacan, 1977, p 6)

Frederic Declercq - Lacan's Concept of the Real of Jouissance: Clinical Illustrations and Implications. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. August 2004, Volume 9

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

….what is refused

….what is refused in the symbolic order re-emerges in the real.

Lacan - The Psychoses: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, ed. J.A. Miller,(W.W. Norton & Company, 1997),

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire...

That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis. But it isn’t a question of recognising something which would be entirely given, ready to be co-apted. In naming it, the subject creates, brings forth, a new presence in the world. He introduces presence as such, and by the same token, hollows out absence as such. It is only at this level that one can conceive of the action of interpretation.

Lacan, J. (1988b) The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 1954–1955, trans. S. Tomaselli. New York: Norton

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning

Lacan, as we have seen in our discussion of Freud, regards the unconscious as structured like a language. This is not only because it works by metaphor and metonymy: it is also because, like language itself for the post-structuralists, it is composed less of signs — stable meanings — than of signifiers. If you dream of a horse, it is not immediately obvious what this signifies: it may have many contradictory meanings, may be just one of a whole chain of signifiers with equally multiple meanings. The image of the horse, that is to say, is not a sign in Saussure’s sense - it does not have one determined signified tied neatly to its tail - but is a signifier which may be attached to many different signifieds, and which may itself bear the traces of the other signifiers which surround it. (I was not aware, when I wrote the above sentence, of the word-play involved in ‘horse’ and ‘tail’: one signifier interacted with another against my conscious intention.) The unconscious is just a continual movement and activity of signifiers, whose signifieds are often inaccessible to us because they are repressed. This is why Lacan speaks of the unconscious as a ‘sliding of the signified beneath the signifier’, as a constant fading and evaporation of meaning, a bizarre ‘modernist’ text which is almost unreadable and which will certainly never yield up its final secrets to interpretation.

Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction.Wiley-Blackwell. 2008.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

It is, on the contrary, the real specific to the unconscious, or at least that to which, following Lacan’s expression, the unconscious bears witness.

But this real – that of which I have said there is a real in analytic experience – is not the real of the discourse of science, not the real made gangrenous by those semblants which emerge from it, and which one is reduced to approaching by numbers to locate it, as has always been done. It is, on the contrary, the real specific to the unconscious, or at least that to which, following Lacan’s expression, the unconscious bears witness.

Jacques Alain Miller - The Psychoanalytic Courses (1996)

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

What is the place of psychoanalysis in these conditions of subjectivisation?

The symptom as a bodily event is the point of exception to the established form of social bond and is connected to the jouissance of the body. The modern subject is subjected to the social bond of the capitalist discourse. His structure has not changed, but his relationships to language and to jouissance have been modified. The subject invents solutions in order to construct his subjectivity and bear his existence, but also to object to the Other or signify his annulment as it is dictated by the capitalist’s discourse. What is the place of psychoanalysis in these conditions of subjectivisation?

Lissy Canellopoulos- The bodily event, jouissance and the (post)modern subject. Recherches en psychanalyse, L'Esprit du Temps. 2010/2.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

So what is this symptom as body-event?

So what is this symptom as body-event?

...the symptom as body-event is apprehended in two ways: first, the symptom is a modality of libidinal satisfaction (which Freud notes in the 1926 text). Second, the symptom as body-event is an effect of the traces of discourse on the body of the speaking being (not a repressed representation, as with the conversion symptom). In what way does a re-definition of the symptom as a body-event help us to find a compass for our practice? It removes the symptom from the classical set of the formations of the unconscious, identified by Freud as distinct modalities for the repressed to return using the mechanisms of the signifying chain such as displacement, transference and condensation. It also amounts to recognizing that what Freud called the symptomatic residues, the un-analyzable, are not an effect of the subject’s virile or feminine protestation in the face of castration, as Freud hypothesized in Analysis Terminable and Interminable. The symptomatic residues are equivalent to the symptom as body-event.

Véronique Voruz -  London Society, New Lacanian School. 20 February 2016

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

this is where Lacan is taking us... toward the opacity of jouissance ciphered by the signifier in the symptom.

the period we refer to as the later Lacan starts with Seminar XX. Following on from Lacan’s recognition of the irreducibility of the real, the later teaching is characterized by a concern with the real as immovable; insistent, but also intimately bound up with language in its entirety. In this phase, jouissance characterizes human existence. Not only does jouissance deregulate and upset the pleasure principle of symbolic balance and proportion, it also becomes specific and integral to speech, now conceived as a carrier of jouissance. The symbolic function of speech does not reduce jouissance but produces it. Speech no longer thwarts the external threat of the real or pacifies its influx but deploys it by revolving around the object, by enveloping it symbolically into the symptom. Gradually, it becomes clear that this is where Lacan is taking us—toward the opacity of jouissance ciphered by the signifier in the symptom. Voruz, Wolf – The Later Lacan. 2007 State University of New York Press, Albany.

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

...the real unconscious, which is an unconscious without repression.

It’s through putting the very notion of the signifying finality of the formations of the unconscious into question that Lacan then isolates the real unconscious, which is an unconscious without repression.

Jacques Alain Miller - Pass Bis (2007), trans. A. Price [Psychoanalytical Notebooks, 17, 2008]

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

It is not to his conscience that the subject is condemned, it is to his body

Studies of Lacan’s work may start from two different points of view. Either one considers that everything is there, right from the start, and the rest of his work is just one long elaboration of what was contained in the beginning. The standard example of this approach is found in those Freud scholars who include the whole of his theory into the early Project for a Scientific Psychology. Or one considers his theory and teaching as a ‘work in progress’ marked by an evolution consisting of drastic changes. Both approaches  can  be defended. I have opted for the second one, which does not mean that we will not also be confronted with the first option at times. From this  second point  of view,  Lacan’s  theory  of  the  relationship  between  the  body  and the  subject can be divided into three periods, each one testifying to an evolution in his work. -  

-    Lacan (1) is concerned with the opposition between the Symbolic and the Imaginary. The Symbolic  determines the body in a predictable way, such that this body is nothing more than an effect, and is understood as a bodily surface. -    Lacan (2) focuses on the Real as the cause of the Symbolic and Imaginary combined; the Real of the body is understood as an organism and as the drive. -    Lacan (3) takes these oppositions up again in terms of jouissance: that is, there is a phallic jouissance versus a jouissance of the body.  

With  respect  to  the  body,  each  of  these  three  moments  in  Lacan’s evolution  can  be  expressed  in  a  sentence. (1) I have a body for/of the Other. (2) The Other is driven by a body, which is not the body. (3) The body is the Other. Borrowing from Zizek, each of these sentences can be rephrased with reference to the  creature  from  the  Alien  movies:  there  is  an  outside  alien  that  enters  us;  there  is  an  alien  in  us  that  determines us; there is an alien as such. 

Paul Verhaeghe – Subject and Body – Lacan’s Struggle with the Real. The Letter 17 (Autumn 1999) pages 79-119

[lacan-psychoananalysisaspraxis]

To enjoy, one needs a body… Even those who promise eternal bliss cannot do so without involving the body:

To enjoy, one needs a body… Even those who promise eternal bliss cannot do so without involving the body: glorious or not, it must be there… Because for the body, the dimension of jouissance is the dimension of its descent into death.

Lacan Jacques (1971). Le savoir du psychanalyste, lecture of 4 November 1971. Unpublished.