The Real, Really?

One of the more helpful ways to understand what Lacan calls the ‘Real’ is as what emerges from the impossibilities or inconsistencies in the symbolic.

This is not the only way to understand the Real, and it is not the only way Lacan presents it. But I will show that it is consistent with how Lacan presents it, and I will point to several places in his work where he makes this clear. While not intended as a short-hand definition, I hope this will be helpful as a way to think about the Real which avoids some of the problems with how the term is sometimes used – or overused – in Lacanian psychoanalysis. 

Lacanian explanations of the real typically – and not unjustly – emphasise how it is “outside of language and inassimilable to symbolisation,”¹ the realm of what escapes symbolic or imaginary registers, that which cannot be put into words or images. Indeed, Lacan describes the real as “the domain of that which subsists outside of symbolisation.”² But here I think Lacan should be read carefully and the concept used sparingly. Caution is needed to avoid treating the real as a landfill concept into which everything one does not understand or finds difficult to theorise gets dumped. The nature of the drives, the experience of jouissance, the body, trauma, sex…. All these have had the epithet ‘real’ attached to them at one point or another, and it is not uncommon to find phrases like ‘the real of the body’, or ‘trauma in the real’ make an appearance in place of a more thorough consideration of these concepts themselves, and where reflection on what the term ‘real’ is doing alongside them would be warranted. 

The real emerges from the impossibilities or inconsistencies in the symbolic

When giving his definition that “the real is the impossible” in Seminar XVII Lacan adds, 

“Not in the name of a simple obstacle we hit our heads up against, but in the name of the logical obstacle of what, in the symbolic, declares itself to be impossible. This is where the real emerges from.”³

What is clear in this passage is that the real is not an originary or background state of undifferentiation, as if we ‘start’ from the real and create a symbolic order around it. Rather it is what “emerges”, he says, from what is impossible “in the symbolic.” 

Lacan repeated this idea at several points in his teaching. In Seminar XII for instance we find him describing the real in terms of the impossible, but elaborating that, 

“It is in the transformation of can into cannot, in the establishment of the impossible that there effectively arises the dimension of the real.”⁴

Notice how Lacan presents the real here: it is through a transformation of what is possible into what is impossible that the real is established or arises. That is, it does not pre-exist as a background state, and the impossibility from which it arises is the result of a transformation, “of can into cannot.” This is an important addition because it shows that just saying ‘the real is the impossible’ is saying too little. We would miss the aspect of transformation, the idea that the real results from an impossibility, that Lacan highlights here. This way of presenting the real becomes more common in his Seminar from the 1960s on, starting around Seminar IX when we find Lacan saying that, “It is only starting from the not possible that the real takes its place.”⁵

If we think of a symbolic order as one which allows the production of meaning – even if those meanings are ultimately arbitrary and capable of shifts and transformations – Lacan defines the real as something that is excluded from this function. Towards the end of his teaching, in Seminar XXIII, Lacan says that the real,

“… Has no meaning, that it excludes meaning, or more exactly that it is deposited by being excluded from it.”⁶

The “or more exactly” part is important here. It shows the nuance Lacan introduces in his description of the Real compared to, say, Seminar I where it is “what resists symbolisation absolutely.”⁷ Though even at this point Lacan was not satisfied with that definition, qualifying it by saying that it, “has the air of being almost too transparent, too concrete.”⁸ Later in his work we get a more nuanced version, as the quote from Seminar XXIII above illustrates, in which the real is defined as something that is excluded, something which does not fit within a certain order, or which is “deposited” when the totality of this order breaks down. The use of “deposited” here might lead us to envisage the real as a decomposition product of the symbolic, in the same way that salt deposits are a product of water evaporation, for instance.⁹ In that passage it is the meaning or sense-making order from which the real is excluded. This might help us understand what Lacan means later in the same Seminar when he describes the real as “lawless”, adding that “the true real… implies the absence of law. The Real has no order.”¹⁰

The real is not a landfill concept into which we can throw everything we don’t understand 

It is perhaps a little too easy to label things we don’t understand as ‘the real.’ Despite some excellent commentaries on the concept, there seems to be a drift towards this tendency in the Lacanian field. Go to a Lacanian conference and it is not unusual to hear phrases like ‘the real of the body’, ‘the real of trauma’ or ‘the real of sexuation’ used as if to invite nodding assent. But the nuances in Lacan’s descriptions of the real – of which the above are only a sample – get lost, and more considered theories of trauma and sex from other analytic traditions that could enrich Lacanian understandings of these topics are overlooked. To go no further than simply describing trauma as ‘real’ without acknowledging the ways in which it testifies to a failure at the level of the symbolic would be strange given the compatibility of this idea not just with Freud’s early models of trauma but also many current theories of trauma. To attach the label ‘real’ to something at times seems like pronouncing ‘case closed’, and at other times like giving up, as if by calling something ‘real’ we are simultaneously describing impossibility and declaring it. 

There is a difference between something that cannot be thought about and something that is better thought about in a different way. If psychoanalytic theory – or our use of it – leads to certain impasses or impossibilities this does not mean that those impasses are evidence for, or examples of, ‘the real.’ They might well be evidence of our inability to think about a problem, or the deficiency of analytic concepts themselves. 

Imagine we were talking about the ‘edge of the universe.’ The unthinkability of this notion is not an example of the real-as-impossible, it is merely an impossibility generated by our thinking of the universe as something that has an edge. To say that the real is impossible is not an invitation to use it as a category for anything we find it difficult to think about, a dumping ground into which we can throw all the things we do not understand due to the limits of our present thinking. This is not to say that we should respond to every clinical problem with an appeal to knowledge or theory, only that the limits of our present thinking are not equivalent to the limits of what is possible to think about per se. After all, doesn’t psychoanalytic treatment itself turn on the analysand’s ability to have a thought they haven’t had before?

A related danger is that we let the real become equated with the unknown, which is different from the unknowable, and – as Badiou has argued – both the unknown and the unknowable are different from the real.¹¹ To describe something as ‘unknown’, ‘unknowable’ or ‘impossible’ might say less about the nature of the thing itself and more about the serviceability of our concepts or the limits in thinking they produce. We experience the Real as the impossible, and Lacan argues that “Everything that comes to us through it, through the real, is inscribed first of all in the register of the impossible.”¹² But we have to separate the Real as impossible, the Real as unknowable, from what is simply unknown. We should be wary of calling things ‘impossible’ when they are merely unknown to us. We may know, for instance, that matter and antimatter coexist even if we do not yet know why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.¹³ Likewise, we should avoid using the term ‘Real’ when things appear as contradictory or inconsistent with what is known. Gravity exists, and planes can fly, but the fact that gravity exists does not mean that planes cannot fly. These are not contradictions or paradoxes. They are simply two facts.¹⁴ 

This is not to dismiss the category of the real but to encourage reflection on how we use it when we use it.

I think the problem I am describing with the use of the term ‘real’ comes from well-intentioned presentations of Lacan that try to define the three registers – real, imaginary, and symbolic – separately, in turn, so that they are easier to understand. But in fact this approach does the opposite because as soon as we confront a reference in Lacan’s work to “the real father”, “the father of the real”,¹⁵ “language in the real”,¹⁶ or how the symptom is the effect of “the symbolic in the real”¹⁷ we are liable to get confused. 

This becomes way more of a problem in Lacan’s late work, famously characterised by a turn to topology (though this turn itself was motivated by the deeper problem of extimacy which runs throughout his work). In his seminars of this period, the Borromean knot is the model for the intrinsic interlinking of the imaginary, symbolic, and real registers in such a way that the severing of any one ring from the three-ring topology releases the others. Hence Lacan says, in Seminar XXIV, “The Real does not constitute a universe, except by being knotted to two other functions.”¹⁸ 

We find this interlinking imagined even earlier in Lacan’s work. It is found in the Ecrits, in the reference to the “intersection of the symbolic with the real”,¹⁹ and in Seminar VII’s extended discussion of the Real in connection with the potter’s wheel, the mustard pots, and the macaroni, where the intertwining and supplementation of one order by another is evident. “The fashioning of the signifier and the introduction of a gap or a hole in the real is identical”, Lacan says in Seminar VII, for instance.²⁰ As Miller comments, it is fine to think of the real as a different register, “but on the condition that we do not forget that it is relative to a signifying construction, to a construction of knowledge.”²¹ 

Often in Lacan we find many difficult terms used together in a way that appears either confusing or contradictory when compared to how he has used these terms at other points in his work. In short, readers of Lacan just have to get over this. One way of reconciling ourselves to it is by accepting – just as we do in analytic practice – that the same term may have different meanings depending on its context, the terms surrounding it, and the terms added to it. To take but one example, when talking about the relation between the real and enjoyment in Seminar XV Lacan does not say that enjoyment is ‘real’, or that there is a ‘real’ of enjoyment, but talks about, “… Enjoyment in fact, which certainly has a relation with the Real, but from which precisely the pleasure principle is designed to separate us.”²² Some readers may find this confusing because of its reference to the Freudian pleasure principle, and this will be especially confusing if your project is to map Lacan’s ideas to Freud’s metapsychology. Personally, I find Lacan’s looseness fruitful in generating connections that put us back in touch with Freud’s intuitions, and better describe clinical phenomena (better, perhaps, than Freud did), a benefit that would be obscured if we tried to segment Lacan’s work into categories of ideas or periods of his teaching. In this spirit we could recall Freud’s brilliant opening to his metapsychological paper on the drive, where he described psychoanalysis as built in the same way as any other science – not from sharply defined basic concepts but from conventions that retain “some degree of indefiniteness” under the guise of basic concepts.²³

The Real, clinically

Where does this leave analytic practice? Argentinian analyst Bruno Bonoris has cautioned against a form of psychoanalytic nihilism in which we are encouraged to embrace the fact that the Other does not exist as a way of “dismantling fictions and embracing the meaninglessness of reality.”²⁴ But, he notes, “the real lies not behind the fictions but rather in them.”²⁵ This is a nice way of putting it because it suggests that any effort to express things via words or images will encounter a point of impossibility. But most interestingly, we don’t encounter this point where there is no effort of symbolisation or imaginarisation, but at the point where this effort encounters a limit, where its horizons of possibility are reached. When Lacan says in Seminar XXIV that the Real is that which “does not cease not to be written” he is referring to this continuous effort at symbolisation and imaginarisation (something of a feature of the human psyche, as if a reparative gesture) which always finds some point of failure.²⁶ The Real is this failure point in symbolic and imaginary constructions, the sign of their inconsistency or unsustainability and in this sense, their ultimate points of impossibility. This is part and parcel of any construction. As Miller puts it, “For Lacan, I would say that the real is the effect of a construction.”²⁷ 

To explain this we could think of what Freud calls the ‘navel’ of the dream. If every dream is a kind of construction (a product of the dream-work and the primary process), and capable of analysis by the fact of this construction, “There is at least one spot in every dream at which it is unplumbable – a navel, as it were, that is its point of contact with the unknown.”²⁸ This does not mean the real is some untouchable netherworld into which language cannot encroach. It is simply the point at which those registers encounter their limits. 

Curiously, the boundary points to these limits are often marked by things that present themselves as symbolic or imaginary in the purest form. Let’s take two examples.

Firstly, in terms of the symbolisation of the real, we can think of the chemical formula for trimethylamine that appears to Freud at the end of the dream of Irma’s injection. In its coded reference to Freud’s father’s three wives, it points to what was impossible to think about sex and generation for Freud. This impossibility would “not cease not to be written” by Freud, as his lifelong obsession with modes of family relation centred on the father (Oedipal, totemic, phylogenetic) would come to attest. This example neatly shows how the unsymbolisable can come to be symbolised as such; that is, it can be symbolised as unsymbolisable.²⁹ Secondly, in terms of the imaginarisation of the real, we can think of the appearance of beauty. As Miller notes, whenever an analysand talks about any instance of the ‘beautiful’ – beautiful paintings or beautiful people, for instance – we know that we are at the barrier of what Freud called ‘the Thing’, das Ding,³⁰ the name given to what, in the infant’s relationship with the mother, is not subject to representation or predication. We could distinguish the Thing from the object a using the same terms above, namely that the object a is a symbol of the unsymbolisable.³¹ Going one step further, we could also distinguish object a from the phallus insofar as the phallus is a symbol, but one which designates what is symbolisable (about the sexual relation and jouissance, specifically). 

To conclude, it is important to accept that language can impact the real. Psychoanalysis derives its efficacy in part from this, and the ways in which language is understood changes significantly in the later years of Lacan’s teaching.³² “Language enters the real and creates structure in it”, Lacan stated in the mid-sixties.³³ That is, language can change the expression of the real, or one’s experience of it, in a structure. If nothing else, there must be a symbolic articulation in order to be able to say that something is impossible. This is why, as Miller argues, with science begins the impossible.³⁴ 

Being able to mark a point of impossibility can be an important moment in one’s own analysis. Recounting her analysis with Lacan, Catherine Millot remembers Lacan responding to her distress about a problem in her life by saying, “No one is expected to achieve the impossible.” This statement anchored her in a symbolic articulation. “By naming it”, she reflects, “he gave legitimacy to that which seemed unacceptable.”³⁵ 

1. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, p.159 ↩︎
2. Écrits, p.324 ↩︎
3. Seminar XVII, p.123 ↩︎
4. Seminar XII, session of 16th June 1965 ↩︎
5. Seminar IX, session of 7th March 1962, my emphasis ↩︎
6. Seminar XXIII, session of 18th November 1975, my emphasis ↩︎
7. Seminar I, p.66 ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Like the “caput mortuum of the signifier” he describes in the Écrits (p.38). Caput mortuum is an alchemical term, literally translated as ‘dead head’, describing the worthless remains or residue left over after a substance had been processed or purified. ↩︎
10. Seminar XXIII, session of 18th November 1975. This might remind us of Lacan’s better-known comparison from Seminar XI, in which the automaton is the representative of a symbolic order, and “the real is the beyond of the automaton.” It is through tuché, chance, that we have “the encounter with the real” (Seminar XI, p.53). ↩︎
11. Badiou, Lacan: Anti-Philosophy 3 (The Seminars of Alain Badiou), session of 15th March 1995 ↩︎
12. Seminar XIII, session of 15th December 1965 ↩︎
13. https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem ↩︎
14. C.f. Freud, SE XIV, pp.56-57. ↩︎
15. Seminar XVII, p.123 ↩︎
16. Seminar IX, session of 10th January 1962. ↩︎
17. Seminar XXII, session of 10th December 1974. ↩︎
18. Seminar XXIV, session of 8th March 1977. ↩︎
19. Écrits, p.383 ↩︎
20. Seminar VII, p.121 ↩︎
21. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, Extimité, 1985-1986, session of 4th June 1986 ↩︎
22. Seminar XV, session of 15th November 1967, my emphasis ↩︎
23. Freud, SE XIV, p.117 ↩︎
24. Bruno Bonoris, Problems of Psychoanalytic Technique in Freud and Lacan: What Does a Psychoanalyst Do?, p.157 ↩︎
25. Ibid. ↩︎
26. Seminar XXIV, session of 10th May 1977. ↩︎
27. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, Des réponses du Réel, session of 16th November 1983 ↩︎
28. Freud, SE IV, p.112, n1 ↩︎
29. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1984-1985, session of 14th November 1984. ↩︎
30. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, Du symptôme au fantasme et retour, 1982-1983, session of 12th January 1983. ↩︎
31. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1984-1985, session of 14th November 1984. ↩︎
32. See my article ‘History, Memory, Poetry: Forms and Constructions in Psychoanalysis’ ↩︎
33. Seminar XII, session of 16th December 1964. ↩︎
34. Jacques-Alain Miller, L’orientation lacanienne, Chose de finesse, 2008-2009, session of 12th November 2008 ↩︎
35. Catherine Millot, Abîmes ordinaires, p.17. ↩︎