The Imaginary (or Imaginary Order) is one of three terms in the psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques Lacan, along with the

Symbolic Symbolic may refer to: * Symbol, something that represents an idea, a process, or a physical entity Mathematics, logic, and computing * Symbolic computation, a scientific area concerned with computing with mathematical formulas * Symbolic dynamic ...

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… hen thenotion of the 'symbolic' came to the forefront."Sheridan, Alan. 1994. "Translator's Note" in '' The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis'', edited by J. Miller, ''Penguin Psychology Series''. London:

Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.As quoted in Mellard, James M. 2006. ''Beyond Lacan
SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture
'' Albany:

State University of New York Press The State University of New York (SUNY, , ) is a system of public colleges and universities in the State of New York. It is one of the largest comprehensive system of universities, colleges, and community colleges in the United States. Led ...

. . Accordingly, a
Hoens and Puth
(2004) express, "Lacan's work is often divided into three periods: the Imaginary (1936–1953), the Symbolic (1953–1963), and the Real (1963–1981)." Regarding the former, "Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process. The imaginary was then the…dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined." It would be in the decade or two following his 1936 delivery of ''Le stade du miroir'' at Marienbad that Lacan's concept of the Imaginary was most fully articulated.

The Imaginary Order

The basis of the Imaginary order is the formation of the

ego Ego or EGO may refer to: Social sciences * Ego (Freudian), one of the three constructs in Sigmund Freud's structural model of the psyche * Egoism, an ethical theory that treats self-interest as the foundation of morality * Egotism, the drive to ...

in the " mirror stage." By articulating the ego in this way, "the category of the imaginary provides the theoretical basis for a long-standing polemic against ego-psychology" Macey, David. "Introduction." Pp. i–xxxiii in ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis'', edited by J. Miller. London:

Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.identification" is an important aspect of the imaginary. The relationship, whereby the ego is constituted by identification, is a locus of "alienation,"—another feature of the imaginary—and is fundamentally narcissistic: thus Lacan wrote of "the different phases of imaginary, narcissistic, specular identification – the three adjectives are equivalent,"Miller, Jacques-Alain, ed. 1998. ''The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I''. Cambridge. which make up the ego's history. If "the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real are an unholy trinity whose members could as easily be called Fraud, Absence and Impossibility," then the Imaginary, a realm of surface appearances which are inherently deceptive, is "Fraud."

The Fragmented Body

For Lacan, the driving-force behind the creation of the ego as mirror-image was the prior experience of the phantasy of the fragmented body. "Lacan was not a Kleinian, though he was the first in France…to decipher and praise her work," but "the threatening and regressive phantasy of 'the body-in-pieces'…is explicitly related by Lacan to

Melanie Klein Melanie Klein (née Reizes; 30 March 1882 – 22 September 1960) was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested th ...

's paranoid position." Klein's "specific phantasy…that something inside the person is seeking to pull him apart and render him dead by dismemberment" fuelled for Lacan "the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image…to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity"Lacan, Jacques. 1997. ''Écrits: A Selection.''—to the ego as other-identification, as "fraud."

The Symbolic

With the increasing prominence of the Symbolic in Lacan's thought after 1953, the Imaginary becomes viewed in a rather different light, as structured by the

symbolic order The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean knot) 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 Othe ...

. It is still the case that "the body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the other… rits own specular image" but no longer does "analysis consist in the imaginary realisation of the subject…to make it well-rounded, this ego, to ... have definitely integrated all its disjointed fragmentary states, its scattered limbs, its pregenital phases, its partial drives." Instead, "one finds a guide beyond the imaginary, on the level of the symbolic plane." It also became apparent that the imaginary involves a linguistic dimension: whereas the signifier is the foundation of the symbolic, the "signified" and "signification" belong to the imaginary. Thus language has both symbolic and imaginary aspects: "words themselves can undergo symbolic lesions and accomplish imaginary acts of which the patient is the subject.…In this way, speech may become an imaginary, or even real object." To the Lacan of the fifties, "the entire analytic experience unfolds, at the joint of the imaginary and the symbolic", with the latter as the central key to growth: "the goal in analysing neurotics is to eliminate the interference in symbolic relations created by imaginary relations…dissipating imaginary identifications." The Imaginary was the problem, the Symbolic the answer, so that "an entire segment of the analytic experience is nothing other than the exploration of blind alleys of imaginary experience". Thus it is "in the disintegration of the imaginary unity constituted by the ego that the subject finds the signifying material of his symptoms", the "identity crisis… henthe false-self system disintegrates."

In the late Lacan

Just as the early predominance of the Imaginary was eclipsed after the Rome Report, so too by the end of the Sixties, the Symbolic would be overshadowed by the Real, as from "this point on, Lacan downplays the Oedipus complex, seen as a mythical – and so imaginarized – version of unconscious organization." Nevertheless, Lacan could still claim that the "objective of my teaching…is to dissociate…what belongs to the imaginary and…what belongs to the symbolic." In the Borromean knots, he considered he had found a possible topological counterpart to the interconnections of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. "Lacan's seminar was at times now little more than a silent demonstration of the properties of the interlocking knots which illustrated the imbrication of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary."

French culture

Use of "the adjective maginaryas a noun can…be traced to the works of the novelist

André Gide André Paul Guillaume Gide (; 22 November 1869 – 19 February 1951) was a French author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (in 1947). Gide's career ranged from its beginnings in the symbolist movement, to the advent of anticolonialism ...

… ndwas probably given greater currency by artre's'' L'Imaginaire.''" In Lacan's hands, the Imaginary came close to being an omnivorously colonising interpretive machine: thus

René Girard René Noël Théophile Girard (; ; 25 December 1923 – 4 November 2015) was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Girard was the a ...

regretted that "To the Lacanian, whatever I call mimetic must correspond to…'capturé par l'imaginaire.'" With the post-Lacanian fissiparous tendencies of his "schools", the term can perhaps return to the general culture, as when the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1972) defines the imaginary "by games of mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection, always in the mode of the double," or when Cornelius Castoriadis defines the imaginary as the capacity humans have to create other forms of individual and social existence.Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1996. "La société et vérité dans le monde social-historique, ''Séminaires 1986–1987, La création humaine I''. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. p. 20. Klimis, Sophie, and Laurent Van Eynde. 2006
''L'imaginaire selon Castoriadis: thèmes et enjeux''
Publications Fac St Louis, p. 70.

Notes

References

The Seminars of Jacques Lacan

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis – Dylan Evans
* Alain Vanier, ''Lacan'' (2000)

External links

Chronology of Jacques Lacan
{{DEFAULTSORT:Imaginary, The Psychoanalytic terminology Jacques Lacan Post-structuralism Structuralism