Jacques Lacan, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The imaginary was the first of the three to arrive — it preceded even the Rome discourse of 1953.1 At that moment, I understood the imago as the proper object of psychology, and identification as the fundamental psychical process; the imaginary was the entire register of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or merely imagined.1 And notice: imaginary does not simply mean unreal.
The image belongs to reality, and I found in animal ethology precisely those formative effects — the way an image acts on an organism — that the mirror stage had already described for the human subject.1 The symbolic came to the foreground with Rome. The symbols in question are not icons, not stylized pictures, but signifiers in the sense Saussure and Jakobson elaborated — differential elements, without meaning in themselves, acquiring value only through their mutual relations, forming a closed order.2
From that point, it is the symbolic, not the imaginary, that is the determining order of the subject; the subject, in my sense, is himself an effect of the symbolic.2 The relation between subject and signifier is consistently contrasted with the imaginary relation, which is the relation between the ego and its images — and many of the problems that occupy the clinic derive from the interference between these two dimensions.2
The real is the third term, and it is the one most consistently misread. It stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and it remains foreclosed from analytic experience — which is, after all, an experience of speech.3 What is prior to the assumption of the symbolic, the real in its raw state — the organism, biological need — can only be supposed; it is an algebraic x.3
It is not to be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable: the subject of desire knows nothing beyond reality, since for that subject reality is entirely phantasmatic.3 The real began as almost a safety rail in my teaching and has been considerably developed since — its signification has been considerably altered over the years.3 I have seen the tripartition taken up in ways that make me wince.
Someone once published — I opened the journal by chance — a piece that concluded, with what I can only call valiancy, that the real is God.4 This is how one becomes, without intending it, a contribution to theological faith. The three terms are not absolutes to be distributed among the cosmos; they are structural positions, and the question is always what falls where in a given configuration of experience.
The R schema makes this structural character precise.5 It is composed of two triangles — the symbolic ternary and the imaginary ternary — joined by the quadrangle of the real, which frames and is maintained by both the imaginary relation and the symbolic relation simultaneously.5 The symbolic triangle carries the Ego-ideal, the signifier of the object, and the Name-of-the-Father in the locus of the Other; the imaginary triangle rests on the dyadic relation between ego and other, with the phallus as its apex — the imaginary object in which the subject represents himself to himself.5
Along one segment of the schema are the figures of the imaginary other, culminating in the mother as real Other inscribed in the symbolic under the signifier of the primordial object, das Ding; along the other are the imaginary identifications that form the child's ego until symbolic identification confers status in the real.6 The barred subject — $ — appears as a projection across the schema, which is the only way to ask what is at stake in the subject's relation between the imaginary and the real.7
The subject determined by one signifier representing it for another signifier cannot simply be placed in any one square; it is the articulation of the three registers that produces the subject, not any single one of them alone.7
the 'imaginary' was the first to appear, well before the Rome Report of 1953. At the time, Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process. The imaginary was then the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imagined.Écrits, A Selection, Sheridan Translation, pp. ix–x
The notion of the 'symbolic' came to the forefront in the Rome Report. The symbols referred to here are not icons, stylized figurations, but signifiers, in the sense developed by Saussure and Jakobson, extended into a generalized definition: differential elements, in themselves without meaning, which acquire value only in their mutual relations, and forming a closed order.Écrits, A Selection, Sheridan Translation, pp. ix–x
The 'real' emerges as a third term, linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the analytic experience, which is an experience of speech. What is prior to the assumption of the symbolic, the real in its 'raw' state (in the case of the subject, for instance, the organism and its biological needs), may only be supposed, it is an algebraic x.Écrits, A Selection, Sheridan Translation, pp. ix–x
I saw an article which began with a sort of incantation around 'the symbolic, the imaginary and the real'... he valiantly concludes: to us this says what it says, the Real is God.Seminar XV, The psychoanalytic act, pp. 50–52
The R schema is made up of the union of two triangles, the symbolic ternary and the imaginary ternary, by the quadrangle of the real, delimited in a square by the base of each triangle.Écrits, A Selection, Fink Translation, pp. 374–375
along the segment i M are situated the figures of the imaginary other, which culminate in the figure of the mother, the real Other, inscribed in the symbolic under the signifier of the primordial object, the subject's first outside, which bears in Freud's work the name das Ding.Écrits, A Selection, Fink Translation, pp. 374–375
If we remember what I teach about the subject as determined by two signifiers or more exactly by a signifier as representing it for another signifier, why not put the barred Subject like a projection onto the other side? This will allow there to be asked what is involved in the relation of the Subject between the Imaginary and the Real.Seminar XV, The psychoanalytic act, pp. 50–52