The Imaginary (psychoanalysis) - The Imaginary and The Symbolic

The Imaginary and 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. It is still the case that 'the body in pieces finds its unity in the image of the other... its 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 analysizing 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... the false-self system disintegrates'.