The very first use of the term ‘real’ goes back to the earliest works of Lacan, and was a common concept in the early twentieth-century philosophy. However, having been exported from a common usage, the term ‘real’ goes through various changes in meaning and usage throughout Lacan’s teaching (Evans, 2001, p. 159). In its first uses the Real is described as concrete and already full, a brute, presymbolic reality which returns to the same place in the form of need, such as hunger” (Ragland, 1996). The connotations of the Lacanian concept of Real with Freaudian Drive is apparent; the real is what comes back, that what cannot be rid of. Later on in Lacan’s work it also starts to have aspects as structural causality. It consists of the material aspects, as in the case of the stars; they are material, they are the objects of the astronomy, physics and chemistry, for they can be observed with the very means of these material sciences. The stars are real because they “are purely and simply what they are” (Lacan,SII, 238).

The real is our drives and our fears, our animal side; that we have uncontrollable urges, and that we are made of flesh and bones, we are vulnerable, we are destined to die. It describes the fabric we are made of. It consists of the aspects we have to repress in the way to becoming a social being. For this reason the real is inassimilable to symbolic (Lacan, SXI, 55), which is the social aspect of being a human. The real cannot be symbolized and be put into words.

The real, or what is perceived as such, is what resists symbolization absolutely (Lacan, SI, 66). In this respect M. Klein’s Little Dick, because he lacks a symbolic representation for his inner world, is living completely in real, “in the pure state, unconstituted”. Therefore, this little boy “lives in a non-human world” (Lacan, SI, 68). He is, in a way, fixated in reality, “which knows no development”. What Klein does in her first interpretation for Dick’s play is to give names, to start symbolization where it did not exist (Perelberg, 2005). Yet it is not a dehumanized real, as it signifies at its own level, fixated in a “single and unique primary identification”, with the void, dark gap. In this gap few things he cannot even name count for him in a rudimentary way of symbolization, those things perhaps M. Klein would call inner or part objects.

YASEMIN DINC

 

References:

EVANS, D. (2001). An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. NY: Brunner-Routledge.

LACAN, J. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953-1954 (Seminar I). MILLER, J-A. ed. (translated by John Forrester). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LACAN J. (1988b). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955 (Seminar II). MILLER, J-A. ed. (translated by Silvana Tomaselli). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LACAN, J. (1977). Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI). MILLER, J-A. ed. (translated by Alan Sheridan). London: Hogarth Press.

PERELBERG, R. J. (2005) University College London MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies Lecture Notes.

RAGLAND, E. (1996). An Overview of the Real, with examples from Seminar I. In Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, Eds. FELDSTEIN, R., FINK, B. & JAANUS, M. (1996). New York: SUNY Press, pp. 192-211.