Лакандық Психоанализдегі Естелік Әлем

Term in Lacanian Psychoanalysis

The Imaginary (or Imaginary Order) is one of three terms in the psychoanalytic perspective of Jacques Lacan, along with the Symbolic 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 [when the] notion of the 'symbolic' came to the forefront." Indeed, looking back at his intellectual development from the vantage point of the 1970s, Lacan epitomised it as follows:
"I began with the Imaginary, I then had to chew on the story of the Symbolic and I finished by putting out for you this famous Real." Accordingly, as 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)." on Lacan's part. Since the ego is formed by identifying with the counterpart or specular image, "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," 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." text=Lacan also identifies the imaginary with the intuitive realm: 'intuition, in other words the imaginary' (SXIII: 30/3/66), 'the imaginary, or intuitive, plane' (SII: 18). 'Everything intuitive is far closer to the imaginary than to the symbolic' (SII: 316). The imaginary is the realm of comprehension, in the Kantian sense, where one takes things in as wholes rather than piecemeal[.] |author=Michael Lewis citing Lacan

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's paranoid position." fuelled for Lacan "the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity"—to the ego as other identification, as "fraud."

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 [or] 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." 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".

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." 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.