Editing Jacques Lacan (section)

====The Real====
{{Main|The Real}}
Lacan's concept of [[the Real]] dates back to 1936 and his doctoral thesis on [[psychosis]]. It was a term that was popular at the time, particularly with [[Émile Meyerson]], who referred to it as "an ontological absolute, a true [[being-in-itself]]".<ref name="dylan_evans" />{{rp|162}} Lacan returned to the theme of the Real in 1953 and continued to develop it until his death. The Real, for Lacan, is not synonymous with [[reality]]. Not only opposed to [[The Imaginary (psychoanalysis)|the Imaginary]], the Real is also exterior to [[the Symbolic]]. Unlike the latter, which is constituted in terms of oppositions (i.e. presence/absence), "there is no absence in the Real".<ref name="seminar_II"/> Whereas the Symbolic opposition "presence/absence" implies the possibility that something may be missing from the Symbolic, "the Real is always in its place".<ref name="seminar_XI"/> If the Symbolic is a set of differentiated elements (signifiers), the Real in itself is undifferentiated{{mdash}}it bears no fissure. The Symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" in the process of signification: "it is the world of words that creates the world of things—things originally confused in the 'here and now' of the all in the process of coming into being".<ref>Lacan, J., "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis" in ''Écrits''.</ref> The Real is that which is outside language and that resists symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine, impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, and impossible to attain. It is this resistance to symbolization that lends the Real its traumatic quality. Finally, the Real is the object of [[anxiety (mood)|anxiety]], insofar as it lacks any possible mediation and is "the essential object which is not an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety ''par excellence''."<ref name="seminar_II"/>