The Imaginary (psychoanalysis)

"[1]: 279  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.

"[3]: xviii  Klein's "specific phantasy…that something inside the person is seeking to pull him apart and render him dead by dismemberment"[8] fuelled for Lacan "the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image…to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity"[9]: 4 —to the ego as other-identification, as "fraud."

"[12] 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.

"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.

"[3]: xxxiii Use of "the adjective [imaginary] as a noun can…be traced to the works of the novelist André Gide…[and] was probably given greater currency by [Sartre's] L'Imaginaire.

"[3]: xxi  In Lacan's hands, the Imaginary came close to being an omnivorously colonising interpretive machine: thus René Girard regretted that "To the Lacanian, whatever I call mimetic must correspond to…'capturé par l'imaginaire.

'"[15] 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,"[16]: 172  or when Cornelius Castoriadis defines the imaginary as the capacity humans have to create other forms of individual and social existence.