Drives

Barthes reflects that the inner voice of the subject is structured in a triad of "Presence" (frustration) created by the maternal Other, "Intermittence" (castration anxiety) over the loss of the phallus as an imaginary object taken by the real father, and "Absence" (privation) that occurs from losing the phallus from the imaginary father; (symbolic desire separates from real need and becomes imaginary demand) (q.v., Lacan's graph of desire).^{[65][66][67][68]}

Hysteric's discourse

The hysteric's discourse is driven by the Real, where object (a) is at an impossible-to-find truth.^[72][73] Neither individuation nor differentiation can happen in the stagnancy of the Real.^[74][75]

The three categories of hysteria — conversion hysteria, anxiety hysteria, and traumatic hysteria — have a basis in alienation, with an identification to those-without-the-phallus, and a self-sacrifice through displacement.^[76] Hurst states that masculine libidinal hysteria breaches the paranoid-schizoid position of masculine fanaticism by attempting to make the Real appear, whereas feminine libidinal hysteria breaches the Nietzschean radical nihilism of Hegel's "eternal irony" by resisting the Symbolic Order.^[77]

Jouissance

Julia Kristeva, particularly in her 1980 essay Powers of Horror, posits that the super-ego's abjection facilitates a subjective traumatic limit between subject and objects, with the Real, through ego-object loss and castration of surplus jouissance.^[114] Hurst references Žižek: for any event that converges on a collapsed Symbolic Order, is a where Antigone becomes the Thing.^[115] Lacanian Being-for-death is a death drive for its telos (i.e., sublimity).^{[116][117][118]}

Suicide is really intended as egocide. [...] if one loses this sense of connectedness [to other egos] [...] the foundation of interconnectedness, is described as 'empty' or 'nothing,' and at the same time as an infinite, 'non-empty' world.^[119]

— Hayao Kawai

Unreal vs real(2)

The unreal-unnameable organ called a lamella (or libido as a symbiotic, pre-Oedipal, pre-symbolic Real(1) before-signified-who-ness) is distinct from the Real(2) after-signifier-what-ness, which a subject experiences at the limits of the Imaginary and Symbolic.^[127] Real(1) is a continuous, "whole" reality that is undivided by language, while Real(2) is the space of the possibility of abjection being raised wherever there is interference in the path of the object of the ego, including the experience of surplus jouissance which threatens to surpass a subject's boundaries; Kristeva remarks that this experience "takes the ego back to its source", i.e., the id.^{[107][124][128]}

[O]bject shadows or things of emergence—contents of the first Yonder from which a first Here conceives itself [...] Objects that, like those we have named, are not objects because they have no subject-like counterpart, are referred to by Macho as "nobjects": they are spherically surrounding mini-conditions envisaged by a non-facing self, namely the fetal pre-subject[.]^[129]

— Peter Sloterdijk

Somatization

The real is the difference between a right glove inside out and a left glove (cf. SXIV: 19/4/67).^[130]

— Michael Lewis paraphrasing Lacan

Malcolm Bowie interprets the Lacanian real as ineffable (i.e., uncanny).^[135]

Subject-as-metaphor

The subject is always the missing signifier, the lack of a signifier, 'the subject is literally at his beginning the elision of a signifier as such, the missing signifier in the chain' (SVII:224). The barred subject, the essence of the human being of desire, can then only exist in the bar [of Signifier/signified].^[152]

— Michael Lewis citing Lacan

In the ordinary way, the study of "real" (i.e. social) space is referred to specialists and their respective specialties — to geographers, town-planners, sociologists, et alii. As for knowledge of "true" (i.e. mental) space, it is supposed to fall within the province of the mathematicians and philosophers. Here we have a double or even multiple error. To begin with, the split between "real" and "true" serves only to avoid any confrontation between practice and theory, between lived experience and concepts, so that both sides of these dualities are distorted from the outset.^[153]

— Henri Lefebvre

Lacan links the processes of displacement with metonymy and those of condensation with metaphor. [...] the process of realization of the subject parallels the action of metaphor that displaces literal levels of meaning in its production of new meaning.^[7]

— James DiCenso

When Pascal writes: the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me, he speaks as an unbeliever, not as a believer.^[154]

— Jean-Paul Sartre

The void is what the subject finds through interrogation of oneself. The subject existentially navigates an inward, metaphorical and vacuous desert or ocean, unguided by the psychoanalytic metaphor of God's "Original Presence".^[160] Premodern philosophers also thought up a formless chora, a pre-universal "chaos", and the experience of horror vacui;^[161] these conceptions of an unguided ego confronting the void informed psychoanalysis.^[162] It prefigured Lacan's outline of how the subject-as-metaphor, later the analysand, encounters the Real and how this experience is slated in analysis to give rise to pathologies, particularly anxieties and traumas. In psychoanalysis, the subject appears either as transference, repression or as the barrier separating the signifier over the signified. Subjective experience is a paradoxical extension inseparable from the experience of place, landscape, and body, which can be conveyed as utopia, dystopia, or pantheon.^[171]

Philosophers reveal the Real engulfing the ego in a comparatively unfamiliar and defamiliarizing space, and the subject's dystonic feelings of confrontation. The geographical self as described in human geography, or alternatively the "makanthropos" as described by Schopenhauer, feels Cartesian anxiety, a confusion of certainty in reason, from the experience of this formless void.^[176]

Consider Heidegger's example of the shoemaker's workshop as a totality of equipment—hammers, needles, and the like. The in-order-to "is constitutive for the equipment" [...] The toward-which of the equipment is the "work to be produced", (p. 99), in this case, shoes [and, ipso facto, shoe heels ].^[177]

— Robert D. Stolorow

Resistance

An impasse is the resistance between the real and the imaginary that affects the therapeutic alliance, wherein the client is at odds with the Transcendent Function of the therapist's mind as mediation to the Symbolic Order by way of the Signifier-as-God (i.e., discrepancy).^[182] Analysis reveals the kernel at the core of the Real through resistance.^[183] The finite ego resists the unconscious's infinite lattice of signifiers.^[184]

Passe

[A] God is something one encounters in the real, inaccessible. It is indicated by what doesn’t deceive—anxiety. [...] God is the supreme Being. I equals Being.^[185]

— Lacan

Lacan gave the name passe to the analysand's dualistic experience of uncertainty, becoming eclipsed and challenged by a subjective confrontation, that gives way to a feeling of certainty with the Real, e.g. in the temptation of Christ or the desolation of saints; it is "the moment of crisis in a speaking cure in which all subjectivity, the last imaginary residue [of the ego], all self-love falls away" and is replaced by acceptance from the analyst.^{[186][187][54][188]}

There is a 'barrier' of repression between Signifiers (the unconscious mind: 'discourse of the Other') and the signified […] a 'chain' of signifiers is analogous to the 'rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings' […] 'The signifier is that which [paternal metaphor] represents a subject for another signifier'.^{[189][190][191][192]}

— Lacan, paraphrased

Michael Eigen states that a paradox of faith comes from subject-attacking-object (such as in Jung's Answer to Job).^[193] The Real, as analogized as an aporia in experience or an encompassing black hole of reality, relates to the Jungian archetype of the Death Mother, the shadow of the Mother archetype, articulated in Neumann's The Great Mother.^{[194][14][15]}

The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. [...] Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization of transcending all experience of form—all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.^[195]

— Joseph Campbell

The becoming produced under therapy sessions can lead to an ineffable and oceanic experience of the Thing (White interpreting Bion, Eigen, Ogden);^[196] the analyst in the Bion school seeks to be an empty container, or empty subject of the void, of the client's projections.^[197]