The Real and Jouissance

Finally, Lacan posits a register called “the real”—not the empirical world but

the ineffable realm of constancy beyond the field of speech. According to

Lacan, the “reality” which is given to consciousness is no more and no less

than an amalgam of the imaginary (the specular and imagistic world of the

rationalizing ego, with all of its self-delusions, defenses, and falsifications)

and the symbolic (the meaningful social world of language). Lacan resists

defining the real in any explicit or easily codifiable way. In his later work in

the 1960’s Lacan discussed the register of the real in light of his work on

much more complex.

According to Lacan, jouissance is any experience which is too much for

the organism to bear. More often than not it is experienced as suffering—an

the organism to bear. More often than not it is experienced as suffering—an

unbearable pain which is experienced as a kind of satisfaction by the unconscious

drives. According to Lacan, this is what lies at the heart of the Freudian

“repetition compulsion,” namely an unconscious, and unconsciously

satisfying, wish to suffer. Healthy human life is about the regulation of jouissance.

Children’s bodies are prone to overexcitation and overstimulation because

they are full of jouissance, which is slowly drained from the body of the

child after its encounter with the “Law of the Father” and its entry into the

child after its encounter with the “Law of the Father” and its entry into the

register of the symbolic. Portions of jouissance linked to especially intense

bodily memories from childhood can become “caught” or centered in the

bodily memories from childhood can become “caught” or centered in the

body and manifest as symptoms. Lacan reconfigured Freud’s theory of castration

by redefining it as the loss of jouissance from the body. More broadly,

Lacan says that the entry into language itself is castration because it introduces