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Imaginary Order- loosely related to Freud's pleasure principle, the Imaginary Order is the primary location of fantasies and images.
Symbolic Order- loosely related to Freud's reality principle, the Symbolic Order is associated with the use of symbols and symbolic systems. It is the realm of language as representation.
Real Order- the Real Order is concerned with fundamental and emotionally powerful experiences such as death and sexuality. It is the "deepest" and most inaccessible of the realms, available to consciousness only in extremely brief and fleeting moments of joy and terror that Lacan describes as jouissance.
The second stage for the infant's development comes when it enters the linguistic world in Lacan's version of the Oedipus complex. The infant's pre-oedipal relation to its mother is imaginary (conducted in images and pre-verbal communication), but as that relationship becomes a triad with the including of the father, the father introduces the principle of law.
As an adult, the person is a subject in language. The adult will sometimes use art and literature as outputs for its desire to return to primordial symbols.
Lacan's basic theory of mind development
Lacan believed that the first stage of human life is preverbal, and because of this, images and rhythms are the dominant means of perceiving the world. Before being able to speak and understand language, the Imaginary Order governs an infant's mind and the way the infant perceives the world. There is a joyful fusion with the mother's body and with the world in which an infant lives. Strict boundaries between self and other have yet to be established.
At the age of about six to eighteen months, an infant enters into what Lacan calls the "mirror stage." During this stage, the infant begins to gain a sense of its own existence as a separate entity and to establish an awareness of the boundaries of its own body through its literal mirror image or through outside objects, notably its mother or closest family member that resembles the infant.
The infant creates an infantile sense of selfhood through differentiation- the infant gains a sense of what it is through a gradually increasing understanding of what it is not. Certain key objects (such as the mother's breasts, the mother's voice, the child's own feces and urinary flow, and the sounds the infant makes itself through its vocal chords) that were formerly experienced as parts of the infant's own self, come in the mirror stage to be recognized as being separate from that self. These key objects function as symbols of primordial lack, and the selfhood of the infant becomes intimately bound up in the sense of the lack of these objects. After entering the Symbolic Order, this feeling of lack will continue to function, and the striving for subjective wholeness will involve a fundamental (and unquenchable) desire for these lost key objects.
For a young boy, this interrupts the boy's sexual desire for his mother, which arises from the desire to recovery the preverbal Imaginary Order fusion. This causes an entry into the Symbolic Order as the boy realizes and accepts its own limitations.
For a young girl, entry into the Symbolic Order requires an acceptance of masculine authority and superiority in that order.
In other words, a child must give up the original happiness of the blissful fusion with the mother in the pre-oedipal phase to enter into the Symbolic Stage of language.
Lacan refers to entry into the Symbolic Order as "castration." For Lacan, castration is not a physical experience but a symbolic one, embodying the introduction to language, rules, and regulations according to which society follows.
Other sites on Lacan
lacan.com
Barsanti on Lacan
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