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CLINICAL NOTES
ON THE SYMBOLIC AND THE REAL
Bruce Fink, ‘The Creative Function of the Word: The Symbolic and the Real,’ The
Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University
Press), pp. 24-31.
Jacques Lacan was fond of pointing out that while we may wonder what the ‘pre-
symbolic’ might be; and what it might have been like to think before the birth of
language; these thoughts themselves are only possible for those who find themselves
within a language.
In other words, the ‘pre-symbolic’ is just another term within natural languages
when linguists and philosophers attempt to make sense of what was there before
language and differentiate that from what is there after language.
They can’t actually go back to the pre-symbolic except within the space of the post-
symbolic itself.
The pre-symbolic then can only be a post-symbolic construct.
Language is ‘always-already there’ to make thoughts possible in the locus of the
symbolic Other.
Since language functions as a Kantian ‘condition of possibility’ for thought, it is not
possible to conceive of what might have been the case before the advent of language
in the human mind.
The question of what language is and what the differences might be between the
pre-symbolic and the post-symbolic is important for clinicians because it will help
them to differentiate between the orders of the real and the symbolic.
The pre-symbolic however is not extinguished when the subject enters the realm of
language; it stays on in the form of the residues of the real. Analysts differentiate
between the status of the subject before and after he has been subject to toilet
training.

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This is a good instance of ‘educating the instincts’ since only humans are subject to
toilet training to the extent that it can affect their character.
Sigmund Freud did a number of studies on the anal character – who resists toilet
training - in this context.
Once the subject has entered the realm of language, however, he has to come to
terms with the social reality of the family and kinship relations in a given society.
In the Lacanian model, language is the locus in which things that did not previously
exist come into being.
In Bruce Fink’s formulation: the real does not exist in the conventional sense, but it
‘ex-ists outside of or apart from our reality.’
So even after entering the realm of the socio-symbolic, it has to be worked-through;
that is why Lacan defined the ‘real as that which resists symbolization.’
Insofar as there are residues of the real, the subject will have to learn to relate the
real to the symbolic. One of Lacan’s early definitions of psychoanalysis was that
analysis is an attempt to ‘treat the real with the symbolic.’
The task of the analysis is not merely to rectify the subject’s relations with ‘reality,’
but to come to terms with the real of trauma, fantasy, and forms of libidinal fixation
in early childhood.
Or, to put it simply, the real coexists with reality; psychic reality makes as many
demands on the subject as everyday reality.
Withdrawing from bourgeois reality does not solve the neurotic predicament,
because there is another kind of work that has to be done internally.
In the later Lacan, the term ‘real’ is used to deconstruct the opposition between the
inner world and the outer world. Either of these categories could serve the function
of the real as long as it made demands on the psyche that had to be worked through.

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A number of imaginary phenomena in analysis and within the Lacanian theory of
subjectivity were reconceived as having effects of the real (lest the reader
misunderstand the imaginary to be something that is merely illusory).
That is why ‘Lacan insists…that it is the analyst’s job to intervene in the patient’s
real, not in the patient’s view of reality.’ That is however not the same as saying that
every element of the patient’s real can be worked-through in analysis since that
would take forever.
So when Lacan pointed out that an analysis can be brought to a successful end, what
he meant was that it will suffice if the elements pertaining to the trauma are
adequately worked-through.
This will ensure that the patient will remember the trauma and work-through the
affects associated with it within the safe confines of the clinic rather than repeat the
trauma endlessly in the world outside.
The task of the symbolic then is to ‘drain the real’ of its affects albeit with the
theoretical realization that it cannot be done in its entirety.
Fink also points out that the real can be conceived as the pre-symbolic real and the
post-symbolic real.
The former is related to forms of trauma or libidinal fixation; the latter is related to
the notion of cause in analysis. The pre-symbolic real is always interpreted in
hindsight from the locus of the post-symbolic real.
The goal of the analytic interpretation should be to ‘hit the cause’ – only then will the
patient’s symptom shift adequately in the symbolic.
The reason that analysis takes so long then is not merely because the patient has to
search for the words that represent his trauma, but because he also has to work-
through and ‘subjectify’ his trauma in the analytic situation.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN