In continental philosophy, the Real refers to reality in its unmediated form. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is an "impossible" category because of its inconceivability and opposition to expression.
In depth psychology
The Real is the intelligible form of the horizon of truth of the field-of-objects that has been disclosed. As the Real Order of the Borromean knot in Lacanianism, it is opposed in the unconscious to the Imaginary, which encompasses fantasy, dreams and hallucinations. In depth psychology, the Real can be described as a "negative space", analogous to a "black hole", a philosophical void of sociality and subjectivity, a traumatic consensus of intersubjectivity, or as an absolute noumenalness between signifiers. Lewis states that the Real can be a presence or is a substance and cites Derrida's claim that the real is authenticity.
Complete understanding, as in [,on the one hand,] the resolution after the period of mourning, represents [,on the other hand,] clear arrival at the Spinozan “impossible”. Even the word 'trace' is an appropriation of the real. [...] ' Writing is one of the representatives of the trace in general, it is not the trace itself. The trace itself does not exist [Derrida’s italics]. [...] (OG: 167, my italics)'[.] Jacques Lacan defines the Real as a plenum, a nature beyond culture that is contradistinct from the ontic. The Lacanian real is a section of the triadic, Borromean knot: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real; the center of the knot is the sinthome (monad-soul).
Thing-ness
Felluga states that Bill Brown's Thing is conceptually close to the Real, as it is a type of unreliableness of the relation between subject and object that is neither subject nor object.
The Real is reality in its unmediated form. It is what disrupts the subject’s received notions about himself and the world around him. [...] as a shattering enigma, because in order to make sense of it he or she will have to [...] find signifiers that can ensure its control.
Discourse of the subject
The drive divides the subject, who uses masters signifiers to cover up this lack, which will produce narratives. A master signifier (S1) organizes narrative (S2): a defensive form of discourse that is an ideological reaction to the Real: i.e., mythic explanation, hero's journey, storytelling, theme, pathos, ethos, plot, conflict, closure. The real subject (as id) is repressed (via aphanisis) by the imaginary-signified ego's ideologizing overtop of the real instincts. Narrative speech (parole) is an attempt to resolve the Real-Imaginary aporia (langue) concerning events.
Psychotic discourse
Felluga states that Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's term antagonism, as a societal limit that sits outside of society's articulation, functions similarly to the Real.
The therapist who feels threatened – threatened by excessive certainty, by excess beyond reason, by a discourse they do not understand, by activity that is not addressed to them or by a client who tries to take their place – might well be driven mad. Hurst states that, in principle, self-analysis (analyst's discourse) might prevent an analyst from retrogressing to the ideological position of the master's discourse (i.e., King in The Purloined Letter).
The crucial difficulty in self-analysis lies not in these fields but in the emotional factors that blind us to unconscious forces. That the main difficulty is emotional rather than intellectual is confirmed by the fact that when analysts analyze themselves they have not such a great advantage over the layman as we would be inclined to believe.
The phallic signifier and castration
The ineffable, unary signifier of lack (phallus) stitches the unconscious drives to jouissance, dialectically bridging language and desire (logos and eros, the Apollonian and the Dionysian).
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).
In neurosis
Hurst argues that the Lacanian Real parallels Derrida's concept of différance. Lewis states that lalangue is the arche-writing repetition that reveals the real subject through différance. Guattari states that temporal différance is secreted from obsessional neurosis.
Hysteric's discourse
The hysteric's discourse is driven by the Real, where object (a) is at an impossible-to-find truth. Neither individuation nor differentiation can happen in the stagnancy of the Real. 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. 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.
Artistic discourse
Artistic discourse is a pneuma of neurosis-psychosis hallucinatory hysteria, a poetic-real microcosm of the True-Real.
[T]he fantasm of a devouring orality or of a return to the maternal breast refers to a mother who is neither real, imaginary, nor symbolic but who is cosmic becoming; it is a Universe of processual emergence as much as of abolition. For all that, we are not in the reign of Jungian universal Imagos or mythological entities such as Gaia or Chronos. The Universes of which the mouth and the breast are the refrain-operators are constellated in a composite and heterogenetic way: they constitute singular events. The artist's sense of truth. [...] he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius.
Signs of the real
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