The Clinical Experience and the Birth of the Symbolic Order: Lacan’s Theoretical Leap in 1953

This chapter presents a preliminary examination of the concepts pertaining to the distinction between the Symbolic and Imaginary orders, as introduced by Lacan in 1953, and the theoretical and ethical dilemmas arising from this conceptualization. These concepts, and the theoretical arguments that concern them, were consolidated during the 1950s which was Lacan's annus mirabilis. In that year, he presented the distinction between the three orders: the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real, and the emphasis on the concepts The-Name-of the Father and the Other. To elucidate these key concepts, I will examine two representative texts: First, "The Neurotic's Individual Myth" in which Lacan first distinguished between the Symbolic and the Imaginary, and consequently between the symbolic father and the imaginary father. In this lecture, the term The-Name-of-the-Father appears almost incidentally. Second, the most important lecture in this period, The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, in which Lacan expresses the principles of his theory in a well-developed and crystallized manner. This lecture may be seen as a type of manifest about the singularity of Lacan's clinic compared to other psychoanalytic approaches.