The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan posits the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real as the three distinct but interdependent orders of psychic experience. These reframe Sigmund Freud’s topography of the ego, the superego, and the id, respectively, elucidating that the domains of the subject are also objective realms of the social. The imaginary is the register of images, identifications, wholes, and projections; the symbolic is the register of language, institutions, norms, laws, practices, and order; the real is the register of what catalyzes the imaginary and eludes the symbolic—the impossible, the unrepresentable, the material, the contradictory or unmeaningful. – Kornbluh
