Imaginification of the Real

The "imaginification of the Real" names a specific fantasmatic operation Lacan identifies in the resolution of Little Hans's phobia: the staged conversion of an inassimilable real element — the encountered, embodied other (Hanna) — into a form the subject can manage within the Imaginary register. The process unfolds in at least two steps. First, the brute real presence of Hanna is retrospectively transformed into a Platonic reminiscence — treated as an "always-already-there" object, something that had existed before and was merely rediscovered rather than encountered as a shock of novelty. This move neutralizes the traumatic character of the real encounter by inserting it into a prior symbolic-imaginary frame. Second, the reminiscence is further refined into an Ideal/Image — specifically, Hanna as a figure of the little other (petit autre) who functions as a kind of superior ego enabling Hans to assume a position relative to the castration situation. The result is that the unrepresentable real kernel is progressively clothed, first in the quasi-symbolic garment of reminiscence, then in the fully imaginary form of an idealized specular other.

This operation is carefully distinguished by Lacan from two adjacent but distinct mechanisms: instinctual regression and the re-finding of the lost object. Imaginification is not a return to an earlier libidinal stage, nor is it simply the Freudian Wiederfinden — the re-encountering of a lost satisfaction. Rather, it is a creative, constructive movement in which the subject, unable to symbolize a real element directly, converts it into an image that can then function within the economy of desire and the management of castration. The phobia itself — with its elaborate system of signifiers (the horse, the cart, the blinkers) — thus appears not merely as symptom but as the scaffolding within which this imaginification is accomplished.

This concept appears once, in jacques-lacan-seminar-4 (p. 362), Lacan's seminar on object-relations. It belongs to the extended case-reading of Little Hans that occupies a substantial portion of that seminar, and it serves Lacan's broader project of reinterpreting the Freudian clinical archive through the RSI framework before those registers are fully formalized. The concept sits at the intersection of several of the seminar's canonical concepts. With respect to Castration, imaginification is precisely the mechanism through which Hans achieves a liveable relation to castration: by converting Hanna-as-real into Hanna-as-ideal-image (linked to the cross-referenced Ideal Ego), Hans secures an imaginary anchor — a "superior ego" — that allows him to take a position relative to the phallic signifier and its absence. The concept thus specifies how the Imaginary register is actively recruited, not passively undergone: imaginification is a labor of the Imaginary, producing the consistency (in the later topological sense) that the subject needs to traverse the castration situation.

In relation to Fantasy and the Lost Object, imaginification marks a crucial distinction: it is not the re-finding of a lost object (Freud's Wiederfinden) and not the construction of a fundamental fantasy ($◇a), but a preliminary, transitional operation — a first "taming" of the real through reminiscence before fantasy proper can be stabilized. It thus occupies a conceptual space between the raw encounter with the Real and the fully structured imaginary-symbolic formations (phobia-signifiers, fantasy formula). The Phallus and Little Other are implicated insofar as Hanna-as-image comes to occupy the structural place of the little other (petit autre, the specular counterpart) whose idealized form permits Hans to imaginarily master what the symbolic — not yet fully operative for him — cannot yet metabolize. In the corpus as a whole, the term "imaginification" is unique to this seminar, making it a local coinage that nevertheless illuminates the mechanics of phobia-formation and its resolution more broadly.

Seminar IV · The Object RelationJacques Lacan · 1956 (p.362)

This reminiscence is the first stage in the imaginification of this real, and it carries a very different meaning from all those stories of instinctual regression.

The phrase "first stage" is theoretically loaded because it marks imaginification as a sequential, processual operation rather than an immediate substitution — implying further stages (the passage to the Ideal/Image) and distinguishing the whole movement from a single defensive act. The explicit contrast with "instinctual regression" is equally important: Lacan is insisting that converting the real into a reminiscence is not a retreat along a libidinal timeline (a Freudian regression to an earlier fixation point) but a constructive, forward-looking imaginary operation with its own internal structure.