from reality in order to emphasize that there are things which “effectively hap-
pen,” “effects” (Wirkungen),that are irreducible to what normally happens in “re-
ality”: for instance, the loss of reality caused by anxiety, the manifest unreality of
dreams, the undecidable (psychosomatic) reality of symptoms and, more gener-
ally, all the formations of the unconscious. Wirklichkeitis meant to give voice to “the
[unconscious] mechanism in its entirety,”^78 to those effects of the interplay between
the three orders which are marginalized by the superimposition of the Symbolic
and the Imaginary determining our (self-conscious) everyday reality. As I pointed
out in Chapter 2 , symptoms, the return of the repressed, go hand in hand with the
process of metaphorization (as repression) that creates new signification; Wirk-
lichkeitis the Real-of-the-Symbolic which, despite being “at the limits of experi-
ence,” is nevertheless absolutely necessary for the functioning of the Symbolic
as such. Indeed, Lacan later specifies that he is referring to a “symbolic Wirklich-
keit”^79 —a Real-of-the-Symbolic—which is usually misrecognized.^80
The Real that psychoanalysis deals with is the Real-of-the-Symbolic, which is
not to be confused with everyday reality and should also be clearly differentiated
from what Lacan calls “the primitive Stoff,”^81 matter unmediated by the Symbolic.
This last distinction is meant to uncover the naïve materialism of the majority of
psychoanalysts, whose “reference to the organic foundations is dictated by noth-
ing but a need to be reassured.”^82 Lacan replaces this organic vision of the Real,
which always surreptitiously entails a reference to a transcendent “ultimate real-
ity,”^83 with an “energetic perspective,” that of effectivity. He explains his point by
way of a long example in which he compares the functioning of a hydroelectric
power plant with that of the unconscious. “What is accumulated in the machine is
first of all strictly related to the machine”: the Real (energy) is to be thought in re-
lation to the Symbolic (the machine). “To say that energy [the Real] was already
there, in a virtual state, in the current of the river... does not mean anything at all
since energy... begins to interest us only from the moment it begins to be accu-
mulated, and it is accumulated only from the moment the machines have started
to work.”^84 It is certain that the machines are activated by a propulsion that comes
from the river, but “believing that the current of the river is the primitive order
of energy,”^85 “confusing the Stoff,primitive matter... or instincts” with symbolic
Wirklichkeit,is as much a mistake as taking energy for a notion like that of manaor
“the sprite of the current.”^86
Lacan needs the example of the power plant in Seminar IV to point out plainly
that the Freudian notion of the libido—a psychosexual energy which he will
later reconceptualize in terms of jouissance—should be located on the level of the
Real-of-the-Symbolic and, conversely, that no libido precedes the Symbolic. The
libido is “an abstract notion, like that of energy,” and “there is nothing less
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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