Imaginary is the picture: you imagine a future
symbolic is "are we exclusive"
real is the stuff you can't put into words, like the shock of your first fight.
Is this accurate? or this is just typical IG Lacan content https://www.instagram.com/p/DeJo-3VzLx2/
I'm a psychodynamic psychotherapist, not Lacanian trained, so I'm asking from outside the tradition and expecting to be corrected.
I came across this instagram reel of Lacan's view on this https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcio-9nzVs-/ (not sure if it's accurate?)
It's more honest than most accounts of where a treatment goes lol. But I can't get past the obvious objection, how is that not "learn to live with it"? Put less kindly, how is it different from the common critique of mindfulness as retreat into indifference dressed as enlightenment? (Zizek?) If the end point is that you stop demanding the Other resolve you and instead get skilled at your own arrangement, what stops that being adaptation with better vocabulary?
Full conversation (For more context): https://youtu.be/RX2tGQxIbEA?si=wiGL3FrqP5Po2hAy
I'm a psychodynamic therapist, relatively early in practice, saw this reel on Instagram by a psychoanalyst (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DcbBFGEqbxD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link) and this is the objection I've never been able to fully put down.
The structure is familiar enough. The patient accepts an interpretation, evidence it landed. The patient rejects it, and rejection is available to be read as resistance, or as a transference enactment, or as material in its own right. Both outcomes are absorbed. Freud is fairly direct about this himself: in Negation (1925) the patient's "it's not my mother" becomes grounds for "so it is his mother," and Constructions in Analysis (1937) takes up at length why a patient's "No" can't be taken at face value. (I got the citations via AI)
I'm aware this is well trodden ground philosophically Popper used psychoanalysis as his standing example of a theory that explains too much, and Grünbaum spent a book arguing Popper had it wrong, that the theory is falsifiable in principle and should be attacked on evidential grounds instead. I'm less interested in relitigating that argument than in what it means at 3pm on a Tuesday with a person in the room.
Because clinically, the answer can't be "we don't make interpretations." And it also can't be "we accept every 'no' at face value" sometimes a patient's flat refusal really is the most alive thing in the session, and treating it as final would be its own kind of failure.
So the question I keep circling what does disconfirmation actually look like in your practice? Not in theory. Concretely. What has made you conclude that an interpretation was simply wrong not defended against, not premature, not "right but not yet usable" just wrong?
The best answer I've been given is that the interpretation is a hypothesis and the evidence isn't the patient's yes or no at all, it's what happens over the following weeks.. whether material opens or closes, whether the transference shifts, whether anything becomes thinkable that wasn't. Which I find genuinely persuasive. But it's also slow, unfalsifiable in the moment, and heavily dependent on the analyst's own judgment about what "opening up" looks like which is where the circularity threatens to walk back in through the side door.
Curious how others hold this particularly anyone working in contexts where deference to authority is culturally loaded.