Imaginary Register

the Imaginary, which approximates to psychological reality, inner world processes (such as fantasy, projection, introjection), attitudes and images derived from, but not the equivalent of, external life.

Samuels provides the canonical Lacanian definition of the Imaginary Register as the order of inner-world processes and proposes its alignment with Jung's personal unconscious, establishing the primary comparative framework for the term in depth-psychology discourse.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis

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Lacan's concept of the Imaginary suggests that what we call the self is always a sedimentation of images from elsewhere. These images are worn like armor, and what is within this armor is certainly less than we often believe.

Frank applies the Imaginary Register to the sociology of illness and embodied selfhood, arguing that the self is constitutively formed through externally derived images and that entry into the Symbolic is required to supplement — though never fully escape — this imaginary constitution.

Frank, Arthur W., The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis

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what we ourselves elaborate in a different manner at the level of what we call the field of the imaginary and the effects of the imaginary. Because, as one might say, what remains, what survives of the object after this libidinal effect... is precisely what eternalises the object under the aspect of a form.

Lacan articulates the Imaginary Register's function in object-constitution, arguing that what the destructive drive leaves intact is precisely the formal, imaginary residue that eternizes the object — linking the Imaginary to the persistence of love-objects in transference.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015thesis

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A fantasy becomes a (subjective, depotentiated) fantasy because it implicitly, through the form of its genre, says, 'don't take me literally, I am only a product of the poetic imagination, I am just an image'... This is the duplicity of psychology's imaginal.

Giegerich diagnoses an inherent duplicity within the imaginal register — its genre-form simultaneously posits and retracts the reality of its contents — arguing this structural ambiguity prevents the imagination from achieving the soul's genuinely logical, self-negating movement.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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by its very form, it does primarily posit beings, persons, animals and so on as positively existing. It thus constantly reaffirms the 'natural' ontological prejudice, supports our habitual sense of positivity, perpetuates the ordinary, perceptual and sensual, form of experiencing the world.

Giegerich argues that the imaginal register, despite its explicit anti-literalism, structurally perpetuates an ontology of positivity, thereby remaining complicit with the ego-perception it nominally transcends.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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This is one reason why we have to go beyond 'the imaginal' and imaginal psychology. The imaginal can of course be taken as metaphysical reality, in which case it is a mystification and would have been reified and positivized.

Giegerich contends that the imaginal register cannot sustain genuine negativity without collapsing either into metaphysical reification or into an unstable play of mental reservation, making the move beyond the imaginal logically necessary for rigorous depth-psychology.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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Jung's psychological Anschauung, which puts such stress on imaginal consciousness — dream, vision, fantasy — and on a life-style (the symbolic life) in which the ego lives and behaves primarily in terms of this imaginal consciousness.

Hillman, from within the archetypal tradition, characterizes the imaginal register as the sovereign domain of psychological life — dream, vision, and fantasy — challenging developmental models that subordinate imaginal consciousness to ego-rational progress.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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things have not been highlighted in their fundamental topology as I am trying to do it for you here.

Lacan gestures toward the topological framework underlying the three registers, indicating that the Imaginary's position can only be understood through its structural relations to the Symbolic and Real rather than in isolation.

Lacan, Jacques, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015aside

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