Across the depth-psychology corpus, ‘Real’ functions not as a settled ontological category but as a contested and plurally-defined threshold concept whose boundaries shift decisively depending on the framework brought to bear. In Lacanian theory, the Real designates a third register alongside the Symbolic and Imaginary — a mystery exceeding representational capture, distinct from both external reality and inner-world fantasy. Jung’s operational criterion — ‘real is that which acts, bringing transformation’ — relocates reality from metaphysical substance to psychic efficacy, insisting that unconscious contents possess genuine ontological weight. Vedantic thought, represented by Shankara via Easwaran, stakes the sharpest counter-claim: only the unchanging is truly real, consigning the entire phenomenal world to evanescence. Aurobindo complicates this further, distinguishing cosmic consciousness as ‘real in itself, real in its effects,’ while interrogating whether Maya possesses even illusory reality. Barrett approaches the question empirically, distinguishing perceiver-independent categories from socially-constructed realities that are nonetheless causally operative. Janet’s hierarchy of degrees of reality, preserved in trauma theory, introduces a temporal and adaptive dimension. Running through all these positions is a shared productive tension: whether ‘real’ is a property of the world independent of mind, of psychic process, of social construction, or of the Absolute alone.
Jung never made sharp distinctions between what is real and non-real; for him, ‘real’ is that which acts, bringing transformation.
This passage articulates Jung’s functional criterion of the real: that which produces transformation is real, dissolving the conventional boundary between inner fantasy and outer fact.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017thesis
the Real, corresponding not only to external reality but also to what might be called the mystery of reality.
Samuels introduces Lacan’s tripartite schema and locates the Real as the register exceeding both Symbolic law and Imaginary inner-world processes, aligned with irreducible mystery.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
When I say that the Self is real and personality only a shadow, it is in a very precise sense of the word ‘real,’ succinctly defined by the great South Indian mystic Shankara: ‘Only that is real which never changes.’
This passage presents the Vedantic criterion of unchangeability as the sole mark of the truly real, excluding all phenomenal and personal existence from ultimate ontological status.
, The Upanishadsthesis
When I say that the Self is real and personality only a shadow, it is in a very precise sense of the word ‘real,’ succinctly defined by the great South Indian mystic Shankara: ‘Only that is real which never changes.’
A duplicate articulation of Shankara’s immutability criterion, reinforcing the Vedantic refusal to grant ultimate reality to anything subject to change or death.
, Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spiritualitythesis
evolution has provided the human mind with the ability to create another kind of real, one that is completely dependent on human observers.
Barrett distinguishes perceiver-independent physical reality from a second, socially-constructed mode of the real, arguing that emotions belong to the latter category without thereby being less causally significant.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
Real then to the man who has had contact with it or lives in it, is this cosmic consciousness, with a greater than the physical reality; real in itself, real in its effects and works.
Aurobindo posits cosmic consciousness as possessing a mode of reality surpassing physical reality, validated both intrinsically and through its effects on inner and outer life.
, The Life Divine, 1939thesis
Being able to maintain this hierarchy of degrees of reality is an essential part of realization. The degree of reality of particular inner and outer stimuli may shift.
Drawing on Janet, this passage frames the real as a hierarchical and adaptive construct, where degrees of reality shift in response to context, making the maintenance of this hierarchy central to psychological health.
, The Haunted Self Structural Dissociation and the Treatmentsupporting
Active imagination is based on the assumption that the unconscious is real and has subjectivity: ‘everything goes on functioning in the unconscious state just as though i’
This passage grounds active imagination in the ontological claim that the unconscious possesses genuine reality and subjectivity, not merely derivative or epiphenomenal status.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting
The unconscious has been made into a museum, unreal because it is too real in the conscious. When a thing becomes too real, I walk right into it, as a bird walks into the mouth of a snake.
Jung’s clinical observation here reveals a dialectical pathology: when something becomes excessively concretized as real in consciousness, the unconscious compensates by rendering it unreal, indicating that the real is a dynamic relational function rather than a fixed quality.
, Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928-1930, 1984supporting
These unrealities cannot be made of the substance of the Reality, for then they also must be real.
Aurobindo engages the Mayavada problem, arguing that if the world’s appearances were constituted from ultimate Reality’s substance, they could not be declared unreal, pressing toward a non-illusionist resolution.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
it seems incredible that the sole power of the Reality should be to manifest something contrary to itself or to create non-existent things in an illusory universe.
Aurobindo contests absolute illusionism by arguing that a Reality whose sole creative power produces unreality would be self-contradictory, pressing toward a positive account of the world’s ontological status.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
The new concept of ‘reality’ which is thus brought into the world is not easily understood. It is an embarrassing fact that we are no longer able to apply to the arts such terms as ‘true’ and ‘real’ without running into complications.
Snell traces the emergence in Greek tragedy of a historically novel concept of the real — tied to human interiority rather than events — which destabilizes the simple applicability of ‘real’ and ‘true’ to aesthetic representation.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
a figural schema permits both its poles — the figure and its fulfillment — to retain the characteristics of concrete historical reality… figure and fulfillment — although the one ‘signifies’ the other — have a significance which is not incompatible with their being real.
Auerbach identifies figural realism as a mode wherein symbolic signification and historical reality are held simultaneously, resisting the reduction of the real to either pure literalism or pure allegory.
, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1953supporting
The only kinds of reality involved are (1) the actual reality of the thing and (2) the reality of the act by which the thing is thought or known.
This Cartesian-scholastic passage distinguishes formal reality of objects from the reality of cognitive acts, framing the epistemological problem of whether ideational content requires its own ontological grounding.
, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2008supporting
there is no real and eternal individual, no ‘I’ or ‘you’, and therefore there can be no real self of the individual, even no true universal self, but only a Self apart from the universe.
Aurobindo summarizes the Advaitic Mayavada position in which the real is identified exclusively with the unmanifest Absolute, rendering all individual and cosmic experience ultimately unreal.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside