ABSTRACT
The experience of an obsessional neurotic is in fact common to any linguistic discourse when deployed along the axes of the Imaginary. The "purely talkative" dimension of an analytic session is one of the very few rules that were successfully transmitted and accepted by all clinical orientations. The Imaginary, much more than denominating a dimension of escape and distance from reality as commonly conceived, should rather be understood in quite literal terms, as that which contains the stuff of an image. The Image as formative of the Ego and the image as an imaginary supplement giving the illusion of One-ness to reality serve the same function. When a psychotic loses hold of reality, however, the effect of de-realisation occurs precisely because of the lack of an imaginary support. Images have an especially important place in the teaching of Jacques Lacan, who started his famous "return to S. Freud" precisely with an image: the one reflected in the mirror.
