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→Speech and Language
Saying "You are my master" gives a [[signification]] to the position of the speaker: either as the slave, or, more likely, as someone who does everything apart from accept the position of slave. Speaking thus determines one's position as speaker, ''it gives one a place''. As a [[patient]] speaks, such [[signification]]s will emerge which are [[unconscious]]. (he words I use mean more than I mean in using them. They carry meanings which are beyond his or her conscious understanding and control. As the analysis continues, the message can be sent back to the patient. (The subject receives the message in inverted form. His desire can finally become recognized.)
At this point in his work, Lacan thought that speech had a subject who strives for the recognition of his or her desire. Since speech usually has the opposite effect, that of blocking recognition, this is hardly an obvious outcome. And if recognition is seen as central to a theory of how speech works, it supposes the existence of an Other, ''a place from which you are heard, from which you are recognized''. (The Other is thus the place of [[language]], external to the speaker, and yet, since he or she is a speaker, internal at the same time.) To the extent that Lacan associates speech and the symbolic, it is possible for the subject to be recognized, to find some kind of [[identity]], in the [[symbolic]] [[order]].
=====The Real=====
To the symbolic and the imaginary, Lacan adds the category of the Real, something he reformulated at several moment in his work. In 1953, ''the real is simply that which isn't symbolized'', which is excluded from the symbolic. As Lacan says, the real "is that which resists symbolization absolutely." He calls ''the real, the symbolic and the imaginary the "three registers of human reality." Thus, what we ordinarily speak of as "reality" would best be defined as an amalgam of symbolic and imaginary: imaginary to the extent that we are situated in the specular register and the ego offers us rationalizations of our actions; and symbolic to the extent that most things around us have meaning. (Everyday objects are symbolized in the sense that they mean something, they have a signification. Sometimes an object loses its meaning. I look at an everyday object as if it is mysterious and uncanny.) ''The real would represent precisely what is excluded from our reality'', the margin of what is without [[meaning]] and which we fail to situate or explore.
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