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Of these three terms, the 'imaginary' was the first to appear, well before the Rome Report of 1953.
At the time, Lacan regarded the 'imago' as the proper study of psychology and identification as the fundamental psychical process.
The imaginayr imaginary was then the owrldworld, the register, the dimension of images, conscious or unconscious, perceived or imaginnedimagined.In this respect, 'imaginary' is not simply the oppsoite opposite of 'real': the image certainly belongs to reality and Lacan sought in anaimal animal ehtology facts that brought out formative effects comparable to that described in 'the mirro mirror stage.'
Henceforth it is the symbolic, not the imaginary, that is seen to be the determining order of the subject, and its effects are radical: the subject, in Lacan's sense, is himself an effect of the symbolic.
Levi-Strauss's formalization of the elementary structures of kinship and its use of Jakobson's binarism provided the basis for LAcanLacan's conception of the symbolic - a conception, however, that goes well beyond its origins.
According to Lacan, a distinction must be drawn between what belongs to the imaginary.
In particular, the relation between the subject, on the one ahndhand, and the signifiers, speehcspeech, language, on the other, is frequently contrasted with the imaginary relation, that between the ego and its iamgesimages.
In each case, many problems derive from the relations between these two dimensions.
The 'real' emerges as a third term, linked to the symbolic and the imaginary: it stands for what is neither symbolic nor imaginary, and remains foreclosed from the anlytic analytic experience, which is an experience of speech.
What is prior to the assumption of the symbolic, the real in its 'raw' state (in the case of the subject, for instance, the organism and its biological needs), may only be supposed, it is an algebraic x.
The Lacanian concept fo of the 'real' is not to be confused with reality, which is perfectly knowable: the subject of desire knowns knows now more than that, since for it reality is entirely phantasmatic.
The term 'real', which was at first of only minor importance, acting as a kind of saety safety rail, has grdually gradually been developed, and its signification has been considerably altered.It began, anturally naturally enough, by presenting, in relation to symbolic substitutions and imaginary variations, a function of constancy: 'the real is that whcih which always returns to the same place.' It then became that before which the imaginary faltredfaltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant.
Hence the formula: "the real is the impossible."
It is in this sense tha that the term begins to appear regularly, as an adjective, to describe that which is lacking in the symblic order, the ineliminable residue of all articulation, the foreclosed element, which may be approache,d approached but never grasped: the umbilical cord of the symbolic.
As distinguished by Lacan, these three dimensions are, as we say, profoundly heterogenoeus.
