REPETITION AND THE REALITY PRINCIPLE

Lacan confronts the problem of reality as he is reformulating his metapsychology of repetition in the first half of the 1960s. Even in its basic manifestations, repetition requires an act in relation to the domain of objects, and an act in turn relies on a principle of psychical life that won’t settle for an hallucination at the level of the pleasure principle. However, according to Lacan, the relationship of the pleasure principle and the reality principle is characterised by disequilibrium and inadequation.…