Three psychic agencies in Lacan’s Theorisation of the Subject

In two lectures in 1953 Jacques Lacan proposed three orders that he believed to be the key registers of human subjectivity and according to which all psychoanalytical phenomena can be described: Imaginary, Symbolic and Real. As Bracha Ettinger notes; these ‘levels of human reality […] are revealed in language through speech (parole). [1] The method outlined in the lectures involved a return to the texts of Sigmund Freud and attempted to define and develop the different psychic agencies introduced by Freud – id, ego and superego – beyond the idea of stages through which the human subject passes.