The Real, Reality, and the Space Between

I began studying psychotherapy a few years ago because, among other reasons, there was a question that never let me rest. I wanted to understand what reality is. The word seems simple, even naive, but it dissolves as soon as we try to define it seriously. On one side there is the reality studied by science, limited by its instruments, models and methods. On the other side there is the world as it appears to us, organized by perception and by the structure of the mind. Kant made this point clear: everything we know is filtered by our way of knowing. The world in itself, the Thing in Itself or Noumenon, remains beyond our reach.

1. If we think of reality from the Noumenon, that would be the domain that exists independently of the subject, even though we can never know it directly. It is not a perfectly organized world, but it is a real field that no human experience can possess. It is there, silent and inaccessible, beyond any measurement.

2. Lacan takes this problem and proposes that this Noumenon, when it intersects with the subject, is transformed from within the subject itself. In this way he proposes the Real, which for him is neither the physical world nor nature. The Real is not outside the subject but in the subject, as that which passes through experience without being able to settle into meaning. The Real is the crack, the tear, the limit where language stops.

3. The reality we live every day is something else. It is the explanations through symbols, words, phrases, stories, images, identifications and desires with which we try to make sense of what we experience. Reality is the Real put into meaning. It is a construction that we use to protect ourselves from the impact of the Real and of the Noumenon.

4. But human life is not limited to these levels. Besides personal reality there is another layer, an invented but shared reality, always in the symbolic and the imaginary. This includes religions, culture, law, myths, collective dreams and even magical realism. They are fictions that function as realities because everyone agrees to live inside them. These collective narratives fill the gap between subjects and allow entire communities to live as if they shared the same world. This is shared reality.

In this way, each person lives inside their own symbolic imaginary reality. Each one builds their own map. And each one lives with their own internal Real, always singular. There are no two identical Reals, even when two people live in the same house.

5. Between these personal worlds and these collective fictions there appears a space that no subject can control. It is the inter subjective void, the gap between people, that intermediate world that is part of us and part of the Noumenon. Jung would have called it the world of archetypes, although not in an identical way. This void belongs to no one and cannot be colonized by any symbolic structure. It is the place where our reality meets that of the other and where neither fits completely. This void recalls a part of the Kantian Noumenon because it exists without depending on any subjectivity, although it excludes the things of the physical world. It is the silence between individuals. It is there, marking the limit of all communication.

6. And even so, there is something more. There are events that break in from outside and pass through everyone equally. An explosion, an earthquake, a catastrophe. They are not the Real in the Lacanian sense, because the Lacanian Real is always singular and inscribed in each subject. But they are events that occur in reality and that undo the symbolic order of everyone in the same way. Such an event affects everyone, even though each one inscribes it within themselves, in their own Real, in a different way.

I deal with all these levels every day. As a scientist, Lacanian, engineer, manager and passionate creator, I observe how each person transforms my words according to their own map. I say user need and they hear sales strategy. I say innovation and they hear chaos. To transmit ideas is to pass through the fear of the other, and between my reality and that of the other an infinite void opens, that inter subjective space between reality and the Real. No language can fill it completely.

Lacan pointed to this impossibility when he said that there is no sexual relationship. All communication passes through the Imaginary, through the Symbolic and through the Real of each person. But beyond that there is also this void that no one controls and that no collective fiction manages to seal completely. We live among worlds that do not coincide, between Reals that cannot touch each other, and faced with events that shatter everyone’s certainties.

The human mind, product of a primitive evolution, found a solution. Faced with this complexity we build images of ourselves. The Imaginary sustains us. The Symbolic tries to organize the fragments and the Real pushes us to move. With this machinery we come into contact with others, knowing that there will always be something we do not understand and something we will not manage to say. Sometimes solidarity is born from this encounter. Sometimes, conflict.

I have spent years trying to build bridges between cultures, people and different realities. I have failed many times and will surely keep failing. But I keep trying, because this gesture of offering the other what we do not have, to someone who perhaps does not need it, is the most exact form of love according to Lacan. To love is not to close the gap that separates us, because that gap is structural and impossible to eliminate. To love is to try to close it, to recognize it and, in spite of it, to reach out toward the other even while knowing that we will never fully reach them. Like the hands that never quite touch in Michelangelo’s Creation.

To love, then, is to inhabit that tiny space between intentions when they draw close. There is a desire, yes, to share worlds, information, creations, and that intention is everything. Beyond the romantic idea, to love our fellow human beings is the compassion of offering listening time, even knowing that our words will never fully fit into the other’s experience. To listen is not to accept everything, but to admit that our own view is not the final one.

I must confess that, although reality escapes me in its definition, the closest I have come is when I share points of view. I listen to perspectives I had not considered and I accept my blind spots. Beyond being right or not, I understand that reality cannot be defined no matter how much science, data or certainty we have. And what harms the world is not reality but what we do with it. To believe that there is only one reality, and to assume that it is mine, leads to injustice, stagnation and the failure of individuals, companies and even nations.

To recognize that our decisions can be mistaken and to be willing to correct them opens the way to freedom, creativity and innovation. We live immersed in multiple personal realities, supported by collective fictions, interrupted by events that exceed us, while the inter subjective void remains silent, always wider and deeper than any word we try to use to capture it.

We are broken bridges, walking hollows, and as we walk, life goes on.

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