Post Number Three: Real Stuffed Animals

Lacan sees "the real" as everything outside of the symbolic and the imaginary. The subject then exists at the borders of language represented by symbols and by the landscape of the imagination, which is modeled after language.

In the doll story, the older sister convinces the younger sister that the Webkinz's soul exists on the internet, and that they need only to download a new soul to replace it. But by applying Lacan's theory of "the real," we can quickly see that the doll isn't real, that it doesn't have a soul. The doll exists in both the symbolic and the imaginary--the doll is a symbol of some other animal or person, and the childrens' imagination give the doll meaning--but it doesn't exist beyond, in "the real." According to Lacan, the doll doesn't have a soul any more than a word does.

Instead, the doll can be seen as a demand by the children--an attempt to fulfill their desire to return to the imaginary, which in their cases was lost only recently. The story about the death of the doll and the new personality code from the internet shows that the children have suspended their disbelief about the inanimate nature of the doll, but then dropping the doll out of a car window threatens that belief. The girls suddenly feel the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic--they know that the doll exists outside of themselves, they just proved it by dropping it out of a window. And when the younger girl begins to lament the death of the doll, as she would the death of a close relative or someone else she would perceive as being more similar to herself, the older girl brings her into the symbolic to console her. She points out that the doll is a representation of something else.