Symptom and sinthome

Here, Fierens returns to the question of reality and truth as well as sexuality by considering the symptom (and transference) as psychical reality invented by the unconscious when faced with a failure of the symbolic or real registers of experience to answer the questioning: “How can we change the real with a mere Ego Ideal?” “How can we take the real into account when everything begins with an imaginary Ideal Ego?” However, how can this psychical reality approach the lack that came before reality, the object a of which it is asked, “Is it something or nothing?” Fierens considers the different ways of thinking nothing according to the different modalities of the drive and argues that the analyst must hold the place of the radical nothing outside meaning.