The Symbolic Condom: Why Depression and Anxiety Create Stories, but ADHD doesn’t | by Lastrevio | Aug, 2025 | Medium

The Lacanian Real is the pre-symbolic and unimaginable register of experience. It is that which always returns, but which remains unsaid and unseen. It is the singularity in a black hole — space and time stops, we cannot see it, but nevertheless everything gravitates around it. We can never directly experience the real, but we often feel its effects. The confrontation with the real is simultaneous with the breakdown of the symbolic, where an unexpected event suddenly shatters all our symbolic coordinates, all of the stories and narratives we tell to ourselves. Your parents suddenly die in a character accident, or an earthquake destroys your home and you are left on the streets. All the stories you told yourself (“I am the son of X and Y, I live a comfortable life in Z city”) suddenly get destroyed in this absurd, meaningless event. The real is the site of meaninglessness. From a semiotic perspective, meaning emerges within the symbolic register as a way to separate us from the real, to

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