If fantasy is the support that gives consistency to what we call reality (Ž Sublime Obj:49) on the other hand reality is always a symptom (Ž 1992). Here we are insisting on the late Lacanian conception of the symptom as sinthome.
In this conception, a signifier is married to jouissance, a signifier is instituted in the real, outside the signifying chain but at the same time internal to it. This paradoxical role of the symptom can help us understand the paradoxical role of fantasy. Fantasy gives discourse its consistency because it opposes the symptom (Ragland-Sullivan, 1991:16). Hence, if the symptom is an encounter with the real, with a traumatic point that resists symbolisation, and if the discursive has to arrest the real and repress jouissance in order to produce reality, then the negation of the real within fantasy can only be thought in terms of opposing, of stigmatising the symptom. This is then the relation between symptom and fantasy.
The self-consistency of a symbolic construction of reality depends on the harmony instituted by fantasy.
This fantasmatic harmony can only be sustained by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalised lack that crosses the field of the social. (Stavrakakis 1999, 64-65)
But how is this done? If social fantasy produces the self-consistency of a certain construction it can do so only by presenting the symptom as an alien, disturbing intrusion, and not as the point of eruption of the otherwise hidden truth of the existing social order (Ž 1991 Looking Awry:40). The social fantasy of a harmonious social or natural
order can only be sustained if all the persisting disorders can be attributed to an alien intruder. […]
When, however, the dependence of fantasy on the symptom is revealed, then the play — the relation — between the symptom and fantasy reveals itself as another mode of the play between the real and the symbolic/imaginary nexus producing reality. (65)