The Oxford English Dictionary defines fake as ​“an activity or action, typically one characterized by dishonesty or deception.”^[1] It tells us that, from the mid-to-late 19^th century, fake was used as ​“a stratagem, a trick, a dodge; a method of swindling, a con; an act of tampering with or falsifying something.”^[2] Fake thus carries connotations of deception and falsification, even of trickery. If, as Lacan put it, our era is one that is characterized by ​“the rising to the social zenith of the object,”^[3] it is also one where there is a seemingly endless proliferation of the domain of the fake: from fake news to fake orgasms, from false memories to false affects. But, from the perspective of psychoanalysis, is fake a logical variant of the ​“lying truth”?^[4]

Lying Truth and Making True

The lying truth, unlike the fake, is not without a link to the subject of enunciation, to the subject of the unconscious, even to the body of the speaking-being. Miller says that the lying truth is a ​“truth that lies about jouissance,” which is a ​“register of existence, where truth does not apply.”^[5] He specifies that what is at stake in an analysis is to ​“make truth [faire vérité] out of what has happened.” In a subject’s experience of life, ​“there are things that failed to become true, traumatism, that which makes a hole, which is what Lacan will later call troumatisme. It is a question of bringing discourse to what could not take place in it, of saying what could not be said.”^[6]

Whereas fake is on the side of falsification, the lying truth serves an altogether other function: it borders the hole, putting speech to the unspeakable. Furthermore, there is the ​“making true” [faire vrai] aspect of an analysis, with its two sides: first, as Patricia Bosquin-Caroz highlights, it has to do with what Lacan refers to as ​“a stroke of meaning, a sens blanc”^[7]; second, it makes affect, the resonance-effect of the signifier in the body, into an effect of truth.^[8] ​“This verification of affect,” Miller says, ​“has therefore the value of indicating that, in psychoanalysis, affect is not true from the outset, it has to be made true.”^[9] From this perspective, we can say that between the fake and the lying truth, there is the time of ​“making true” that links jouissance to its cause.

Guises of the Real

Today, common discourse is saturated with signifiers — false self, constructed persona, fake personality, etc. — that testify to the unknotting of subjective experience. These signifiers could lead us to the hypothesis that while beauty might be the last defense against the real, today fake names a minimal first defense covering it. In our era of the fake, psychoanalysis, which Lacan ultimately calls a swindle, cannot but remain oriented toward the various guises of the real: troumatisme, the hole of trauma; anxiety, an affect that does not deceive; feminine jouissance, in its link to the body; and sinthome, denuded of the signifying metaphor.

1. “Fake.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/fake_n2?tab=meaning_and_use#4675595. Accessed 15 November, 2025. ↑
2. Ibid. ↑
3. Lacan, J., ​“Radiophonie”, Autres écrits, ed J.-A. Miller, Seuil, 2001, p. 414. ↑
4. Lacan, J., ​“Preface to the English-Language Edition of Seminar XI.” The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A. Sheridan, New York/London: Norton, 1977, p. ix. ↑
5. Miller, J.-A., ​“Truth Is Coupled with Meaning,” The Lacanian Review. 2, 2016, p. 9. ↑
6. Ibid., p.10. ↑
7. Bosquin-Caroz, P., ​“Presentation of the NLS Congress Theme 2026: Varity — Variations of Truth in Psychoanalysis,” 2025, NLS Congress. Avaialble at:https://www.amp-nls.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/ARGUMENT-NLS-CONGRESS-2026-PBC‑1.pdf. [TN] Sens blanc a blank of meaning homophonic with semblant. ↑
8. Miller, J.-A., ​“Les Affects dans l’Expérience Analytique” La Cause du Desir 93, 2016, p.103. ↑
9. Ibid., p.102. ↑