The intensity of pain that you can experience seems to be without any limit and so to exceed experience understood as mental representation or as in that way symbolic, but to be a direct encounter with reality. Intense intractable physical pain is the body's pain and not something that arises in association with a body image. The fact that pain has no 'ceiling' reinforces this impression. And yet in spite of this certain drugs acting on the nervous system are able to neutralise the pain, at least for a short time. In other words, the sharp distinction between the real and the imaginary/symbolic in enacted entirely within the latter's structures.