The big Other operates at a symbolic level.

This symbolic space acts like a yardstick against which I can measure myself. This is why the big Other can be personified or reified in a single agent: the ‘God’ who watches over me from beyond, and over all real individuals, or the Cause that involves me (Freedom, Communism, Nation) and for which I am ready to give my life.

This brings us back to Freud who, in the development of his theory of trauma, changed his position in a way strangely homologous to Einstein’s above-mentioned shift. Freud started with the notion of trauma as something that, from outside, intrudes into our psychic life and disturbs its balance, throwing out of joint the symbolic coordinates that

As Lacan puts it, the lamella does not exist, it insists: it is unreal, an entity of pure semblance, a multiplicity of appearances that seem to enfold a central void – its status is purely phantasmatic. This blind, indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called the ‘death drive’, and here we should bear in mind that ‘death drive’ is,

The Freudian unconscious caused such a scandal not because of the claim that the rational self is subordinated to the much vaster domain of blind irrational instincts, but because it demonstrated how the unconscious itself obeys its own grammar and logic: the unconscious talks and thinks. The unconscious is not the preserve of wild drives that have

What is it that separates us humans from the ‘real Real’ targeted by science, what makes it inaccessible to us? It is neither the cobweb of the Imaginary (illusions, misperceptions), which distorts what we perceive, nor the ‘wall of language’, the symbolic network through which we relate to reality, but another Real. This Real is for Lacan the Real

Such a displacement of our most intimate feelings and attitudes onto some figure of the Other is at the very core of Lacan’s notion of the big Other; it can affect not only feelings but also beliefs and knowledge – the Other can also believe and know for me. In order to designate this displacement of the subject’s knowledge onto another, Lacan

In other words, when a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not: ‘The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people,’ but rather: ‘You may think that the commodity appears to you

We should not be surprised, then, to find an echo of this duality in Freudian theory: on the one side the hermeneutics of the unconscious, interpretations of dreams, slips of the tongue or other such ‘mistakes’, symptoms (exemplified in Freud’s three early masterpieces The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and The Joke