On the symbolic Other (4 of 4) : Desire and the Other

No discussion of the big Other is adequate - especially for those with clinical interests - unless we broach the topic of how the Other impacts the subject. A series of issues come to the fore here. How does Lacan’s concept of the big Other complicate our everyday distinction between the ’internal’ (the intra-psychic domain) and the ’external’? Psychical subjectivity, it seems, is more the result of symbolic (over)determination than we might have imagined. Furthermore: how can we definitively distinguish between imaginary ’little’ mirror-image others and the big symbolic Other? And how does this distinction allow us to separate two lines of identification, namely those of imaginary ideal-ego identification from symbolic Ego-Ideal identification? Before turning to the multiple means of Hegel’s idea, adopted and reformulated by Lacan, that desire ’is always the desire of the Other’, we consider the sad situation when world-record breaking athletic performances are not se