Symbolic order

The Symbolic (or Symbolic Order) is a part of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, part of his attempt "to distinguish between those elementary registers whose grounding I later put forward in these terms: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real — a distinction never previously made in psychoanalysis".

Lacan's early work was centred on an exploration of the Imaginary, of those "specific images, which we refer to by the ancient term of imago. ... it set out from their formative function in the subject". Thereafter "[t]he notion of the "symbolic came to the forefront in the Rome Report [1953] ... henceforth it is the symbolic, not the imaginary, that is seen to be the determining order of the subject".

Lacan's concept of the symbolic "owes much to a key event in the rise of structuralism ... the publication of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Elementary Structures of Kinship in 1949. ... In many ways, the symbolic is for Lacan an equivalent to Lévi-Strauss's order of culture": a language-mediated order of culture. "Man speaks, then, but it is because the symbol has made him man ... superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature". Accepting then that "language is the basic social institution in the sense that all others presuppose language", Lacan found in Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic division of the verbal sign between signifier and signified a new key to the Freudian understanding that "his therapeutic method was 'a talking cure'".

For a decade or so after the Rome Report, Lacan found in the concept of the symbolic an answer to the neurotic problematic of the imaginary: "It is the task of symbolism to forbid imaginary capture ... supremacy of the symbolic over the imaginary ... supremacy of the symbolic over the real". Accepting through Lévi-Strauss the anthropological premise that "man is indeed an 'animal symbolicum'", and that "the self-illumination of society through symbols is an essential part of social reality", Lacan made the leap to seeing "the Oedipus complex - in so far as we continue to recognise it as covering the whole field of our experience with its signification" - as the point whereby the weight of social reality was mediated to the developing child by the (symbolic) father: "It is in the name of the Father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law".

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