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In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean rings)Thurston, Luke, "Ineluctable Nodalities: On the Borromean Knot", in: Dany Nobus (ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Other Press, pp. 144-145. is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects; an example is Jacques Lacan's idea of desire as the desire of the Other, maintained by the Symbolic's subjectification of the Other into speech. (1994). 9780814741986, New York University Press. ISBN 9780814741986 In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.
Early on, Lacan considered his attempt "to distinguish between those elementary registers whose grounding I later put forward in these terms: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real" to be "a distinction never previously made in psychoanalysis", because Freud had not encountered semiotic ideas, but had encountered phenomena in case studies that warranted a semiotic understanding.Jacques Lacan. 1997. Écrits: A Selection. London.
The name-of-the-father is a "binary signifier" while the phallus is a "unary signifier".
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.David Macey. 1994. "Introduction." Pp. i–xxvii in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, by J. Lacan. London. Therefore, "Man speaks…but it is because the symbol has made him man" which "superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature."Accepting that "language is the basic social institution in the sense that all others presuppose language,"Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. London. p. 60. 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.'"Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, as quoted in Macey 1994: xxvii.
The imaginary now came to be seen increasingly as belonging to the earlier, closed realm of the dual relationship of mother and child—"Melanie Klein describes the relation to the mother as a mirrored relationship … neglecting the third term, the father"Jacques Lacan. 1982. "Seminar III." Pp. 57–8 in Feminine Sexuality, edited by J. Mitchell and J. Rose. New York. —to be broken up and opened to the wider symbolic order.
Lacan's shorthand for that wider world was the Other—"the big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words which … are public, communal property."Hill, Philip. 1997. Lacan for Beginners. London. p. 73, 160. But though it is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is involved also in the Imaginary and the Real. The symbolic dimension of language is that of the signifier, in which elements have no positive existence but are constituted by virtue of their mutual differences.
By the turn of the decade (1968–71), "Lacan gradually came to dismiss the Oedipus … as 'Freud's dream'",Clemens, J., and R. Grigg, eds., 2006. Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis: Reflections on Seminar XVII. London. p. 51. despite his own earlier warning of the dangers if "one wishes to ignore the symbolic articulation that Freud discovered at the same time as the unconscious…his methodical reference to the Oedipus complex."
Whether his development of the concept of jouissance, or "the 'identification with the sinthome' (as the naming of one's Real) advocated in Lacan's last works as the aim of psychoanalysis,"Lorenzo Chiesa. 2007. Subjectivity and Otherness. London. p. 188. will in time prove as fruitful as that of the symbolic order perhaps remains to be seen. Part of Lacan's enduring legacy will surely however remain bound up with the triumphal exploration of the symbolic order that was the Rome Report: "Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join together … the shape of his destiny."
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