symbolic (symbolique)
One of the three ‘orders’ (the others are the imaginary and the real) which, according to Jacques Lacan, structure human existence. Lacan adapted the concept from the work of French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, Claude, who, in turn, took his model from the work of Swiss linguist Saussure, Ferdinand de. Taking Saussure’s idea that the signifier is arbitrary in its relation to the signified, that there is in effect no necessary link between a representation and its meaning, Lévi-Strauss extended this principle to all cultural phenomena and argued that what had to be understood was the symbolic system that gives all phenomena their specific meanings. Lacan adopts this argument and adds two important implications of his own: first, that the unconscious must be structured like a language for it to have produced such a system and to be able to exist within it; second, that the subject is born into the symbolic system which they have to learn to use and this experience is alienation. For Lacan the maturation of the ego occurs when the child is inducted into the symbolic order. psychosis, for Lacan, is the state of being one falls into if this process of induction into the symbolic fails and the subject is left stranded in the illusory world of the imaginary.