: The realm of language, social laws, and culture. Lacan calls this the "Big Other" —a pre-existing system of rules we are born into that structures our desires and identity.
: Lacan posited that humans are inherently divided by language; once we enter the Symbolic order, we are "barred" from our true being. Mathemes and Topology : The realm of language, social laws, and culture
Before diving into the topography of the mind, one must grasp Lacan’s foundational axiom. Where Freud spoke of condensation and displacement , Lacan saw metaphor and metonymy . Taking a structuralist view of Saussurian linguistics, Lacan argued that the unconscious is not a primordial soup of instinctual drives (a cellar of monsters, as it were); rather, it is a linguistic network . : The realm of language