On the symbolic Other (3 of 4): The Other scene

How does Lacan’s idea of the big Other connect back to Freud’s ideas? Well, the ideas of the mOther tongue and of the Other voice speaking within my own link us back to Freudian notions of the unconscious and help us better appreciate Lacan’s idea of the unconscious as ’the discourse of the Other’. How though are we to account for the fact that the big Other seems at times to be a theory about language (big Other as ’treasury of signifiers’, as ’third in every dialogue’) and others a theory about authority (a ’point of appeal’, ’the locus of the truth’)? We respond to this question by discussing how God might be represented, and thinking about the mantra of the London Underground (“Mind the Gap“). Lacan’s later formula for the big Other as a subject of transference (that is, the Other as ’Subject supposed to know“) likewise proves helpful. We end by thinking about how Freud’s idea of the ’Other scene’ as the location of unc