The Symbolic

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Symbolic (or Symbolic Order of the Borromean knot) is the order in the unconscious that gives rise to subjectivity and bridges intersubjectivity between two subjects;^{[citation needed]} 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. In the later psychoanalytic theory of Lacan, it is linked by the sinthome to the Imaginary and the Real.

'It is in the dimension of a synchrony that you must situate the unconscious' (SXI: 26).

— Lacan

In Lacan's theory, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other and thus belongs to the Symbolic. It is also the realm of the Law that regulates desire in the Oedipus complex, and is determinant of subjectivity. A formative moment in the development of the Symbolic in a subject is the Other giving rise to the objet petit (a)utre, establishing lack, demand and need. However, when it becomes an empty signifier, psychosis, which Freud had failed to tackle in theory, develops from an unstable metonymic sliding of the signified (i.e., foreclosure). "The signifier", which in Lacan's theory is above the signified as opposed to Saussure's unity of signifier and signified, "is that which represents a subject for another signifier."

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.

Lacan uses a French double entendre of nom (name) vs. non (no-no) to contextualize Freudian incest prohibition into a figurative, linguistic framework; the name-of-the-father (no-of-the-father) signifier quilts the lattice of signifiers with a "paternal metaphor", a master signifier that "double stitches" the meaning of the Symbolic Order over the Imaginary Order by establishing the Law, a prohibition of imaginary demand by supplanting symbolic desire.

The name-of-the-father is a "binary signifier" while the phallus is a "unary signifier".

Lacan's term for such elected transcendental constants is the 'point de capiton,' which Žižek describes as the ultimately fake 'quasi-transcendental master signifier that guarantees the consistency of the big Other.'