Identity and the Big Other
Discussion
Cadell Last:
"The big Other tends to be something that the subject uses to “guarantee the consistency and coherence of the symbolic order”. To give very simple examples, if someone strongly identifies with a “national identity” or a “religious identity” and regulates its fundamental boundaries with this “Other” (e.g. United States citizen, Christian etc.) then this would be the example of a “big Other”. What is crucial is that the subject will interpret everything “within the boundary of the big Other” to be “consistent/coherent”, and everything “without the boundary of the big Other” to be “inconsistent/incoherence” “otherness” (further info).
For Lacan, the big Other has a type of imaginary function that would prevent the subject from actually understanding the notion “I is an Other”. The notion “I is an Other” is literally saying that the “I” (in terms of present identity, or subjective experience/disposition) finds its truth in “becoming other to itself” (i.e. the subject is split between itself and otherness). So, for example, when I was a teenager, I identified as an athlete and couldn’t imagine a summer where I was not playing baseball (reified repetition; in some sense being a “professional baseball player” was like a “big Other” to me). However, through many subjective catastrophes, this identity changes and became something totally other (eventually an academic identity). Now today I have a certain professional identity, but I am also aware that it (I) could become totally other to what I am right now (I is an Other). I know that in ten years I could be almost as different if not more different then I was in relation to my teenage self as a baseball identity.
In this relationship I would suggest that the more open one can be to otherness and finding one’s identity in otherness, the less shocking or traumatic it will be to undergo fundamental transformations of identity. However, if you have a very strong “big Other” imago (to use the Jungian term), then when it inevitably collapses, it will lead to a state of “subjective destitution” (further info). Many people can turn their Mothers/Fathers into “big Others” if they haven’t overcome their infantile images, for example."