The big Other

In plain words

You learn to speak a language that existed before you, with names, rules and expectations that you did not choose. Lacan called that wider system "the Other", written with a capital letter and the symbol A, to separate it from the "little other" (a), the people you compare yourself with. The big Other is not a person. It is the background against which anyone's wishes get a shape.

Where the idea comes from

Lacan uses algebraic notation, with the big Other (l'Autre) as A and the little other (l'autre) as a. He ties the big Other to language and the law, so it belongs to the Symbolic order (see the symbolic, the imaginary and the real). The Wikipedia article quotes him saying that the Other is "a locus in which speech is constituted" and that "the unconscious is the discourse of the Other". The mother is usually the first figure to occupy that position for the child, and the child eventually finds that the Other is incomplete, since a signifier is always missing; Lacan marks this with a bar through the A, the "barred Other".

The notion of alterity was shaped by Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel (1933–1939), and the Other appears in Lacan's mirror-stage work of 1936 and 1949 and in his Seminar IV. His formula that "man's desire is the desire of the Other" links the idea to desire and lack. The little other belongs to the Imaginary, as a reflection of the ego (see the mirror stage).

How it shows up

In everyday terms, the big Other is the sense of "what is expected", "what people say", "what is done". Someone who acts to satisfy an imagined audience, who feels watched while alone, or who cannot want something that nobody around them would approve of, is described in Lacanian writing as addressing the big Other. This is a way of reading, not an observation anyone can make from outside.

Oneli, the AI agent on TwentyThird, is itself a risk here: a member might treat it as an audience. It says it is an AI and does not act as one's judge. It can notice whose voice a member quotes when describing what they should do.

What it is not

It is not God, society or a particular person, though Lacanian writers use it for all of these in different places. It is not a general-psychology term. Critics argue about the framework around it: André Green argued that the unconscious is not structured like a language, because Freud tied it to thing-presentations rather than word-presentations, and Luce Irigaray criticised the phallocentric symbolic order the Other belongs to. Use it as a concept from one school, with its disputes.