Social Reality - Socialisation and The Capital Other

Socialisation and The Capital Other

Freud saw a child's induction into social reality as consolidated with the passing of the Oedipus complex and the internalisation of the parents: "the same figures who continue to operate in the super-ego as the agency we know as conscience...also belong to the real external world. It is from there that they were drawn; their power, behind which lie hidden all the influences of the past and of tradition, was one of the most strongly-felt manifestations of reality".

Lacan clarified the point by stressing that this was "a highly significant moment in the transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, what I call the Capital Other...the field of the Other - which, strictly speaking, is the Oedipus complex". Lacan considered that "the Oedipus complex...superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of nature", bringing the child into the Symbolic Order.

Within that order, Lacanians consider that "institutions, as signifying practices, are much more extensive structures than romantic notions allow and they thus implicate us in ways which narrower definitions cannot recognize...exceed any intersubjective intention or effect". In similar fashion, Searle asserts that "institutional power - massive, pervasive, and typically invisible - permeates every nook and cranny of our social lives...the invisible structure of social reality".