describes the relation to the mother as a mirrored relationship [...] [neglecting] the third term, the father"--to be broken up and opened to the wider symbolic order.

Lacan's shorthand for that wider world was the Other--"the big other, that is, the other of language, the Names-of-the-Father, signifiers or words [which] [...] are public, communal property." But though it is an essentially linguistic dimension, Lacan does not simply equate the symbolic with language, since the latter is