ABSTRACT
The first thing to say about the Symbolic is that one is born into it. It is not a way of representing the world that one occasionally stumbles into, not a form of experience only encountered in dreams, but rather is made up of the very staging posts that make any experience of the world possible. The Symbolic itself has a history: the first symbolic cave art dates from about 40,000 years ago, soon after the time when people first began to speak complex languages. This history is, as it were, incorporated into the life of any child born into the world today: depending on the nature of this Symbolic, a child will have very different experiences of the world. The edges, the borders, the limits, and the anxieties that the child encounters are produced by the pathways through this Symbolic. Pathways, contours, detours, impasses: all approaches to subjective history form part of the body of the Symbolic.
