The symbolic order, also known as the register, is an expression used by Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and a number of other representatives of semiotics to highlight the social order as a symbolic arena in which human beings are involved and prevented from acting. As a result of such involvement and participation, the symbolic is internalized, which makes it somewhat more open in which the subjects are located. It is already a dimension of their subjectivity.
The most important institution that creates this order is language, but law, morality, and religion are also important.
Only through the tensions and inhabitation of the symbolic order is human subjectivity genetically shaped.
For psychoanalytically oriented semiotics such as Lacan and Kristeva, involvement in the symbolic order is related to the Oedipal conflict.
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