Understanding Otherness: The Architecture of Identity and Exclusion

Listen Now

Transcript below

Today, I will talk about otherness.

My name is Simone, I’m a psychoanalyst, and I’ll be hosting today’s episode.

Otherness

It is a fundamental concept in philosophy, sociology, and psychology that describes the process by which a majority group (the “In-group”) identifies a minority group (the “Out-group”) as being fundamentally different.

The Roots of Othering

The concept of the “Other” was popularised in the 20th century. At its core, othering serves two primary functions:
Identity Formation: We define who we are by defining who we are not. A group often feels closer by separating itself from others.
Power Dynamics: By labelling a group as “Other,” the dominant group justifies the exclusion, marginalisation, or colonisation of that group.

Foundational Philosophical Frameworks

Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic: Hegel says we only know who we are through other people. He explains this with a story where two people engage in a life-and-death struggle for recognition as both want to be recognised. One becomes the master and the other the slave. The master has power, but he stops growing and depends on the slave. The slave, through work, slowly gains a deeper understanding of himself.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Sartre says that being looked at by another person changes how we feel about ourselves. When someone else looks at us, we stop feeling completely free and start feeling like an object. In that moment, we move from being an active subject to feeling like something seen and judged in the other person’s world.

Simone de Beauvoir and the “Woman as Other”: de Beauvoir argues that men have historically positioned themselves as the “Subject” or the “Absolute,” relegating Woman to the status of “Other”.
This subordination is maintained through myths of the “eternal feminine” helped keep women in a passive role, stuck in repetition and limitation, while men were free to act, create, and move beyond those limits.

READ MORE: The Difference Between Otherness and Alterity

The Psychoanalytic Perspective

Sigmund Freud: The Uncanny
Freud explored Otherness through the idea of the Uncanny – the uneasy feeling that appears when something familiar suddenly feels strange. He argued that what we find “creepy” in the outside world is often a repressed part of our own psyche being projected outward.

Jacques Lacan
Lacan made a crucial distinction between two types of otherness:
The little other: This refers to others who are like us – our peers or reflections. This begins in the Mirror Stage, where a child sees their reflection and identifies with it, creating an ego based on an external image.

The Big Other: This refers to language, law, and social conventions. It is the “symbolic order” that exists before we are born and makes it possible for us to speak, relate, and exist as social subjects.

LEARN MORE: Jacques Lacan Philosophy

Jean Laplanche: Otherness
For Laplanche, otherness begins in early childhood, when the adult unconsciously sends the child confusing and emotionally charged messages that the child cannot fully understand, as the child lacks the mental tools to translate these messages, and they remain unprocessed and settle inside the mind as foreign elements, creating an internal “other” that does not fully belong to conscious thought. Over time, these untranslated messages become the core of the unconscious. Later, inner conflicts, anxieties, and repetitive patterns are shaped by this early presence of something inside the self that feels strange, and intrusive.