Understanding Alterity: The Bridge Between Self and Other
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Transcript below
Today, I wil explore the concept of alterity.
My name is Simone, I’m a psychoanalyst, I’ll be hosting this episode.
Table of Contents
Alterity is the state of being other or different. It focuses on the radical distinction between the “Self” and the “Other.”
The Key Pillars
• Irreducibility: We cannot reduce a person to a single label (e.g., their race, job, or religion).
• Reciprocity: Recognising that while someone is an “Other” to us, we are also an “Other” to them.
• Ethical Responsibility: The idea that our encounter with difference demands a moral response.
Alterity vs Similarity
Similarity feels safe because it mirrors the image we already have of ourselves. It works like talking to someone who agrees with everything we say: nothing new appears, and our sense of identity stays untouched.
Alterity feels uncomfortable because it introduces something that does not fit our expectations. It is like hearing a viewpoint that disrupts our usual way of thinking or meeting someone who cannot be easily understood. This discomfort forces movement, questioning, and change.
In Philosophy
Alterity, in philosophy, is used to reflect on ethics, responsibility, and the limits of what we can know. It highlights the point where understanding reaches its boundary. It shows that the other cannot be fully understood, controlled, or turned into something familiar. The other resists being absorbed or mastered, and this resistance is precisely what demands ethical respect rather than domination.
In Psychoanalysis
Freud: The Other Inside
Freud showed that the mind is not a single, unified whole. Instead, it is divided, with parts that do not fully belong to conscious awareness.
Thoughts, desires, and fears can appear strange or unfamiliar, as if they come from elsewhere, even though they arise from within. This inner unfamiliarity shows that we are never completely clear or transparent to ourselves. The unconscious acts as an inner “other,” influencing us without being fully known or controlled.
Lacan: The Big Other
Lacan explained alterity through the idea of the Big Other. The Big Other is not a person, but the shared system we are born into.
It represents rules, social norms, language, and meanings that exist before us and shape how we think and speak. The Big Other shows that our desires and identities are formed in relation to something outside us, not created by us alone.
LEARN MORE: Jacques Lacan Philosophy
Jean Laplanche: Radical Alterity
Laplanche placed it (otherness) at the origin of psyche, as the child receives messages from an adult that are confusing and full of emotion. These messages go beyond what the child can understand or explain. It is like being spoken to in a language they do not yet know. Because the child cannot fully process them, these early messages leave marks in the mind and later appear as inner tension and conflict.
Alterity and Relationships
Relationships become difficult because we often expect others to think, feel, and love in the same way we do. It is like assuming everyone sees the world through our own glasses.
This expectation denies alterity. When we treat the other as a copy of ourselves, we erase their difference. Conflict appears not because the other is wrong, but because they are truly different, and that difference was never accepted.