Neuromythography

The Architecture of the Soul

Jacques Lacan developed his own brand of Freudian psychoanalysis. His formulation of mind proposed three domains: the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real, which lends itself to a lot of linguistic analysis in the Symbolic domain.

He created an algebraic notation for his psychological constructs, known as Lacanian algebra. One of Lacan’s more amusing eccentric quips was that the role of the phallic function (i.e. the male sex organ) in the Imaginary domain is analogous to the square root of -1 in the imaginary plane of mathematics.

Lacan developed a pair of constructs he called the little other and the Big Other, that neuromythography claims have biological correlates in the social domains governed by vasopressin and oxytocin, respectively.

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