Other

For the movie, see The Other. For the Doctor Who character see Other (Doctor Who).

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The other or constitutive other is a key concept in psychology and philosophy where it is often considered to be what defines or even constitutes the self (see self (psychology), self (philosophy), and self-concept) and other phenomena and cultural units: "What appear to be cultural units--human beings, words, meanings, ideas, philosophical systems, social organizations--are maintained in their apparent unity only through an active process of exclusion, opposition, and hierarchization. Other phenomena or units must be represented as foreign or 'other' through representing a hierarchical dualism in which the unit is 'privileged' or favored, and the other is devalued in some way." (Cahoone 1996). Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, saw apprehension of the other as the basis for ethics, and as a limit on ontology.

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The poet Arthur Rimbaud may be the earliest to express this idea: "Je est un autre" . Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science phrased it thus: "You are always a different person." Ferdinand de Saussure described language as, in Calvin Thomas' words, a "differential system without positive terms". Jacques Lacan argued that ego-formation occurs through mirror-stage misrecognition, and his theories were applied to politics by Althusser. Also see Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. (Thomas 2000). Yet before all these it was used by the German philosopher, Hegel, who said: 'Each consciousness pursues the death of the other', meaning that in seeing a separateness between you and another, causing a feeling of alienation, you try to resolve it by dissolution into a higher synthesis. Hegel's famous parable of the Master and Slave uses this concept of "the other" to great effect. Famous French feminist, Simone De Beauvoir, adopted this Hegelian notion of the Other, in her description of how male-dominated culture treats woman as the Other in relation to man. .

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According to Warner (1990) "the modern system of sex and gender would not be possible without a disposition to interpret the difference between genders as the difference between self and Other...having a sexual object of the opposite gender is taken to be the normal and paradigmatic form of an interest in the Other or, more generally, others." Thus according to Warner, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis hold the heterosexist view that if one is attracted to people of the same gender as one's self one fails to distinguish self and other, identification and desire, and is "regressive" or an "arrested" function. He further argues that heteronormativity covers its own narcissist investments by projecting or displacing them on queerness.

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The Other: :This article is about the movie, The Other. For the psychological topic, see Other. For the Doctor Who character, see Other (Doctor Who)....

Doctor Who: Doctor Who is a long-running British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC about a mysterious time-travelling adventurer known only as "The Doctor". It is also the title of a 1996 television movie featuring the same character. It is common to see the show's title abbreviated as D...

Other (Doctor Who): The Other is a fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A legendary figure in Time Lord history, the Other does not appear in the television series itself, but is mentioned several times in the spin-off media based on the programme....