The Stranger Within: The Other, the (A), and Psychoanalysis

Migration isn't just about crossing geographical borders. It's also about crossing symbolic borders: a language that isn't ours, codes we can't grasp, and ways of life that demand new gestures from us. In this displacement, the stranger isn't revealed merely as a social figure, but as an intimate experience: being a stranger to oneself. And being a stranger to oneself is the very essence of psychoanalysis.

This is where the contribution of Argentine psychoanalyst Alfredo Eidelsztein becomes invaluable. He proposes a differentiation between the Other and the (A), a distinction that opens up avenues for us to reflect on immigration and, more broadly, on the subject in analysis.

The Other refers to someone who embodies and occupies the place from which we receive our own message. It is a function sustained by a speaking subject, even if this subject never fully coincides with the place they occupy. The (A), on the other hand, represents the symbolic order: the field of language, law, and significants. It is a virtual place, a "treasure of significants," always empty and without incarnation.

Although distinct, the Other and the (A) are intertwined in our experience. After all, when someone speaks to us, it's a subject embodying that place; but what is at stake is not just their speech—it's also the traversing of the code, language, and culture that sustain them.

This distinction helps us think about immigration. Migrating means coming face-to-face with a radically different Other: another language, other codes, other ways of inhabiting the world. This displacement brings to light the symbolic dimension of the (A), as it shows that, behind every encounter, there is a field of significants that precedes and determines us. At the same time, it's not possible to access this field except through the mediation of subjects who, with their own marks, embody this place of the Other.

But this experience doesn't belong only to the immigrant. All of us, to some extent, are strangers in relation to ourselves. Analysis is precisely this movement of estrangement, in which the subject can listen to their own message coming from an Other place. As Mirta Goldstein reminds us:

The subject in analysis is an immigrant, migrating from one subjective position to another.

In this process of displacement—whether geographical, subjective, or analytic—the experience of the Unheimlich, the uncanny, also emerges, just as formulated by Freud (The Uncanny, 1919). Migrating, in both the literal and psychic sense, is often about encountering what seemed familiar, but which, displaced from its context, becomes unsettling. The mother tongue that is no longer sufficient, the habitual gestures that lose their meaning, the body that feels inept in the face of new codes—all of this updates a feeling of internal foreignness.

The Unheimlich reveals that the most intimate can become strange, and that, in this estrangement, the subject is summoned to re-inscribe themselves in the symbolic. This is where analysis operates: as a space where the unfamiliar can be heard in a new light, and where the discomfort of not recognizing oneself can pave the way for new ways of inhabiting the self.

The clinical setting thus reveals itself as a place of this crossing: a space of speaking, where something can find a voice and, in being spoken, open up gaps for the unprecedented. It is about sustaining a field in which the subject is welcomed in their singularity, without judgment or prescriptions, but with the wager that something new can emerge. It is in this movement that other subjective positions become possible, new ways of inhabiting the word—and, with it, the world.

René Magritte, The Forbidden Reproduction, 1937.

EIDELSZTEIN, A; Las Estructuras clínicas a partir de Lacan. Vol. I (2003, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2017, 2019).

FREUD, S. O inquietante. 1919. In: ____. Obras completas, volume 14: História de uma neurose infantil (“o homem dos lobos”), além do princípio do prazer e outros textos (1917-1920). 1ª ed. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010.

GOLDSTEIN, M; Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental (Rev. Latinoam. Psicopat. Fund.), São Paulo, v. 12, n. 3, setembro 2009, p. 85, no artigo “A condição errante do desejo: os imigrantes, migrantes, refugiados e a prática psicanalítica clínico-política”.