A term from French philosophy that has several, sometimes overlapping meanings in cultural studies, including anthropology and psychoanalysis.
1 Most commonly, another person or group of people who are defined as different or even sub-human to consolidate a group's identity. For example, the Nazi's internal cohesion depended in part on how they defined themselves against (strove to maintain distinctions from) their image of the Jews. In this sense, "The other" is the devalued half of a binary opposition when it is applied to groups of people. (See binary opposition.)
2 A "specular" other. In the thought of Jacques Lacan, human infants have an image of themselves as whole before they actually have control over their bodies. This "mirror phase" in their development gives them an image of wholeness to strive for, but it is also alienating because the image in the mirror does not match their burping, defecating reality. Presumably we might spend our entire life trying to achieve a kind of wholeness and integration, this time on a psychic level, that is ultimately at odds with how our brains and bodies, and certainly language, works. For this reason, images of our doubles may be experienced as threatening and sinister (see Dopplegänger).
3 The "symbolic" Other. The Other that is always capitalized. For Jacques Lacan and many other French philosophers, to be is to speak, but to speak is use a system of representations that precede us. To the extent that our inner thought processes (how we represent ourselves and our experience to ourselves) are shaped by language, we are as much "spoken" or "inscribed" as we are speaking. In this account, our consciousness is created by a kind of intrusion from the outside, a kind of alien Other that structures our subjectivity.
(See The Feminist Dictionary of Psychoanalysis)
http://www.sou.edu/English/IDTC/Terms/terms.htm
http://www.sou.edu/English/IDTC/Terms/terms.htm
Doppelgänger:
Dopplegänger
comes from German; literally translated, it means “doublegoer.” A
dopplegänger is often the ghostly counterpart of a living person. It can
also mean a double, alter ego, or even another person who has the same name. In
analyzing the dopplegänger as a psychic projection caused by unresolved
anxieties, Otto Rank decribed the double as possessing traits both complementary
and antithetical to the character involved.
Example: In Psycho, by Robert Bloch, Norman Bates becomes so distraught after killing his mother in a jealous rage that he gradually takes on her personality. She becomes his alter ego, and by the end of the novel has taken over his mind completely. Other famed doubles in Gothic lore include Jekyll/Hyde, Victor Frankenstein/his monster. . . .(relationship to repression: the doppleganger represents the inverted opposite of that which is repressed: appetite/bulimia, celibacy/abusive priests, anti-drugs/Rush Limbaugh and pain pills etc.)
http://www2.gasou.edu/facstaff/dougt/goth.html#dop