Rothenberg, Molly Anne. The Excessive Subject. Polity Press, 2010.
Only the encounter with significative excess produces the subject as a social subject, serving as the means for freeing the child from the closed world of dyadic meanings and ushering him into the world of circulating (not completely stable) meanings available for appropriation and re-signification.
The Symbolic is not a systematic set of proscriptions, rules, practices, or any other substantively specifiable content shared alike by everyone else in the social field: it is not a system of stable meanings, even though it may seem that way at times and even though one might fervently wish or imagine it to be so. Rather, the Symbolic is a psychic register, the register of significative excess and appropriability.
In this register, in the mind of the individual, resides a collocation of meanings that have significance for that person, meanings which are always to some extent fantasmatically shared with others. These meanings come from the world of bodily experience, parental behaviours and dicta, extended familial practices and beliefs, the school environment, and the larger social world. Of course, people sometimes overlap in their habitation of these worlds: siblings, schoolmates, neighbors, party members, fellow religionists, countrymen, and conlinguists may share signifiers and contexts. Yet the significance invested in even the most closely overlapping elements may be radically different from person to person — and from time to time for the same person. Even children raised in the same house have different experiences and attach different meanings to the same events, parental actions, family narratives, and emotional states taking place in their home environments (88).