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=Summary=
LAcan reformulated the central complex of psychoanalysis, the Oedipus omplex, as a ''symbolic structure.''
Thus, for Lacan, the threat of castration does not involve an actual bodily threat but a symbolic process, as the infant assumes a psoition in the symbolic order as a desiring subject.
Similarly, LAcan radically reformualted the role of the father.
The role of the father in psychoanalysis depends not upon the presene of an actual father but upon a signifier, the paternal metaphor, which subsittues the desire fo the motehr with symbolic law.
It is through the intervention of the Name-of-the-Father that the dyadic relationship of the imaginary is broken and the phallus is installed as the original lost object.
The phallus is the original object-cuase of desire and the central organizing signifier of the unconscious.
These ideas are linked through the notion of the two fathers ot the function of the superego, as at once the itnernalization of the symbolic law and the desire to transgress this law.
