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→The Symbolic Phallus
==The Symbolic Phallus==
It is through the intervention of the [[Name-of-the-Father]] that the [[imaginary]] unity between [[child]] and [[mother]] is broken.
The [[father]] is assumed to possess something that the child lacks and it is this that the mother desires.
It is important here though not to confuse the Name-of-the-Father with the actual father.
The Name-of-the-Father is a symbolic function that intrudes itno the illusory world of the child and breaks the imaginary dyad of the mother and child.
The child assumes that the father is one that satisfies the mother’s desire and possesses the [[phallus]].
In this sense, argues Lacan, the [[Oedipus complex]] involves an element of substitution, that is to say, the subtitution of one signifier, the desire of the mother, for another, the Name-of-the-Father.
It is thoruhg this initial act of substitution that the process of signification begins and child enters the symbolic order as a subject of lack.
It is also for this reason that Lacan describes the process of symbolization itself as ‘phallic’.
It is through the Name-of-the-Father that the phallus is installed as the central organizing signifier of the unconscious.
The phallus is the ‘original’ lost object, but only insofar as no one possessed it in the first place.
The phallus, therefore, is not like any other signifier, it is the signifier of absence and does not ‘exist’ in its own right as a thing, an object or a bodily organ.
Lacan equates the process of giving up the [[imaginary phallus]] with Freud’s account of [[castration anxiety]], but he argues that the process of castration in Freud is more complicated than people generally think.
Castration involves not just an [[anxiety]] about losing one’s penis but simultaneously the recognition of ‘’lack’’ or ‘’absence’’.
The child is concerned about losing its own penis and simultaneously recognizes that the mother does not have a penis.
The idea of the penis, therefore, becomes metonymically linked to the recognition of ‘’lack’’.
It is in this sense that Lacan argues that the phallus is not simply the penis; it is ‘’ the penis plus the recognition of absence or lack’’.
Castration is not the fear that one has already lost, in the case of girls, or will lose, in the case of boys, one’s penis but rather the symbolic process of giving upo the idea that one can be the phallus for the mother.
The intervention of the father distances the child from the mother and also places the phallus forever beyond its reach.
If the symbolic father is seen to possess the phallus, then the child can only become a subject itself in the symbolic order by renouncing the imaginary phallus.
The problem for Lacan is how does one symbolically represent ‘lack’ – something that by definition is not there?
His solution is the idea of the ‘veil’.
The presence of the veil suggests that there is an object behind it, which the veils covers over, although this is only a presumption on the part of the subject.
In this way the veil enables the perpetuation of the idea that the object exists.
Thus, both boys and girls can have a relationship to the phallus on the basis that it always remains veiled and out of reach.
The phallus provides the vital link between desire and signification.
It is desire that drives the process of symbolization.
The phallus is the ultimate object of desire that we have lost and alwayss search for but never had in the first place.
To summarize, the phallus stands for that moment of rupture wen the child is forced to recognize the desire of the other; of the mother.
“The mother is refused to the child in so far as a prohibition falls on the child’s desire to be what the mother desires.”
The phallus, therefore, always belongs somewhere else; it breaks the mother/child dyad and initiates the order of symbolic exchange.
In this sense the phallus is both imaginary and symbolic.
It is imaginary in that it represents the object presumed to satisfy the mother’s desire; at the same time, it is symbolic in that it stands for the recognition that desire cannot be satisfied.
By breaking the imaginary couple “the phallus represents a moment of division which re-enacts the fundamental splitting of the subject itself.
As a presence in absence, a ‘seeming’ value, ‘’the phallus is a fraud’’.
=The Law of the Father and the Superego=
