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→To Have or to Be the Phallus?
=To Have or to Be the Phallus?=
The feminist critique of psychoanalysis focused on two particularly problematic strands of Freud's thought. First, feminists saw psychoanalysis as propagating a form of biological essentialism in the sense that one's anatomy - whether or not one has or does not have a penis - determines one's sexual identity. And there is indeed more than a little truth in this. Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962), for example, went so far as to argue that 'biology is destiny' and the attempts to revise Freud's 'phallocentrism' by Jones, Bonaparte and Horney had paradoxically resulted in much more deterministic and essentialist theories of sexual development. The second critique advanced by feminism is that psychoanalysis always defines women negatively in relation to men. For Freud, men are seen as active agents while women are defined in terms of passivity. By the 1960s and early 1970s these two critiques were firmly established and widely accepted within feminism (see Kate Millet's classic feminist text Sexual Politics (1977 [1969]) for a clear statement of these criticisms), and consequently the psychoanalytic explanation of sexual difference was displaced through the study of gender as a social construct. It was within this context that Lacan's idiosyncratic formulations of sexual difference were received. Lacan's insistence that all notions of a stable fixed identity are a fiction rather than biologically given were seen to provide feminists with the possibility of a non-essentialist psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference.
From a Lacanian perspective the unconscious is that which undermines any stable or fixed identity and that includes a stable sexual identity. For early Lacan, sexual difference is not a question of biology but of signification; masculinity and femininity are not anatomically given but are subject positions defined through their relationship to the phallus as signifier. As we saw previously, for Lacan, the phallus is a signifier that is related, but not directly equivalent, to the penis and, as Jacqueline Rose points out, the importance of the phallus as signifier is precisely 'that its status in the development of human sexuality is something which nature cannot account for' (1996a: 63). The phallus is the signifier of lack. The phallus functions initially as an imaginary object - an object presumed to satisfy the mother's desire. It then functions symbolically through the recognition that desire cannot be satisfied and that as an object it will remain beyond reach. The rupturing of the imaginary unity between mother and child inaugurates the movement of desire and simultaneously the process of signification. The phallus thus represents a moment of rupture or division that re-enacts the fundamental division of the subject. In this sense, the phallus represents lack for both boys and girls, as both sexes are symbolically castrated. Castration for Lacan is a very different process from that elaborated by Freud and involves a fundamental loss for both sexes, that is to say, the giving up of some part of one's jouissance. In order to come into being as desiring subjects we are forced to acknowledge the impossibility of the total fulfilment of our jouissance. Castration designates that fundamental loss for which the phallus is the signifier. What we need to keep in mind here, if we are not to confuse these terms and, more importantly, if we are not to confuse them with the actual physical organ, is that jouissance is related to the drive and the real, while the phallus is a signifier and is related to the symbolic. The 'difference' between a male and a female castration complex, therefore, is how the subject represents this primordial lack or loss, and it is here that the asymmetry of the Oedipus complex becomes apparent. Boys can 'pretend' to have the phallus, while girls must be the phallus. What does this mean? Having and being the phallus represents two modes of identification that cover over this primary lack. Through the Oedipus complex boys recognize the mother's desire and lack. They then identify her object of desire with the father, assuming that he has the phallus. In short, the boy shifts from the mother as a lacking other to the father as possessor of the phallus. Thus, boys pretend to have the object of desire for the Other (women). This is only 'pretence', however, because they never possessed the phallus in the first place; the phallus is always elsewhere.
Women, on the other hand, have to undergo the rather more complex procedure of giving up on the notion of 'having' the phallus before they can identify with the mother and thus become the object of desire for the Other (men). Lacan linked this process through which women must give up an essential part of themselves in order to be the phallus with the concept of masquerade:
Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I am saying that it is in order to be the phallus, that is to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that a woman will reject an essential part of femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade. It is for that which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved. (Lacan 1977d [1958]: 289-90)
It is through the masquerade that a woman's 'not-having' the phallus is transformed into 'being' the phallus.
=Femininity as Masquerade=
