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→Phallic Phase
==Phallic Phase==
[[Freud]] called the [[development|period]] between [[development|three and five years of age]] the "[[phallic phase]]." The [[phallic phase]] denotes a [[stage]] in [[development]] in which the [[child]] ([[boy]] or [[girl]]) knows only one [[biology|genital organ]] - the [[phallus|penis]]. At this stage, infants of both sexes are dominated by the question of who possesses a penis and the related issue of its masturbatory jouissance (gratification). [[Freud]] argues that children of both [[sexual difference|sexes]] set great value on the [[phallus|penis]], and that their discovery that some [[human]] [[being]]s do not possess a [[phallus|penis]] leads to important [[psyche|psychical]] consequences. Up to this point, the mother is imagined as having a penis, and the discovery that she lacks a penis, after an initial denial, precipitates the castration complex.
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Freud had his first intuition of the primacy of the phallus as early as 1905 in "Three essays on the theory of sexuality"; it is explicitly discussed in "The infantile genital organization," which Freud offered in 1923 as a complement to "Three Essays." In this later text, the predominance of the phallus is linked to the problematic of castration in the following way:
<blockquote>The main characteristic of this 'infantile genital organization' is its difference from the final genital organization of the adult. This consists in the fact that, for both sexes, only one genital, namely the male one, comes into account. What is present, therefore, is not a primacy of the genitals, but a primacy of the phallus. [ Freud 1923, p. 142 ]</blockquote>
The fact that the essential role of only one genital organ is recognized at a certain stage in infantile sexual development implies that this primacy, from the outset, is not located in the realm of anatomical reality or on the level of organs, but precisely on the level of what a lack of the organ might represent subjectively.
Freud ( 1923) makes the same radical distinction by linking castration to the phallic order and not to the penis.
<blockquote>The lack of a penis [my italics] is regarded as a result of castration, and so now the child is faced with the task of coming to terms with castration in relation to himself. The further developments are too well known generally to make it necessary to recapitulate them here. But it seems to me that the significance of the castration complex can only be rightly appreciated if its origin in the phase of phallic primacy is also taken into account. [ Freud's italics] [p. 144]</blockquote>
In fact, sexual difference is constituted from the outset on the basis of this notion of lack: the feminine genital organ is different from the masculine one only because it lacks something. In addition, the product of observation (perceptual reality) is immediately elaborated on the subjective level as a conception: Freud writes "the lack of a penis is regarded as."
As Freud ( 1923) puts it, this lack confronts the child "with the task of coming to terms with castration in relation to himself" (p. 144).
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<!-- It is in the domain of these Freudian references that Lacan systematizes the problematics of the phallus as foundational to psychoanalytic theory. Specifically, Lacan establishes the phallus as the primordial signifier of desire in oedipal triangulation. The Oedipus complex plays itself out around locating the position of the phallus in relation to the desire of the mother, the child, and the father. A dialectical process develops in two modes: that of being the phallus and that of having the phallus. -->
=Jacques Lacan=
