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In privation, on the other hand, it is the lack that is real. Lacan designates this type of lack as a hole in the real. But the object of privation is a symbolic object.
Finally, in castration, the lack involved is symbolic, since it concerns the incest taboo, the symbolic reference par excellence. It is this that makes the paternal function operative in governing the child's access to the symbolic order. The lack signified by castration is above all, as Lacan puts it, a symbolic debt. But in castration the object that is lacking is radically imaginary and can never be a real object. This imaginary object of castration is, of course, the phallus.