Talk:Phallus

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he term is rarely used by Freud but is central to Lacan's reorientation of psychoanalytic theory.

For Lacan the concept of the phallus refers primarily to the imaginary and symbolic value taken on by the biological penis in the ourse of the subject's accession to language and the symbolic.

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Although he often refers to the existence of the phallic stage in which children believe the penis to be the sole sexual organ and explain femininity in terms of castration, Freud normally uses the noun 'phallus' to refer to the ancient symbol of royal power.

Lacanians often attempt to find a phallus/penis distinction in Freud's writings, but he himself usually uses the two words as synonyms and rarely makes a clear distinction between the two.

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Lacan's theory of the phallus was elaborated in the 1950s.

In the 1955-6 seminar on the psychoses (published 1981), the phallus is described as the mediating element in the castration complex and as an imaginary object which the child finally recognizes as being in the possession of its father.

In Lacan's major paper on the significance of the phallus (1958), it is redefined as a privileged signifier which facilitates the articulation of desire and the logos, and as the symbol of sexual difference itself.

The phallus is the object of the mother's desire, and the child identifies with it in an attempt to satisfy both the mother's desire and its own desire for the mother.

In this recasting of Freud's description of the Oedipus complex, the subject's insertion into language and the symbolic is a form of castration which obliges the child to recognize that it cannot possess the phallus because it is not an attribute of an individual, but a symbol.

It is the symbol of sexual difference in that there is no corresponding female symbol or signifier; both male and female subjects are constituted as male and female with reference to it.

Elsewhere Lacan describes the phallus as appearing in place of the lack of the signifier in the other (the mother) and as the signifier of desire itself (1991).

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The theory of the phallus is one of the most ocntroversial aspects of Lacan's work and it has triggered important debates relating to the fraught relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism.

It has been argued that the introduction of the concept of the phallus allows sexual difference to be understood in symbolic and non-biological terms and that it renders obsolete the criticisms of psychoanalysis that focus on the notorious issue of penis envy.

Conversely, it has also been said that the symbolic function ascribe to the phallus valorizes the biological penis by making it a sign of masculine privilege, and thus naturalizes male dominance.

For Derrida, the notion of a 'privileged signifier' is unsatisfactory in that it contradicts Saussure's basic thesis that signifiers acquire value and meaning only because they are different from other signifiers.

The idea of a privileged signifier implies the existence of a transcendental point of origin for language as a whole, and reproduces the metaphysics of logocentrism in the form of phallogocentrism.






However, Lacan warns his students that the complexity of this symbol might be missed if they simply identify it with the Symbolic phallus.[1]

The symbol is more correctly understood as designating 'the phallic function'.[2]

In the early 1970s Lacan incorporates this symbol of the phallic function in his formulae of sexuation.

Using predicate logic to articulate the problems of sexual difference, Lacan devises two formulae for the masculine position and two formulae for the feminine position.

All four formulae revolve around the phallic function, which is here equivalent with the function of castration.



Lacan goes on in 1961 to state that the Symbolic phallus is that which appears in the place of the lack of the signifier in the Other.[3]

It is no ordinary signifier but the Real presence of desire itself.[4]

In 1973 he states that the Symbolic phallus is 'the signifier which does not have a signified'.[5]


The Symbolic phallus is written PI in Lacanian algebra.



Dictionary

The term "phallus" designates the representation of an erect penis, which plays a key role both intra- and inter-subjectively. Freud barely distinguished between the fantasized phallus and the anatomical penis. He called the period between three and five years of age the "phallic stage." 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), which is clitoral in the case of girls. 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. Jacques Lacan chose to use the term "phallus" for the imaginary and symbolic representation of the penis in order to better distinguish the role of the penis in the fantasy life of both sexes from its anatomical role. Freud's famous "symbolic equation" of breast, feces, penis, and baby (1916-1917a [1915-1917], 1918b, 1924d) already implied this distinction between the real penis and its phallic representations. According to Lacan, the phallus at the outset represents what else the mother desires is in addition to the baby. Thus, a pre-oedipal triangle of mother, phallus, and infant arises. At first the infant tries to be the phallus for the mother until the moment of a crucial transformation when the child, after identifying the phallus as a static image of completeness and sufficiency, sees it as representing the mother's desire, and thus her lack. From then on, the phallus takes the form of something missing (-') within any imaginary, and hence libidinal, frame of reference. Thus the phallus comes to signify desire, Lacan says. The intermittence of its erection, its ability to fade (compare Ernest Jones's concept of aphanisis), and even the fact that half of all humans do not have it have made the erect penis eminently suited to symbolize the crucial issues of being (subject) and having (object) in both sexes. The penis constitutes the key element in the asymmetrical division that, according to Roman Jakobson, characterizes any symbolic system. When the phallus takes on the role of signifier, this implies that the subject grasps it in the Other, the locus of the set of signifiers that determines the subject. There it signifies the Other's desire, which is to say that the Other is marked by her own incompleteness. From then on, the phallus signifies the Other's submission to the laws of symbolic exchange, and such incompleteness frees up in the subject her own jouissance. In his seminar on female sexuality (1998), Lacan further specified what he meant by the term "phallic jouissance." He used the phallic signifier (Φ) in writing his "formulas of sexuation," which posit that every human being has to be on one side or the other of the sexual divide. A woman always has something of the phallus (she is not entirely castrated), and the man is only supposed to "have" the phallus when he fantasizes his castration. In Lacan's symbolic notation, the phallus takes on the formal role of a supplement, which adds to the castration complex the fact that "there is no sexual relation," as Lacan said, referring to the impossibility of writing an equation of the relationship between the sexes.

Phallus

Freud's work abounds in references to the penis.

Freud argues that children of both sexes set great value on the penis, and that their discovery that some human beings do not possess a penis leads to important psychical consequences (see Castration Complex).

However, the term 'phallus' rarely appears in Freud's work, and when it does it is used as a synonym of 'penis'.

Freud does use the adjective 'phallic' more frequently, such as in the expression 'the phallic phase', but again this implies no rigorous distinction between the terms 'phallus' and 'penis', since the phallic phase denotes a stage in development in which the child (boy or girl) knows only one genital organ - the penis.


Lacan generally prefers to use the term 'phallus' rather than 'penis' in order to emphasise the fact that what concerns psychoanalytic theory is not the male genital organ in its biological reality but the role that this organ plays in fantasy.

Hence Lacan usually reserves the term 'penis' for the biological organ, and the term 'phallus' for the Imaginary and Symbolic functions of this organ.

While this terminological distinction is not found in Freud's work, it responds to the logic implicit in Freud's formulations on the penis.

For example, when Freud speaks of a symbolic equation between the penis and the baby which allows the girl to appease her penis envy by having a child, it is clear that he is not talking about the real organ.[6]

It can be argued, then, that Lacan's terminological innovation simply clarifies certain distinctions that were already implicit in Freud's work.

Although not prominent in Lacan's work before the mid-1950s, the term 'phallus' occupies an ever more important place in his discourse thereafter.

The phallus plays a central role in both the Oedipus Complex and in the theory of sexual difference.


The phallus and the Oedipus complex

The phallus is one of the three elements in the Imaginary triangle that constitutes the preoedipal phase.

It is an Imaginary object which circulates between the other two elements, the mother and the child.[7]

The mother desires this object and the child seeks to satisfy her desire by identifying with the phallus or with the phallic mother.

In the Oedipus complex the father intervenes as a fourth term in this Imaginary triangle by castrating the child; that is, he makes it impossible for the child to identify with the Imaginary phallus.

The child is then faced with the choice of accepting his castration (accepting that he cannot be the mother's phallus) or rejecting it.

The phallus and sexual difference

Lacan argues that both boys and girls must assume their castration, in the sense that every child must renounce the possibility of being the phallus for the mother; this 'relationship to the phallus . . . is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes'.[8]

The renunciation by both sexes of identification with the imaginary phallus paves the way for a relationship with the symbolic phallus which is different for the sexes; the man has the symbolic phallus (or, more precisely, 'he is not without having it' [il n'est pas sans l'avoir]), but the Woman does not.

This is complicated by the fact that the man can only lay claim to the symbolic phallus on condition that he has assumed his own castration (has given up being the imaginary phallus), and by the fact that the woman's lack of the Symbolic phallus is also a kind of possession.[9]

The status of the phallus: Real, Imaginary or Symbolic?

Lacan speaks of the real phallus, the imaginary phallus and the symbolic phallus:

The real phallus

As has already been observed, Lacan usually uses the term 'penis' to denote the real biological organ and reserves the term 'phallus' to denote the imaginary and symbolic functions of this organ.

However, he does not always maintain this usage, occasionally using the term 'real phallus' to denote the biological organ, or using the terms 'symbolic phallus' and 'symbolic penis' as if they were synonymous.[10]

This apparent confusion and semantic slippage has led some commentators to argue that the supposed distinction between the phallus and the penis is in fact highly unstable and that 'the phallus concept is the site of a regression towards the biological organ'.[11]

While the imaginary phallus and the symbolic phallus are discussed more symbolic phallus.

The phallus has no corresponding female signifier; 'the phallus is a symbol to which there is no correspondent, no equivalent. It's a matter of a dissymmetry in the signifier.'[12]

Both male and female subjects assume their sex via the Symbolic phallus.

Unlike the Imaginary phallus, the Symbolic phallus cannot be negated, for on the Symbolic plane an absence is just as much a positive entity as a presence.[13]

Thus even the Woman, who lacks the Symbolic phallus in one way, can also be said to possess it, since not having it the Symbolic is itself a form of having.[14]

Conversely, the assumption of the Symbolic phallus by the man is only possible on the basis of the prior assumption of his own castration.

Criticisms of Lacan

Of all Lacan's ideas, his concept of the phallus is perhaps the one which has given rise to most controversy.

Objections to Lacan's concept fall into two main groups.


Firstly, some feminist writers have argued that the privileged position Lacan accords to the phallus means that he merely repeats the patriarchal gestures of Freud (e.g. Grosz, 1990).

Other feminists have defended Lacan, arguing that his distinction between the phallus and the penis provides a way of accounting for sexual difference which is irreducible to biology (e.g. Mitchell and Rose, 1982).



The second main objection to Lacan's concept of the phallus is that put forward by Jacques Derrida (Derrida, 1975) and echoed by others.

Derrida argues that, despite Lacan's protestations of anti-transcendentalism, the phallus operates as a transcendental element which acts as an ideal guarantee of meaning.

How can there be such a thing as a 'privileged signifier', asks Derrida, given that every signifier is defined only by its differences from other signifiers?

The phallus, in other words, reintroduces the metaphysics of presence which Derrida denominates as logocentrism, and thus Derrida extensively by Lacan than the real phallus, he does not entirely ignore the latter.

On the contrary, the real penis has an important role to play in the Oedipus complex of the little boy, for it is precisely via this organ that his sexuality makes itself felt in infantile masturbation; this intrusion of the Real in the Imaginary preoedipal triangle is what transforms the triangle from something pleasurable to something which provokes anxiety.[15]

The question posed in the Oedipus complex is that of where the real phallus is located; the answer required for the resolution of this complex is that it is located in the real father.[16]

The real phallus is written H in Lacanian algebra.

The Imaginary phallus

When Lacan first introduces the distinction between penis and phallus, the phallus refers to an Imaginary object.[17]

This is the 'image of the penis',[18] the penis imagined as a part-object which may be detached from the body by castration,[19] the 'phallic image'.[20]

The Imaginary phallus is perceived by the child in the preoedipal phase as the object of the mother's desire, as that which she desires beyond the child; the child thus seeks to identify with this object.

The Oedipus complex and the Castration Complex involve the renunciation of this attempt to be the Imaginary phallus.

The Imaginary phallus is written 9 (lower-case phi) in Lacanian algebra, which also represents phallic signification.


Castration is written -e (minus lower-case phi).


The Symbolic phallus

The Imaginary phallus which circulates between mother and child serves to institute the first dialectic in the child's life, which, although it is an Imaginary dialectic, already paves the way towards the Symbolic, since an Imaginary element is circulated in much the same way a signifier (the phallus becomes an 'Imaginary signifier').

Thus Lacan's formulations on the Imaginary phallus in the seminar of 1956-7 are accompanied by statements that the phallus is also a Symbolic object[21] and that the phallus is a signifier.[22]

The idea that the phallus is a signifier is taken up again and further developed in the 1957-8 seminar and becomes the principle element of Lacan's theory of the phallus thereafter; the phallus is described as 'the signifier of the desire of the Other',[23] and the signifier of jouissance.[24]

These arguments are stated in their most definitive form in Lacan's paper on 'The signification of the phallus'.[25]

The phallus is not a fantasy, if by that we mean an Imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.). It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolises. . . . The phallus is a signifier. . . . It is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified.[26]

Whereas the Castration Complex and the Oedipus complex revolve around the Imaginary phallus, the question of sexual difference revolves around the concludes that, by articulating this with phallocentrism, Lacan has created a phallogocentric system of thought.

Kid A In Alphabet Land

Kida p.gif

Kid A In Alphabet Land Pacifies Another Pernicious Persona - The Phony Phallus!

You're An Abominable Erection! You Demand To Be Raised To The Level Of Signifier, But You Need To Be Veiled, To Hide What You Haven't Got! Wouldn't You Like It Both Ways! But By Making The Woman Rigid, You Make Her Frigid! Humph! You're Only So Much Meat!


See Also

References

  1. ↑ S8, 296
  2. ↑ S8, 298
  3. ↑ S8, 278-8 1
  4. ↑ S8, 290
  5. ↑ S20, 75
  6. ↑ Freud, 1917c
  7. ↑ S3, 319
  8. ↑ E, 282
  9. ↑ S4, 153
  10. ↑ S4, 153
  11. ↑ Macey, 1988: 191
  12. ↑ S3, 176
  13. ↑ see E, 320
  14. ↑ S4, 153
  15. ↑ S4, 225-6; S4, 341
  16. ↑ S4, 281
  17. ↑ S4, 31
  18. ↑ E, 319
  19. ↑ E, 315
  20. ↑ E, 320
  21. ↑ S4, 152
  22. ↑ S4, 191
  23. ↑ E, 290
  24. ↑ E, 320
  25. ↑ Lacan, 1958c
  26. ↑ E, 285
  1. Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917a [1915-1917]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15-16.
  2. ——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.
  3. ——. (1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. SE, 19: 171-179.
  4. Lacan, Jacques. (1998). On feminine sexuality: The limits of love and knowledge (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1972-1973.)
  5. ——. (2002). The signification of the phallus. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1958.)

See Also

References

  1. Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917a [1915-1917]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15-16.
  2. ——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.
  3. ——. (1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. SE, 19: 171-179.
  4. Lacan, Jacques. (1998). On feminine sexuality: The limits of love and knowledge (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1972-1973.)
  5. ——. (2002). The signification of the phallus. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1958.)



Index
Phallic function, 39, 71, 76, 79
as contingent, 59, 94
negation and, 72
woman and, 17,73-74
See also Phallus; Phallic jouissance
Phallic jouissance, 64
Phallus, 7-8, 9, 28-29, 81, 94
and man, 7, 71, 76
woman and, 7, 73-74
See also Phallic function; Phallic jouissance


Trash

Freud does use the adjective "phallic" more frequently, such as in the expression the "phallic phase", but again this implies no rigorous distinction between the terms "phallus" and "penis", since the phallic phase denotes a stage in development in which the child (boy or girl) knows only one genital organ - the penis. Freud's famous "symbolic equation" of breast, feces, penis, and baby (1916-1917a [1915-1917], 1918b, 1924d) already implied this distinction between the real penis and its phallic representations.

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