The Logic of

SEXUATION

SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture

Henry Sussman, editor

The Logic of
SEXUATION
From Aristotle to Lacan

ELLIE RAGLAND

State University of New York Press

Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
2004 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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Production, Dana Foote
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 1941
The logic of sexuation : from Aristotle to Lacan / Ellie Ragland.
p. cm. (SUNY series in psychoanalysis and culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6077-0 (alk. paper) ISBN 0-7914-6078-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sex (Psychology) 2. Lacan, Jacques, 1901 I. Title. II. Series.
BF175.5.S48R34 2004
155.3dc22

2004041706
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedicated to my mother, Lucile Stowe Ragland, and my brother, Gene Ragland,

with love and gratitude for their support and encouragement

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CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

1
On the Signication of the Phallus (1958)
According to Lacan 1
2
Freuds Female Sexuality (1931) and Femininity (1932):
Oedipus Revisited via the Lacanian Pre-Oedipus 29
3
Feminine Sexuality, or Why the Sexual Difference Makes All the Difference:
Lacans For a Congress on Feminine Sexuality (1958) 65
4
A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay:
Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes through Lacans Theory of Sexuation 91
5
The Place of the Mother in Lacanian Analysis:
Lacans Theory of the Object, or Castration Rethought
Conclusion

179

Notes

193

Index

209

vii

143

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jacques Lacan (19011981) may be considered the most important thinker in France
since Rene Descartes and the most innovative and far-ranging thinker in Europe since
Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud. Lacans formation was that of a
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in the Freudian school. His return to Freuds theories,
however, and particularly his rethinking of Freuds early observations on symbols,
language, and sexuality led him to a rereading of Freuds texts that is so comprehensive
and so radical that it virtually constitutes a new vision of man. Lacans further work on
sexuality and sexuation links jouissance (libidinal enjoyment) to language in a way that
redenes the two kinds of knowledge that constitute what we call mind, but with the
mind depicted as inseparable from the body. He, thereby, makes sense of Freudian
libido as mental/bodily energy that functions as the subject of desire and the object of
enjoyment.
Lacans teaching put an end to an era when it was possible to talk about the
human subject without reference to the ethos of the language, desire, and jouissance
that structure it and, hence, condition all conscious and unconscious perception. In this
sense, Lacans revolutionary theories in psychoanalysis have immediate relevance for
philosophy, linguistics, literary theory, gender theory, and the wider disciplines in the
human sciences and humanities. Traditional philosophical dilemmas regarding the
nature of the perceiving subject and its relation to objects, the status of human
knowledge, the way knowledge is constituted as a dialectic, the meaning of sexuation as
a binding together of sexuality and culture in subjective sets of identications of fantasy
and unconscious memory, the structure of discourse, and the scope of freedom are all
problematized and given a new meaning in startling fashion by Lacans psychoanalytic
teaching.
The purpose of this book is to lay out the complex and elusive ideas of Jacques
Lacan regarding the meaning of the phallus, the sexual difference, feminine sexuality as
different from masculine sexuality, and the place of the mother in Lacanian teaching.
This is no small task because in redening these terms Lacan constructed a new theory
of what knowledge is, and an extensive theory of how jouissance forms a separate
knowledge system, as powerful as the more familiar system of representations. At stake
is a nding that surprises. The limit of rationality and freedom is psychosis. The logic
in play is that the psychotic has never inscribed the signier for sexual difference that

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments

causes the lack-in-being from which desire as a structural motivating principle is born.
In this sense, psychosis becomes an empirical proof of Lacans theories regarding the
differential distinction of all subject positions as a response to the phallic signier and
to the lack-in-being that he names castration.
Lacans theories require a three-dimensional logic to make sense. Conscious,
typical binary thought simply obscures the structure of the unconscious, made up as it
is of the symbolic, the imaginary, the real, and the symptom. Thus, any theory that
grapples with Lacans ideas by reducing them to one of his myriad thoughts risks not
understanding the breadth and scope of this teaching. Lacans claim that individuals
make the world of their thought equal to their own conscious understanding of it is
validated in such truncated readings of Lacan. The challenge for any reader is how to
approach this dense thought and unfamiliar use of language to ascertain what Lacan
meant. In this book I hope to have shed some light on this difcult aspect of Lacans
teaching such that psychological and philosophical studies that perplex over the referent and the cause of a given effect, for example, will have found answers to these age-old
questions in Lacans work.
My goal of rendering Lacans theory of sexuation accessible to any study of his
work presents a theory that broadens and deepens the study of gender, insofar as ones
sexuation joins culture/language to mind/body by an interweaving of castration and
the interpretation of sexual difference. Lacan argued that there is no signier for gender
in the unconscious. Given that there is no preordained male or female subject, there
cannot be transgendered subjects either. Jacques-Alain Miller has offered the theory
that biological boys and girls try to take their sexual identities from the Mother
<> Father parental couple, while unaware that the Male <> Female sexual couple is not
reducible to the parental couple. Lacan gives us the Masculine <> Feminine couple
wherein the masculine has to do with identication within the symbolic order of
language and social conventions while the feminine has to do with identication within
the real order of the seemingly impossible to say or grasp. Masculine and feminine
identications are not, then, equatable with biological sex. While the material of the
symbolic and the real will differ from culture to culture, one may nd that males who
are obsessionals in terms of desire are marked by feminine traits, while girls who are
hysterics are marked by masculine identicatory traits.
The hope has been expressed that a chronological ordering of Lacans teachings
by historical periods will provide nal clarity and insight. This is, certainly, a seductive
idea and one that has been applied to Freuds texts. But such a tactic implies a linear
progression in insight. Lacan taught that such a manner of reading Freud has led us to
undervalue the majesty of Freuds scattered and elusive discoveries. Although one can,
as Jacques-Alain Miller has demonstrated, trace clear periods of focus and development
in Lacans teachings, any periodization also follows Lacans ight from institution to
institution. This attests to the political, dangerous nature of Lacans words. But what is
truly gripping and unsettling is that Lacan often waits years to answer a question posed
twenty years before. His pronouncements continually double back on themselves and

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

consequently defy chronology. I have respected chronology in the sense that I have
sought to show how Lacans theories regarding the phallus, castration, femininity,
masculinity, and the object make sense of Freuds own impasses in his study of feminine
sexuality. I have started with Lacans essay on The Signication of the Phallus
(1958) and ended with his Seminar IV on The Object Relation, having studied his Congress
on Feminine Sexuality (1958) and his Seminar XX (19721973): Encore, in between.
Finally, I should like to record here my gratitude to the University of Missouri
for a years sabbatical leave during which I wrote this book. I am also grateful to my
mother, Lucile Stowe Ragland, for sharing her home with me and to my brother, Gene
Ragland, for nding me ofce space in which to work. Thanks go, as well, to the Lacan
Study Group with whom I have worked for two years for their suggestions and
questions in reading portions of my manuscript. Thank you Gregg Hyder, Filip
Kovacevic, Zak Watson, and Jack Stone. Further, I would like to thank the members of
the Guild House at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for the super coffee they
provided me while I was writing. I also appreciate help with typing up variations of my
editings from Christy Houle and Vickie Thorp. Other friends and colleagues with
whom I had discussions are too numerous to name. But I thank them one and all.

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1
On the Signication of the Phallus (1958)
According to Lacan

The idea that either Freud or Lacan can contribute anything new to an understanding
of the sexual difference has been rejected by many American feminists and psychoanalysts as well. By retracing the history of one small disagreement, we shall try to put
that view into perspective with the hope of redressing a balance that advances the study
of psychoanalysis as a theory of how mind is constituted and linked to the body. In his
return to Freud, Lacan maintained that not only does conscious thought emanate from
unconscious thought, moreover, it bifurcates into four different ways of thinking
depending on how the sexual difference is interpreted: (1) the normative masquerade,
(2) the neuroses (obsession and hysteria), (3) perversion, and (4) the psychoses. These
are structurations of desire that join mind to body, and are not meant here as pathologies or descriptions of varying sexual behaviors.
One of Lacans principle theses is that while there is a sexual rapport in the
animal world that seems to be based on instinct, humans have never had such a rapport
because of the perturbations caused by the linkage of fantasy and language to the
phallus () and castration (), as well as to the objects that rst cause desire. Thus,
each persons most basic partner is his or her own unconscious Other, not the other of
the relationship. Lacanian scholar and analyst Genevi`eve Morel goes so far as to call

Chapter 1

this an equation and principle thesis in Lacan: Sexual non-rapport is an equivalent of

the phallus. 1 Contrary to Freud, Lacan stressed that the meaning of the phallus is
linked to the fact that the penis is not the phallus.
The psychoanalytic debates of the twenties and thirties among Karl Abraham,
Karl Jung, Karen Horney, Hel`ene Deutsch, Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Hannah Segal,
and other post-Freudians could not make sense anymore than could Freud, of his
theories on feminine sexuality and the phallus. Each analyst had a different theory of
how feminine sexuality differed from masculine sexuality, and what the stakes truly
were in what Freud called Realitat (psychic reality). Although these debates were passionate, they never derived a thesis that elaborated a logic of psychoanalysis, not in
Freuds essays such as Some Psychic Consequences on the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes (1925), Female Sexuality (1931), and Femininity (1932), nor
in those written by his colleagues.2 Since those days, psychology, sociology and
poststructuralism, among others of the social sciences, have taken up the question of
the meaning of the sexual difference, but have not evolved a logic such as Lacans. Lacan
sought to make scientic sense of the sexual difference itself, not only within the eld of
psychoanalysis but by borrowing from other elds and, thereby, extending the meaning
and scope of psychoanalysis, logic, epistemology, and science, among other areas of
study.
The three Freud essays just mentioned bring up the question that bothers many
readers of Lacan. Why would he return to, or retain, Freuds use of the provocative
word phallus? If we scrutinize some of the disagreements regarding the term phallus,
starting with Lacans differing from Freud over the meaning of the word itself, perhaps
we can shed light on why some contemporary feminist thinkers such as Luce Irigaray
and others have (mis-)taken Lacan for Freud, arguing that he equated the word phallus
with the biological male organ, as Freud generally did. Lacan maintained that, from
early childhood on, individuals distinguish among the penis as a real organ, the phallus
as an imaginary object, and the phallic function of no as causative of a lack-in-being
(or castration). So far-ranging is Lacans thinking here that he gradually equates the
early perceptionwithin the rst few monthsof the sexual difference with the
construction of a dialectical base of mind: The latter emanates, strangely enough,
from the structuration of desire between losing an object and wanting its return.
Paradoxically, gender-based essentialist misreadings of Lacans thought remain closer
to Freuds biological reductionisms than to Freuds continual efforts to separate psychic reality from biological realities and exterior sensory data.
In this regard, Ernest Jones wrote: I think that the Viennese could reproach us
[Freud and his followers] with too high an evaluation of primordial fantasy life, at the
expense of exterior reality. To that we will answer that no serious danger exists that
analysts will neglect exterior reality insofar as it is always possible for them to underestimate Freudian doctrine on the importance of psychic reality.3 In that multiple
issues are raised in any consideration of what links psychic reality to the body, Lacan

On the Signication of the Phallus

followed Freuds own efforts to decipher the meaning of the phallus. But Lacans
attention to Freud here is also merely a touchstone for another investigationfor
answering the question of what constitutes reality. Lacan points out that even for
Freud the concept of reality remained simplistically split between exterior reality of
sense data (Wirklichkeit) and interior psychic reality (Realitat).4
Freud rst made this distinction in The Project for a scientic psychology in
1895.5 By 1889 he had put together the idea of a contrasted pair: Realitat versus the wish
or dream. Equating Realitat with the objective psychic reality that accomplishes a desire or
wish, he agreed that human psychism emanates from there. Lacan argued that one sees
in Freuds equation of psychic reality with a fullled wish the incipient notion of a
reality-based ego that marks Freuds second topology; there the ego serves as the
mediator between the id and the superego. Be it as a wish or an interceding ego, Freud
maintained that the nature of psychic Realitat is specied in its being constituted by the
realization of a desire (Westerhausen, p. 34). Moreover, the wish or dream accomplishes an objective concerning the Realitat. But in what would the realization of dream
desire consist? Freud admits in Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) that he does not
know.6
But Freud had another notion of reality as well, one following a master discourse kind of logic. He believed that the observable objects of the world bore the
reality of the interpretation(s) he attributed to them. For example, he did not doubt
that the ideal couple was derived from the oneness or unity of the mother and
infant dyad and was, indeed, an objective reality. In this, he was a kind of phenomenological empiricist who took his own observations and interpretations to
be positive facts, although he continually emended his interpretations in footnotes,
addenda, and through an essay style of constant correction of his own erroneous
views.
From the start of his teaching, Lacan began to restructure Freuds binary splits
between reality and fantasy, (biology and psyche, and so on). This culminated in his
own equation of fantasy with reality, wherein he proposed that unities of natural
rapport between mother and infant only exists at the level of imaginary fantasy. So
strong is this fantasy, Lacan insisted, that it eventually becomes the pervasive myth of a
totalized essential Womana kind of Ur-motherwho is thought (in Kleinian
fashion) to contain the object(s) that Lacan says cause desirethe gaze, the breast,
the urinary ow, the feces, the voice, the (imaginary) phallus, the nothing, and the
phoneme. The mothers constant temporal comings and goings are experienced by her
infant, not so much as organ losses, but as a fading away of the grounding whose force
eld is the surface of the infants own skin. The infant takes its body to be an imaginary
consistency or a surface cut into by the real of the holes created by maternal absences
and disappearances.
Jeanne Lafont refers to this simple topology of the one-dimensional border (or
edge) and the hole as being written like this:

Chapter 1

The hole and its edge are the base grammar of the real. In other words, the real is the
reality principle which one is always pushed to retrieve, rend, and expel because it
ex-sists outside the pleasures of imaginary bodily consistency and is felt as a rupture
of well-being and homogeneous comfort.7 Because the real was rst created by the
traumatic effects of loss, it must continually be mastered in that it is the central
structure of being. Thus, its rst form is that of a central void () that continually
shatters or, at least, perturbs an incipient egos sense of consistency and continuity.
Insofar as language gradually lls the holes, as well as being disrupted by them, it
contains its own material referent in the letter (letre) of being, as opposed to the
signier of language. No pregiven metalanguage serves as the source of thought and
memory, then. Rather than emanating from deep thought, language ties itself to the
unary traits of imaginary identications, real affects, symbolic conventions, and symptomatic sublimations of an ideal Fathers Name linked to a mothers enigmatic desire
and jouissanceLacans formulae for the Oedipus complex.
The Lacanian phallus is an imaginary copula, then, seeming to join the two sexes
for reproduction and/or love. But in the unconscious, the phallus is not inscribed as a
link to language. It is, rather, an effect of difference. Patients of Freuds attested, in fact,
to its imaginary properties of semblance or fantasy, Lacan taught. But they did not
conceptualize the phallus as lying behind the masks that make the visible seem to be
itself, and behind the words that try to name the real, while, instead, they repress, deny,
repudiate, or foreclose it. For this reason alone, Lacan denounced Aristotle for basing
logic on the grammar of language (Morel, pp. 9798). The reality of language lies in its
duplicity, not in its truth. In the late fties Lacan portrayed the phallus as a mask, and
normative sexual prescriptions of a given culture as a comic masquerade. One sees
why he would claim that we see the masquerade at work more clearly in Greek and
Roman art, or in Rabelais in the French Renaissance, than in contemporary Western

On the Signication of the Phallus

art where the Fathers Name signier has come unhooked from the law, thus forestalling comedy at its own expense (Morel, p. 21). Such comedy is to be found, nonetheless,
in television sitcoms and in other genres as well.
Later, we will return to the importance of Freuds efforts to distinguish between
a truly real psychic reality (Realitat) and one that accounts in a radically different way for
external reality (Wirklichkeit). He makes the distinction precisely on the issue of the
phallic phase. Indeed, Freuds claims regarding the phallus are responsible for the furor
regarding such a notion that raged within the psychoanalytic movement of his day. For
the moment, we will leave aside what Lacan called Freuds connections of desire to
reality, to focus, rather, on Freuds rst mentions of the phallus in 1923, 1924, and
1925 when he added the idea of a new libidinal stage of evolution he called the phallic
phase, common to both sexes. In the heated debates that took place among analysts from
1920 to 1935 regarding the phallic phase, the key issue was their attempt to understand
the true nature of the phallus in relation to the action of accomplishing a desire. As we
know, the disagreements were wide ung: Karl Abraham and Melanie Klein viewed the
phallus as an imaginary part-object that could just as easily be symbolized by the breast
as by any other organ; Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, and Karl Jung argued for equal and
equivalent principles of male womb envy and female penis envy, the Elektra complex
equaling the Oedipus complex, and so on.
Lacan returned to these biologically oriented debates to note that the organ was
always erroneously taken to be the-thing-in-itself. He argued that this phenomenological view kept the analysts in question from answering their own queries. Approaching
the question of the sexual difference, not from the viewpoint of organ reality, but as
something to be understood from the representational and libidinal registers of the
imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, Lacan, nonetheless, paid honor to Freud for
having seen and articulated the idea that unconscious phenomena are at issue in
the enigmatic meaning of the sexual difference. Beyond serving as a mask over the
sexual difference, or as an abstract signier that marks itthat is, as a propositional
functionthe meaning of the phallus is also a real sexual genital jouissance (+)
that links the body to conscious acts and thoughts via an everowing unconscious
language of fantasy and desire.
However, Lacans linking of the body to language by way of unconscious
fantasy, is never a light-hearted notion. He calls the fantasy a canker that appears in
the guise of enjoying the bodyenjoying the Other as body, as wellin such a way as
to disorganize ones experience of ones own body. This is a very different idea of the
body as fantasized (imaginary body) from Descartess concept of it as a res extensa
imagined in a pregiven space. For Descartess whole body, Lacan substitutes a body that
necessitates another kind of space: a topological space that is not limited to the three
dimensions of the imaginary, symbolic, and the real (Morel, pp. 2223.)
Stressing that Freud never claried his many thoughts on the phallus, Lacan
points to The Infantile Genital Organization: An Interpolation into Theory of

Chapter 1

Sexuality (1923) where Freud called the phallus an imaginary object. Throughout all
his texts commenting on the phallus, Freud alternated between describing it as
illusoryan imaginary object or illusory psychic realityand as the masculine genital
organ. Like Elizabeth Grosz and others, psychoanalytic theorist Anne Berman has,
somewhat accusatorally, suggested that it was Lacannot Freudwho introduced
the distinction between the penis and the phallus.8 Indeed, in many English mistranslations of Freuds precise terms, one would not necessarily know that the distinction is
Freuds own. In his article The Infantile Genital Organization (1923), for instance,
one easily sees that Lacans literal and correct reading of Freuds German would never
have resulted in his claiming to introduce contrasts between the penis and the phallus if
they had not already been clearly present in Freud.9
However, it was Lacan who added the proposition that the phallus orients
sexualityand, thereby, mentalityin a minimal number of interpretations of the
sexual difference that are based on how a child identies with the signier and agency
of the Fathers Name, as transmitted by the mothers unconscious desire. This proposition claims that ones sexual identity has a (phallic) basis in terms of which the sexual
difference has been interpreted as a castration to be repressed, denied, repudiated, or
foreclosed. For example, the obsessional (neurotic) takes knowledge as his master
signierS2 reduced to S1 as the phallic mark of his power. The hysteric (neurotic)
identies with her father, or a very close replica of him, in an equation of identity,
knowledge, and being with sexuation: /S jS1 . The normative subject of a given
social order takes the values and masquerades of the reigning symbolic Other as the
phallus to please, or to be: /. The perverse subject identies with being the object
(a) that would ll the Others lack, which he equates with bringing jouissance to The
Woman, or her feminine stand-in: /a. The psychotic forecloses the phallic no
which imposes a lack-in-being on other subjects, resulting in the identication of a
whole subject with a whole Other: S O.
These are the different pathways desire may take vis-`a-vis the castrating no
pronounced by the real father of jouissance, thereby dividing the sexes by placing an
incest taboo on the infant/mother dyad. In his later seminars Lacan argues that the
no creates holes in the symbolic, placing gaps or impasses between signiers, and
cuts in(to) the supposed consistency of the imaginary body, cuts whose effects create
erogenous zones of desire at the surface of the real of esh.10 In other words, the losses
of the primary object-cause-of-desire bring together the psychic operations of the
desire to replace a lost trait or pleasure and the construction of the eld of the partial
drives (the invocatory, oral, and anal drives), all referred to the primary scopic one.11
The second-level effect of the phallic interdiction is a no to being All One sex, an
androgyn.
The result of the anatomical difference is interpreted in the imaginary and
symbolic such that neither sex has the phallus, and neither sex is it. The masculine/
feminine opposition is not a binary difference then. Rather, a subtle dialectic of desire

On the Signication of the Phallus

organizes itself around the phallic signier whose effects are primary, but which
functions subsequently as a third term: a signier without a signied Lacan says ()/.
Moreover, the third-term effect produces a quadrature, mathematically speaking. That
is, three cannot cohere topologically at the place or site where the third category (the
real) ek-sists on the inverse side of a cross-cap

or Moebius strip [8] without making a kind of hole and knot at the point of the twist or
turn. Lafont says:
The cross-cap is a Moebius Strip where the hole would be reduced to a point, ignored and invisible. It is also the adjunction to a Moebius strip of a particular
stopper, named [(a)] by Lacan, and which has the particularity of being bilateral itself both in carrying, not only the central point which structures the cross-cap, but
also the double buckle of a Moebius strip. That is to say that it is at the center of
this dialectic between the hole and its edges. (Topologie lacanienne . . . , pp. 1819)
Indeed, any male or female may well pretend not to have it (phallic power or
its desirability) even though one has itbe it as a corporation president or the
mother in the kitchen running it (Morel, p. 26). In this sense, the phallus is commensurate with the master signier (S1 ). By reading on the obverse of the power/desire
dialectic, by aiming askew, one sees the Freudian distinction between the penis meaning
a biological organ and the phallus taken as a psychic reality. Lacan rst valorized this
concept of the phallus, not realizing, perhaps, that it would lead him to found a new
concept of the phallus. Lacans reconceptualization occurs, paradoxically, not at the
point where the terms penis or phallus are used interchangeably, but at the points where
Freud used the terms interchangeably in trying unsuccessfully to distinguish between
Realitat and Wirklichkeit.
Freuds concept of Realitat, Lacan argues, shows the phallus to be an imaginary
representation of an object of desirethe penis, the father himself, or a babyand in
Wirklichkeit, the phallus is a datum of biological reality in the sense of an organ that
enjoys: that is, the penis itself. Lacan argued that Ernest Joness errors were good
examples of how all the post-Freudians of the twenties and thirties made egregious
mistakes in proposing their own imaginary delineations. Indeed, their interpretations
reduced psychoanalysis to the positivistic study we now call psychology.12

Chapter 1

Jones, Lacan said, simply could not gure out how to give a symbolic status to
the phallus. For Lacan, symbolic status always implied a logic of the signier as that
which implies lack (/S) by representing a subject for another signier. Going back to
Aristotles logic of class and attribute, Lacan argues that language remained insufcient
and an obstacle to explaining the questions Aristotle raised. Lacan stressed, rather,
Gottlieb Freges, Ludwig Wittgensteins, and Ferdinand de Saussures ndings: That
the signier always differs from itself(a a); a does not equal a. I does not
equal itself from one speech act to the next: Frege, for example, was discontent with
the linguistic expression subject attribute. Lacan returned to Freuds laws of the
unconsciouscondensation and displacementand Jakobsons discovery of metaphor and metonymy as the two principle axes of language, to demonstrate that the laws
of the signier are those of metaphor and metonymy. This means, as Genevi`eve Morel
puts it, that according to its context, the signier can take on any value (Morel, pp.
2931). By exchanging the logical terms function, argument, agent for the grammatical
ones, subject, verb, attribute, Lacan also borrowed arms from Frege for showing how logic
unsticks itself from grammar. In this context, in the 1970s, Lacan proposed the phallus
as a function of a sexuated subject () where x represents the subject (Morel, p. 31).
By not imagining the quadratic complexity of psychic reality, Jones claimed one
can reconcile the irreconcilable: One could easily join Realitat to Wirklichkeit in a simplistic, analogical reductionism. In his articles on feminine sexuality, for example, Jones
takes the phallus to be a penis and reduces the function of the organ to penetration.
Desire conceived of as the accomplishment of a reality or a wish as Freud implied in
describing Realitatwas relegated by his followers to the level of a real (as in factual
reality) or natural satisfaction. Thus, Joness concept of wish as desire has nothing to do
with the unconscious desire Lacan intuited in Freud, and dened as the gap or splitting
between the need for satisfaction and the demand for love in The Signication. . ..13
Lacan wrote in 1958:
By a reversal that is not simply a negation of the negation, the power of pure loss
emerges from the residue of an obliteration. For the unconditional element of
demand, desire substitutes the absolute condition: this condition unties the
knot of that element in the proof that love is resistant to the satisfaction of a
need. Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for
love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the rst from the
second, the phenomenon of their splitting.
Indeed, the unique constitutive reference for unconscious desire is that language
be oriented by the primordial objects-cause-of-desire whose symbolthe alies at
the heart of the three jouissances whose logic Lacan formalized in the Borromean knot
where orders of the real, symbolic, and imaginary intersect. Between the symbolic and
the real, he placed the symbolic phallus (), equated with the language and concepts of
reality given by a local/universal order. Between orders of the symbolic and imaginary,

On the Signication of the Phallus

he placed the imaginary phallus () by which he marked castration as a gap between a

thing and its name, thereby representing a point of lack in the subject that gives rise to a
sense (sens) beyond signication (/S). And between the imaginary and the real, he
situated the Other jouissance, sometimes marking the primary real of chaos and
fragmentation, with a void at its center ():14

In the 1950s, desire becomes the unconscious question in the mothers discourse
that refers itself to the signier of the Fathers Name, in reference to the third part of
this dialectic: The child as phallus, or object of desire. In his last formula for the
paternal metaphor (or Oedipal complex), Lacan rewrote Freuds Oedipus complex to
argue that one identity solution to the lack-of-being-whole, created by the sexual
divide, is to seek to ll the void left in its wake by simulacra of the lost object (a)
through identications.15 The object (a) is proximate to unary traits (S1 )indivisible,
single strokes of identicationtaken from the real, imaginary, and symbolic orders.
Thus, the unary traits own absolute density is a coalescence of traits from each of these
orders, with a preponderance of emphasis given to the force eld of which every drive
is in ascendance over another.
And the drives emanate from what Lacan, in 1960, described as the rst eight
objects-cause-of-desire, which are both constituitive of an Ur-lining of the subject and
without specularity or alterity. In Le sinthome: un mixte de symptome et fantasme, Miller
describes the barred subject as a void: One goes from the hole made by the perception
of the sexual difference, the imaginary , to the subject emptied of enjoyment (/S); that
is, one goes from the hole made by the loss of the object a to the lack of enjoyment
(from to /S), insofar as its absence reects traits of a positivized identity, but without
representation.16 In his Seminars on James Joyce, Lacan maintained that Joyce sought
to ll the void by making the real voice suture all the crevices in being and body: /a.17

10

Chapter 1

Indeed, the object a in the center of the Borromean unit articulates, as well, the
; the ; and the : three castrations or negations. These are the three holes
connected to each of the three jouissance(s). Lacans innovation lies in his showing that
the hole of the unconscious is inserted by the symbolic, which leaves positivized traces
at the site of the object. Giving radically new meaning to any materialist theory of
language, Lacan argues that the hole made by the phallic divide is one no imaginary
fantasy can ever repair. The split between the sexes/makes the object itself
only ever partialthe negativized phallus is imaginary (); the word can never
equal the voice or the letter in saying it all in the symbolic; the hole in the Other
()the Other not existing as suchacquires a pseudoexistence of alienation, given
that language names affects, images, and concepts (Lafont, p. 116).
Ernest Jones depicted the phallus as an imaginary object, structured in the same
mode as any other object. Thus, Joness phallus has no properties of lack in the image
(); in what the word depicts (S1 jS2 ), nor in some supersexual libidinal phallic
function (x;x;). Lacan gives three meanings of lack to the phallus, meanings on
which its privilege depends. In this sense, Joness imaginary is not Lacans: Symbolizing the lack in the image I(mage) (1) by the square root of the negative, Lacan makes the
image that which only partly represents what it is trying to incarnate. This matheme
states the proposition that part of its meaning is always lacking in the image.18 While
Jones opened the door wide to object-relations theories by making of the phallus a
positivized partial objectthe-things-in-itself, marked by moral attributes, both external and internal, and good or badLacan argued that such an inside/outside distinction is always a subjective imaginary modeled on a false image of the body. The bodys
seeming wholeness is divided by the image of an outside and inside, giving one the idea
of volume, of the container and the contained. In their complexity, Lacan writes in
1973, knots are well-designed to make us relativize the supposed three dimensions of
space, founded solely on the translation we give for our body in a solid volume.19
Lacan pointed out that the place of the object (a) is not in the mothers body, as objectrelations theories claim, but in the fantasy. Joness error, paradoxically, is that of any
critique that attributes to the phallus qua penis the function of properties equatable with
character attributes. Lacan accorded the phallus a function, proposing for it the status
of the key signier by which both sexes interpret their sexuality as lacking (or not) in
reference to the mothers unconscious desire regarding her own sexual difference.
Giving new meaning to Freuds The Ego and the Id (1923), Lacan also
redenes Freuds invention of an imaginary order by equating its formation with that of
the ego. He follows Freud in viewing the ego as rst and foremost a bodily ego. Unlike Freud, however, he argues that the ego is not merely a surface entity, but is itself
the projection of a surface.20 Lacans rethinking here is of a piece with his explanation
for why we see the body in a solid body form. Although anatomy lends itself to such
an interpretation, the body actually takes on that form for the sake of our gaze (S.
XX, p. 133). By that he means that we see the body as whole in order to avoid seeing it
as lacking, lack, paradoxically, being precisely that which the gaze shows. In Painting,

On the Signication of the Phallus

11

Gerard Wajcman writes that thought and space are, indeed, coherent and homogeneous
in that both are extensions that cannot be thought outside of thought. Thus, space
measures thought at the level of geometry, equating proof with the visible and the
quantiable.
Even though Descartes, like Irwin Panofsky, later, uproots the object from its
representation by proposing that all space is homogeneous, Lacan removes the logical
aws from Descartess partes extra partes proposal that all parts are identical, even in being
different. In 1966, Lacan introduced the notion of value which can suppose an
imaginary identity that is actually a measurable equality. But thought does not introduce measureconceived of as separating thingsinto space. Rather, thought constitutes and builds space. But what are geometrys measures, Wajcman asks, answering
that the body is its own image given meaning: Spatial extensions and thought are
reducible to the imaginary/symbolic bodyto its space. Descartess impasse lay in his
reducing visual structure to a metrical geometry that made it impossible for him to
think the opposition between the desiring subject and the world of objects, enveloped
as they are in the seemingly unied clothing of skin. Descartess Body, thought of
as extended space, is as imaginary as Ernest Joness phallus.
Jacques Derridas poststructuralism imputes to Lacan a teaching based on
phallo-phono-logo-centric principles. From this premise, Derrida views the Lacanian
phallus, not as a part of the body which is, in turn, re-presented in perception, but as a
privileged signier whose function would be transcendental; a nondetermined metaphysical element among heterogeneous elements. For Derrida, the phallic function
would be that of ending the eternal sliding of the phonemic signier. We know, of
course, that words do not continually slide arbitrarily into one another, either as proper
nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on, nor as phonemes. Words anchor sound in points of
xity in the imaginary, symbolic, real, and the symptom, xities that constitute the
meanings one lives from. They organize the serial (a,b,c; 1,2,3) that Lacan calls the
serious. Indeed, where there is xity, Lacan argues, one nds the real.
Beyond merely communicating, or, more often, miscommunicating, words also
seek to decipher the ineffable object (a), the enigmatic essence of ones own being which
language seeks to cover, discover, conceal, or reveal as ones true allure, one desirability. The phallus is not the transcendental signier Derrida calls it, but a key
organizing signier whose functions are manifold. It masks the real of sexuality and
trauma by linking language to the law of differencenot only insofar as one sound or
one meaning always differs from anotherbut also insofar as phallic law, by
delineating this from that, the masculine from the feminine, for example, orients desire.
In this sense, the phallus can be said to construct the Realitat Freud sought to describe, a
psychic reality whose laws also have the formal properties of the already formalized
functions of language.
Thus, the phalluss referents differ from the sense-data realities of biological life.
Put another way, the phallus functions to structure biological realities by the processes
of identication that govern desire. The form of the imaginary body, Lacan proposes, is

12

Chapter 1

composed of a set of identications with mirror-stage other(s) in all three orders. It

becomes a symbolic body by incorporating language as the Ideal ego construct Lacan
places at the base of his che vuoi graph.21 In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the
Ego (1921), Freud called the Ideal ego a primordial identication.22 Lacan interpreted Freud to mean that the primordial identication of a child is to difference or
Otherness whose referents are symbolic-order signiers.
The phallic signier, in turn, orients the Other as a corpus of Language that
interprets the imaginary body as the real desires of the mother referred to the Fathers
Name. This is the sense in which Lacan equated difference with language. Language,
when taken as a signier for the father, becomes the name of that which divides the
mother and infant, by substituting a name for an image or an effect that produces lack;
that is, metaphor. Meanwhile, the mother is identied by the infant with the real body,
which enjoys, not the Cartesian body that thinks. In Morels phrasing, the Cartesian
symbolic body thinks, and is, indeed, an equivalent of thinking against the real (Morel,
La difference des sexes, p. 28).
Beyond orienting the drives within thought, Lacans concept of the phallic
function answers the question Freud posed concerning the difference between the
accomplishment of a reality and the accomplishment of a dream desire: The phallus as
a signier gives the reason of desire, Lacan wrote, an image whose reality is its
incompleteness (The Signication . . ., p. 273). The word qua word (parole) describes
an image of something whose dynamic is that of the Fort! Da! movement of the Here/
Therethe gap, the lackof the bobbin reel, rather than the imaginary stasis of an
organ reality. Later, Lacan will describe speaking as an act that creates its own signieds, while the interlocutor forgets the real trenchency of the act: dire (saying)/dit (said).
And this is not John Austins speech act, or Judith Butlers performative. It is the act of
speech as real. This idea of the phallus moves us from guration to abstraction, to a
logic of lack(s). Freud could never explain the link between Realitat and dreams in his
effort to join dream desire to sexual desire. So, he dropped his efforts to prove an
unconscious, opting, rather, to attribute psychic cause to biological organs and to
propose genetic developmental stages (oral, anal, and genital) as explicative of that in
the human which is opaque and engimatic.
But even though Freud made biology a rst-cause mover of psychic Realitat, he,
nonetheless, vacillated throughout his career in his various efforts to explain what
causes human sexual identication along lines that are not gender specic. He advanced
several theories in trying to gure out how children could imaginarily attribute the
penis to the mother in ways that refused the evidence of sexual difference. Elizabeth
Grosz wonders why Freud did not simply stick with the idea of a psychic Realitat which
would equate penis=phallus=sociologically-powerful-or-culturally-successful man.23
What truly bafed Freud was the ineffable effect of the presence or absence of an
organ, taken as a basis for assessing superiority or inferiority, and activity and passivity.
Lacan turned Freuds concern into a problematic concerning having or being.24
Insofar as having phallic attributes simply means being associated with powera

On the Signication of the Phallus

13

family name, a career, and so onsuch identications are not gender or organ specic,
Lacan stressed. One believes oneself to be powerful based on what a given society
values, which becomes an equivalent of who one is. Again, the issue is not the
phallus as organ, but as a referent of the meaning attributed to a person at the level of
identity in terms of where he or she is thought to be within the Others gaze.
Luce Irigaray misconstrues the early Lacanian idea of a mirror-phase, logically
deducible moment, in which the imaginary ego identity is constituted by the images of
the rst body parts with which one identies. These are assumed from the introjectiveprojective mirror of the human form, as if one put them on. The rst forms refer to
the primary caretaker, usually the mother. Irigaray confuses Lacan with Freud, arguing
that Lacan viewed the mothers body as depreciated because it lacks a phallus. Indeed,
Freud described the way his patients viewed the sexual difference, while himself maintaining an air of surprise and shock at their prejudices against women, and against the
mother in particular, prejudices manifested by both sexes. Irigaray also clings to an
object-relations theory, assigning judgmental capacities of good or bad to the infant as a
kind of innate knowledge possessed long before he or she has the language that will let
him or her discern whether he or she has/is the symbolic phallus (or not); this is an
interpretative judgment bequeathed in an acquired descriptive (imaginary) language.
Irigaray, thus, misunderstands that Lacans theory of the mirror stage refers to the
structural moment in normative or typical physical/mental development when a child
integrates its own inchoate (pre-mirror fragmentation) body parts into a seeming unity,
modeled on identifying with the perceived whole body image of another: The infant
takes on its sense of being one in reference to another; or two. The small childs rst
sense of being whole is identied with the mother counterpart who, as a seemingly whole
body, becomes the paradigm for an imaginary unity, applicable to boys and girls alike.25
At the point where Lacan seeks to explain why Freud might have imagined a
voracious phallic mother, he encounters Freuds own inability to see the mother as
lacking anything. Despite the evidence of what his analysands said to him, Freud could
not envision the mother as imaginarily lacking an organ. Still, he was always certain that
this was an illusion children extrapolated from their discovery of the sexual difference,
each in reference to the same-sex parent.
Freuds theory here is far from Lacans idea that a repudiation of the sexual
difference links epistemology to the fetish, while foreclosure of the difference results in
psychosis that produces delusions and hallucinations. Simply stated, every child will
not interpret the meaning of the sexual difference in the same way, despite the gender
difference. Put in other terms, no set (as in mathematical set theory) contains all the
answers within itself. Thus, Freuds symmetrical argument could seem to fall within the
incompleteness theorem (Godels, for example) implied by set theory. Lacan pointed
out that, logically speaking, mathematicians uncovered the same functional principle as
Freud in discovering that a null set in number set theory grounds the next number,
which denotes the absence of number: the 0. Zero, in turn, is bracketed[0] to
distinquish it from the null set. The next number will be the rst countable number,

14

Chapter 1

either 1 or 0 bracketed twice. Set theory continues by a series of ever-expanding

bracketed zeroes. But the null set is designated by a barred zero. (Freges ).26
Closer to Gottlieb Frege than to Freud, Lacans discovery of the functionality of
asymmetries differed from set theorists in his nd that every set does not include the
previous one. Freges successor relation theory is a minimal logic in which are given
those pieces only which are necessary to assure it a progression reduced to a linear
movement: Zero grounds one plus one more 0[1+n]. But the n splits, inferring a gap
or lack following 1, when taken as a natural number.27
Additionally, Lacan picked up on Georg Cantors notion that one could not
rethink space topologically via whole numbers, for they are countable. Rather, an
innite continuum can be made via countable fractions, which are transnite or irrational. Equating the unary traits of identication (Freuds Einiger Zuge) with the real and
symbolic (the +1 of countable traits), Lacan emphasized that such traits can be added
to the unthinkable imaginary numberj1but without producing sense.
Rather, real numbers (S[]) that decomplete a set allow subtraction, which gives rise
to the 1 as negative and absent, albeit intrinsic to an ensemble of signiers. Thus,
Lacan wrote the unary trait (S1) as 1 + 1 where nonsensical being (]) which
decompletes a set allows subtraction, which gives rise to the 1 as negative and absent,
albeit intrinsic to an ensemble of signiers. Thus, the unary trait (S1 ) coalesces with the
real and symbolic of thinking: 1/1 comes from S()/. That is, the paradigm of
the detachment of the image from the word that creates a gap in meaning is precisely
the , or negativized image of the phallus interpreted as a separable body part.28
Like Freud, Irigaray leaves out the negative grounding of thought, which is, then,
derived from the body. She positivizes what Lacan interpreted as the childs imaginary
representing of an organ evaluated in reference to loss. In Lacans thinking, the imaginary
problem concerns grappling with a difference between a cosimultaneous presence and
absence in image, word, and real effect. This logic works from quite another logic
than biology. While biology classies species and assigns attributes according to the
positive traits of visible having or not having, Lacan symbolized the particular problem
of the null set or split number by the negative phi () meaning imaginary castration.
The cut is between a specular image of an imaginary phallus that is there, and, then,
potentially, not there because the little girlthe boys counterpartdoes not have it.
Freud believed that little boys look in the mirror of identication and see that they have
a visible organ the mother does not have; they impute sexual difference to themselves, or
sexual sameness, if they identify with the mother. In Freuds interpretation of the words
of his female patients, when little girls understand that the mother is like themselves,
without the male genital organ, each one interprets this difference in terms of loss ()
which is, in turn, ltered through substitutive fantasy.
Jacques-Alain Miller reminds us that fantasy is imaginary and that once one has
crossed the plane of identication, fantasy becomes pure drive (Le sinthome . . ., p.
12). When the unary trait links up with its being of jouissance in the Ideal ego (I),
one can see under or behind the fantasy that generally masks the real of the drive.

On the Signication of the Phallus

15

Indeed, one can go so far as to say the structure of the transference implies the
identicatory unary traits, not the object (a) (p. 13).
Paradoxically, Irigarary argues that her picture of the sexual difference critiques
Lacans theories, while she actually follows Freuds theories of biological reductions to
organs, ending up in a logical bind that has led critics to describe her as a biological
essentialist. Irigaray does not depict the Freud who nally decided that the only
explanation he could nd for what he called wounded narcissism lay in the experience
of having undergone a psychic trauma.
In The Germs of Empires, Tim Dean distinguishes between physical and
psychic trauma. In his delineation, the former ruptures the bodys surface, while the
latter ruptures the egos boundaries. Stressing the links among sexuality and retroactive
relation of prepubertal sexuality to postpubertal fantasy, Dean writes that trauma
names the absent cause of history, the force of the real in any symbolic network (cf. Althusser,
189),29 Cathy Caruth writes that traumatic experience, beyond the psychological
dimension of suffering it involves suggests a certain paradox: That the most direct
seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy,
paradoxically, may take the form of belatedness.30
Lacans depiction of the body as an imaginary constellation rst incorporated
from the Other, then returned into the symbolic as a projection of ego identications,
can be brought together with Dean and Caruth to describe different aspects of the
psychic trauma, which Lacan considered as a splitting that occurs when an imaginary
consistency of Oneness is broken. Lacan argued that this is not the trauma Freud was
seeking to understand. Rather, Lacan, translated Freuds phallic phasecommon
to both sexesinto a logic of phallic signication that sets up an asymmetry between
the sexes, and whose referent is the phallus, taken as a propositional function. Lacan
hypothesized that the sexual asymmetry concerns, not ones libidinal object choice,
but submission (or not) to the (phallic) law of difference. The symbolic order is
represented by the signiers of ideal Fathers Names on the masculine side of
sexuation from which males and females take their identity: xx/xx.
Insofar as a male identies primarily with another malenot with the mother
he will achieve this identication by supposing an abstraction: A male who incarnates
the law while being an exception to it, be he Daddy, some omnipotent river spirit, the
mothers brother, the signier for the stranger, or some other. Since girls are not
required to identify away from the rst Other, they have the freedom to ignore or
subvert this phallic injunction to difference, this no to being all One sex: x x/
xx. The male identies with a logic of accepting to be all under the law of the Urfather, exception to the law which also grounds it, while the female identies a part of
herself as not [being] all under the law of a conventional reality one might describe as
patriarchal/phallic/symbolic law.
Sexuality is clearly affected by the degree to which male jouissance is fettered by
the law of what Lacan called the obscene superego. Insofar as a man is all under the
symbolic law, his guilt for any transgressions will be the inverse face of his trying to

16

Chapter 1

obey social-symbolic order (superego) demands. This particularly male burden is

placed at the intersection of thought and enjoyment, as is male dependence on the unary
character of his genitality. Guilt joins the compulsion-to-enjoy with yet another control
or castration placed on the meaning(s) of the phallus that structure male sexuation.
Moreover, the requirement of erective performance places an additional castration on
men that women do not have. That feminine sexuality is not all under symbolic (phallic)
injunctions, means that women are less enslaved to the Others superego dicta. Lacans
explanation of the female superego makes more sense than Freuds deduction that
women have weaker superegos than men and are, thereby, characterologically inferior.
What Freud considered male superego superiority is what Lacan calls the enslavement
to a master discourse logic wherein reality and language are measurable as clear
communications made within conscious meaning.
In the last paragraph of her article on the phallus in Feminism and Psychoanalysis,
Elizabeth Grosz says: Freud and Lacan have been strongly defended by a number of
feminists, most notable Juliet Mitchell and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, who claim that
psychoanalysis merely describes rather than participates in the social subordination of
women. For both, it is the anchoring term which saves the subject from psychosis by
granting it a social position outside the incestual web of desire in the nuclear family.
However, the phallus cannot be a neutral signier, as Ragland-Sullivan and Mitchell
claim; the relation between the penis and the phallus is not arbitrary, but is clearly
socially and politically motivated (Feminism and . . . , p. 322).
One might respond to Grosz in several ways. First, that such a relation would be
politically and socially motivated does not per force make the relation arbitrary. Lacans
concern was to discern the difference between cause and effect in the larger ramications of the sexual difference. Secondly, in the common biological sense, the etymology
of the word phallus is taken from the Greek exllos, which associates the penis with the
phallus, referred to as the biological organ. But at the level where meanings of the
phallus are interpretations or representations that give rise to symbol and structure as
themselves rst causes (rather than organs), they determine the particularity of sexuality
and subjectivity by constructing fantasy as a relation of signiers (S1 jS2 ) and
jouissance (a) that ll the lack (/S) in the subject.
In Le sinthome: un mixte de symptome et fantasme, Miller describes the symptom as
that which resists knowledge in that its jouissance and truth are linked to Thanatos, to
xities of repetition (-compulsion). The symptom resides in the real of what does not
cease writing itself . . . [as] the way each one enjoys his or her unconscious insofar as the
unconscious determines him or her (pp. 1617). In other words, the symptom is a
mode of enjoyment at the level of the master signier(S1 ;)that represents the
symbolic order by elements one can measure or count.
Millers formula is an advance over Lacans early descriptions of the phallus as
having the status of a simulacrum or a representation. Insofar as one of the meanings of
the phallus is that it designates or stands in for something elsebe it object of value or

On the Signication of the Phallus

17

desired childits rst effect is, even then, to introduce the reality of difference into the
seemingly holistic rapport between a meaning and an (immediately visible) object. Any
effort to interpret this difference gives rise to questions that assume answers that
become xed representational meanings.
We see that Lacans denition of the signier as that which represents a subject
for another signier quickly becomes inadequate to dene the subject as sinthome. After
thinking of the subjects (/S) rst valuethat which is represented by a signier for
another one: S1 jS2 one can assess its second value. Minus the unary traits (S1 ) and
the jouissance (a) that ll it, the subject appears, both in language and affects, as
emptied of enjoyment: /S;. That is, the sinthome localizes the subject as a barred subject
distinct from the eld of language and representations while still being made up of
language (S1 ,S2 ). One can then see that S1 , (a), and S2 (or the Ideal ego) are formations of the unconscious that place themselves in the gap made by lack. This dynamic
shows that the subject is [exists] only as represented (Miller, p. 11). That is, it
doubles itself.
If someone argues literally, as Ernest Jones, Karen Horney, and others in the
twenties and thirties, or as some theorists do today, that any disparity resulting from
the discovery of the sexual difference is a simple matter of corrective education that can
only produce a nal equality and equivalence between the biological sexes, such theorists will fail to admit to the radical difference of images and body experience that
confronts boys and girls in their rst efforts to ground identity in bodily realities. And
this occurs long before conscious awareness of the sexual difference becomes something
to interpret. Little girls know that their genital sexual parts are hidden or enclosed
within the folds of their skinclitoris, vagina, labia lipsin imaginary comparison
between themselves and little boys. And these parts are not experienced as breaks or
cuts, but as parts of a whole that relate to jouissance. Rather, what is natural to one
becomes an image of the measurable or visible as a standard for the norm, that, in turn,
is equated with social reality.
In mathematical terms, one could describe imaginary awareness of the sexual
difference as having the weight or dimension of the line, whose topological density is
that of an absolute real, a unary trait, or unbroken line. Yet, paradoxically, it takes an
innite number of extensionless points (i.e., 0) to add up to a innite distance, such as
that of a real number whose value is exactly 1.4. This is, indeed, Zenos fth paradox of
plurality, which allows us to deduce the reason Descartes failed to solve the mind/body
problem with his theory of the body as an extended thing: An extended body consists
of a number of parts that have no extension, as does distance (or it would be innitesimally small). Yet, Descartess idea presupposes the innite as macrocosmic. Zeno,
Descartes, Kant, and Freud are some of the thinkers who have tried to solve problems
of how to quantify difference and distance by means of visible reductions to size. Zeno
gives us Achilles and the tortoise who will never be congruent, thus suggesting a limit
within innity, just as Descartess notion of extension implies something in reference to

18

Chapter 1

which a body would be extended. Kant adheres to the notion of macrocosm and
microcosm in his Third Critique where one nds his aesthetic of the beautiful in his
distinguishing the beautiful from the sublime.31
Freud argued that precisely such imaginary effects produce the real of trauma for
the female who compares her genital structure to the males. Lacan argued, rather, that
each sex takes the penis as a phallus, a representation of what can be lost. He also argued
that each sex takes his or her organ(s) as the standard for what is natural in the
imaginary and real. Moreover, the girl has recourse, within Lacanian topology, to less
anxiety regarding the sexual difference than the male. Insofar as the feminine genitalia
constitute many marks on a planethe border (of the vaginal split or the labia) seen or
felt at the surface of the skin (and so on), she thinks of her sexuality in terms of a
profundity, or as the backdrop of a base against which a thing is seen as other in
reference to something else.
The boy, by contrast, has one overtly visible and moving apparatus made of three
parts. The penis and testicles are assessed as susceptible to loss because the boys has
imaginary proof that half the human race does not have the same organ, with its visible
obviousness, its exposure. This alone would account for Freuds patients efforts to
equate difference with visible size. In The Signication of the Phallus (1958),
Lacan had already stressed that the phallus does not become an index of power as such
on the basis of turgidity, detumescence, or reproductive capacity. Later, in 1960, he
placed the (imaginary) phallus in the list of eight objects susceptible to the (seeming or
perceptible) cut of separability from the body, giving all eight a Fort! Da! quality.
Jeanne Lafont advances the topological mark as the complement of the hole; the
point of an engima. Within the psychoanalytic logic of forms that goes from guration
to abstraction, Lafont gives this denition: These operations are to be found in the
linking of the symbolic with the imaginary [that produces the gap between a word and
an image ()]. They transform the symbolic into the imaginary . . . in the measure
that they are formulated by gures which put perception [itself ] into play. The
topological objects in fact, like the sphere, the torus, the cross-cap, the Klein bottle,
even the Moebius strip, are considered here as representations of the operations [they
perform]. Between the real of the clinic, and the symbolic pertience of a word, there is
an imaginary space of the transference, the obstruction of a reality [by interpretation
wherein, for example, an image can serve as an unconscious knot or impasse]. The
topological operations situate themselves at this dialectical point (Topologie lacanienne, p.
30).
In the essay drawn from its course Ce qui fait insigne (19861987),32 JacquesAlain Miller focuses on the symbolic/imaginary properties of the concrete identicatory nature of the unary trait (S1 ) as the basis for the structure of the transference. It is
not the object (a) that represents the analyst, he maintains, but, rather, a positivization
of absolute traits (unbroken lines) without representation (Le sinthome . . . , pp. 11
and 13). In other words, it is not topological objects themselves that put representations into play, but, rather, that the representations represent the operations they congure

On the Signication of the Phallus

19

starting with the constructions of any empty space or hole that is, in turn, lled by
objects and master signiers. At the level of perceptual effect, the Moebius strip
represents the gaze, which subtends the other drives as that into which one is already
born. One does not gaze. One is gazed at, unconsciously seeing onself as being seen.
Things that present themselves as having mysterious properties are the signiers of
objects hidden in the overlap of the two sides of the Moebius band,

both sides constituting a surface. Lacan compares the twist in the Moebius form to the
twist in thought that allows one to drop ideas or associations into the memory bank of
the unconscious where knowledge remains hidden. In the gaze elicited by the female genitalia, feelings of desire and jouissance are at play in the space that opens onto the erotogenic eld of the apertures and slits on the bodys skin surface (Subversion . . . ,
p. 315).
Lacan reminds us of this in his interpretation of the burning child dream rst
narrated by Freud. Only after his son is dead and his shrouded body burning from the
candle that had fallen onto it, does the dead boys father grasp unconsciously that his
sons wordsFather, dont you see Im burning?could mean something about his
sexual desire when he was living. For the father does not know consciously that his sons
bandages are on re. This Other knowledge has been occulted in the overlap of the
Moebius strip.33 This topological form replicates the gaze, one might say, as uncastrated: The real is showing, but not seen. Lacan also called this phenomenon of
consciousness a scotoma (a mental blind spot) in Seminar XI. A problematic example of
such a reading of sexuality as ones hidden (unconscious) desire, is exemplied by
Hel`ene Cixouss description of Doras mother, her governess, and Dora as loving a man,
loving difference and disguration.34 The penis, represented as phallus, is disgured
in Cixouss picture of it, in her picture of desire. Desire is for an organ, Lacan said,
while love is for a name.
This is a radically different notion of the cut from the feminist equation of
Lacans concept of castration with a literal cutting of the female genitalia as put forth by
Laura Mulvey, Elizaberth Bronfen, and others. Throughout his teaching, Lacan raises
the biological Freud to the realm of signifying systems where the phallus, as well as

20

Chapter 1

other notions, take on different meanings. Although Lacans equation of the phallus
with language has been widely assimilated, we have seen that he meant many other
things as well by phallus. He also referred to the phallus as the imaginary object of
frustration; the real object of privation; and the symbolic object of castration (lack or
debt).35 Indeed, to construct the concept of the phallus, these three registers are
required. Thus, early in his teaching, Lacan departed from equating the phallus with
language, in the simple sense of the words naming a thing. The function of naming is
attributed to the signier of the Fathers Name. Rather, he depicts the alienated word as
residing at one remove from the real. And long before he developed his topological
logic, he stressed the fact that a symbol or a gure always stands in for something else,
something opaque.
In his essay Painting [Tableau], Gerard Wajcman writes that Lacan the
toponymist, the topographer, became a topologist because the unconscious itself is
topological. Things are situated there. But the things in question are the objects
(a) that cause desire for symbolic goods, or lure us in the imaginary, or catalyze the
drive for enjoyment in the real. Lacan tried to situate this logic with his graphs that
inscribe place and correspond to symbolic space, his schema that gure imaginary space
and, thus, stratify the planes of the image with the surface prevailing there. As for real
space, its representation supposes that one promote, along with the graphs and
schemas, a picture that represents sites, or pure real places. For Lacan, Wajcman argued,
topology is not a metaphor that represents the subject as signied or gured. It presents
the structure or site where the subject emerges as effect of the trifunctionality of
thought.36
The imaginary phallus becomes an object-cause-of-desire, not at the level of organ
per se, but insofar as it denotes perceptual separability or the part that lacks-in-animage. We remember that Lacan rst named this operation negative castration (): Its
cause is the real father of jouissance, whose function is to create lack by a symbolic
castration of imposing no on the infants thought. Miller points out that this gap
later becomes the empty subject (/S). Lacans way of saying this was that the phallic
signier has no signied, only effects that evolve. These are claried by Miller as the S1 ,
the /S, and the (a). The signied or referent of the phallus, in other words, is the
imaginary lack (1) around which fantasy organizes the S1 (or unary trait), the /S, and
the (a). Miller relates symptoms and fantasy thus: The relation of the symptom is not
simply of a meaning, but of a meaning [given] to signifying structurethe fantasy
where there is a rapport of the subject to jouissance (Le sinthome: Un Mixte . . ., pp. 14
15).
To summarize briey, Lacan argued as early as 1958 against Freuds thesis that
biology causes sexuality, stressing that the phallus is not the real organ, the penis,
neither (1) in its role of copulation, nor (2) in its typographical sense as an equivalent
of the logical copula, nor (3) by virtue of its turgidity, as the image of the vital ow as
transmitted in generation (Signication . . ., pp. 28990). Rather, the phallus is the
abstract signier of difference whose functionand this is crucialis to give a per-

On the Signication of the Phallus

21

son access to others via the fantasmatic constitution of desire whose lack pushes
one to reach out to the other across the solipsistic wall of ones own desirous
Other.
Lacans categories of the symbolic, imaginary, and real come into play in his
arguments here insofar as logical orderings of the object (a), present in each category,
make of structure topological structurethat is truth-functional by paradoxical
contradictionsnot by linguistic or mythic structure. Insofar as the three orders
cohere, it is because they are interlinked by the fourth order Lacan named the knot or
the symptom (). These four orders coalesce to constitute the signifying chain we, in
turn, call mind. Miller describes the functioning of the chain as the automatism of
repetition plus the symptom (the linking of jouissance to master signiers) (p. 16) in
reference to the knot that guarantees ones self image by positive and/or negative
identications referred to a particular Fathers Name signier. Ones oedipal interpretation of the phallus and castration in childhood xes ones language, enjoyment, and
lack-in-being along four possible axes for the development of desire as it commands
language and sexuality from a point halfway between language and repetition.
The differential axes of the Lacanian clinicthe masquerade, the neuroses, the
p`ere-version, the psychosesdelineate the structure(s) of mind as a minimal number of interpretations of the sexual difference: its repression in the masquerade,
its foreclosure in psychosis, its repudiation in perversion, and its denial in the
neuroses.
If the mothers unconscious desire is for a given child to belong to the most
popular social group, to accept the sexual norms of the masquerade of a given
cultural moment, her child will try to please the Other whose gaze establishes the
superegolike terms of the Ideal ego unconscious formation. Rather than an enlightenment developmental view of human sexuality, one has the masquerade that cultures
have always used to camouage sexual desire and the nonrapport at its center, whose
insignia are the real traits that encircle a void (). Insofar as sexuality is imposed on an
infant from the outside worldin the imaginary order of identication with the
breast, the feces, the gaze and the voice; in the real order where loss of such objects
inscribes a symbolic unary trait susceptible of transformation from Eros to Thanatos
and back; in the symbolic order of nomination by which one elaborates a belief system
he or she takes to be right and true; and in the order of the symptom where it is invested
with the jouissance that elevates it to a sublimated symptom () where one nds oneself
in the Idealsexuality is a system of meaning that includes negative elements of
uncertainty about ones value as an object, as well as a positive slope of pleasure and
orgasmic fulllment.
Lacan linked both functions to the phallus in terms of jouissance and castration,
denoted respectively by a plus (+) or minus (), the plus depending on the minus.
That is, jouissance is correlated with lack that makes it always a diminution or
transgression of the law, lack thereby placing a limit on the excess (+). Genevi`eve
Morel (p. 33) writes the phallic correlation to jouissance and castration thus:

22

Chapter 1

Lacan was at pains to stress that neither sexual behavior nor object choice are
the point, but, rather, that all sexuality emanates from the particularity of fantasy.
Fantasy, moreover, is fundamentally perverse, Lacan argued, based as it is on turning
away from superego dicta and veering, rather, toward transgressions that emanate from
the real of object traits magnetized to ll the gap that is the subject (/S <> a). Sexuality
is itself the father version, the p`ere-vers. To distance himself from the mother, from the
feminine, the male aims at the (a) as a passive object in an effort to replicate lost objects
of desire with traits retained in fantasy. Later, the effort to incorporate the partner as
beloved will be a masculine drive, whether it emanates from a male or female. Real traits
of desire become the necessary investment in the fetish that marks (perverse) sexuality
by dramatic scenes, as in David Lynchs Blue Velvet where the fetish creates a
masochistic kind of Eros.
The rst difference that impinges on a childs conscious perception in his or her
construction of an identity of beinga logic of separationis the absolutism of the
cut. The second is the perception of sexual difference, which creates dialectical thought.
Thus, masculine and feminine distinctions are determined not by psychic essence or
behavior, nor by any pregiven active or passive behavior(s) or attitude(s), including
homosexual or heterosexual postures, but as gender nonspecic identications as
lover (active) or beloved (passive). These point, rather, to rhythms and desires transformed into drives once the cut established in the mother/infant paradigm makes a
space between the object and the desiring subject, rather than between a supposedly
natural male or female behavior.
By phallic effort, Lacan means nothing other than the capacity for thinking
dialectically, which can happen only insofar as an infant takes a distance from the
object (a)-cause-of-desire embodied by the mother in the order of the real. Identifying
with the phallic signier, in this sense, means that the infants capacity to learn or
differentiatethat is, introject the Otherrequires him or her to break off totalizing
identications with the mirror-stage mothers desire. Charles Pyle writes in Lacans
Theory of Language: The Symbolic Gap that Lacan uses the bar in violation of the
normal assumptions of well-formedness in logic and math. Going to the root of the
logic of the bar in Lacans theory of language, Pyle comments on Lacans frequent
assertions that the bar represents the phallus.37 At the level where imaginary identicatory fusions or conjunctions are known only as an effect of the barthat is, as an effect
of loss or the cutwhich can also be taken as a phallic effect of separation by no,
one can readily characterize the effect of loss on an imaginary unity as real and
traumatic. Losses of identication with parts of the motherattached to a fantasy of
her as wholeare traumatic losses of the imaginary illusions of a consistency of body
and being that rupture a mental identication with something outside that produces
effects of sameness and oneness.

On the Signication of the Phallus

23

Object-relations theorists or cognitive psychologists talk about this period of

constructing an elemental mentality as the developmental stage of individuation when the
infant breaks away from the mother between about six and eighteen months of age.38
Such theorists generally represent this as a stage of consequence in terms of a developmental (neuropsychically based) norm. Lacan, following Freud, showed, rather, how
secondary process symbolic material of the Other constructs primary-process thought
in each of the three orders, thereby serving as a memory-mind storehouse of reminiscences from the start of life. Consequently unconscious memory will forever after enter
conscious language, more like Prousts privileged moments of associative grasp, than
as a supposed retrieval of (distorted) narratives, or scant rememorations. The unconscious enters the conscious realm as a negative dialectic between loss and the
object(s) that cause desire: /a. Primary process, created by secondary process, reenters
language as an interpretation of the sexual difference and as an awareness of lost objects.
One might write the structure of lack in a formula for symbolic castration:

Insofar as symbolic castration is the form of the incest taboo that takes as its
referent the real fathers no to a oneness between the mothers lack and the infant as
ller of that lack, what occurs at the level of imaginary castration is that one confronts
the logic of the cut between the imaginary and the question of sexual difference. This
question is rst posed for the boy as the threat of actual organ loss. But, in his
assumption of sexuality cum identity, one cannot specify the age or period as to
choice of jouissance:
a

Moreover, such choices change throughout life. Morel comments on Lacans enigmatic
sentence: the common error does not see that the signier is jouissance and that the
phallus is only its signied. (Signication . . . , p. 37).
Lacans decades of working with the criminally insane enabled him to hypothesize the Realitat of the psychotic, male or female, as the empirical variable against which
the other structures can be measured. In that the psychotic remains one with the
primordial mothers desire throughout life, he or she retains only one set of narcissistic
identications. These are rigidly tailored to the mothers jouissance. Such petrication
of jouissance is, indeed, the antithesis of the social masquerade where desire is paradoxically rigid only in the sense that it is ever changing with the winds of trend. Within
the logic of psychosis, instead of the exchange and freedom of movement manifested in
the normative metaphorical substitutions of one thing for another, as long as one
pleases the social Other, metonymic master signiers speak from la lalangue of the real.

24

Chapter 1

In the Schreber case, Lacan quipped, President Schrebers delusional transsexualism denounced the common phallic error of attributing an ordering by a law of
difference of the sexes. The error consists in dening ones psychic sexualityfor
which there is no signier in the unconsciousby translating the penis into the
phallus, and classifying oneself as a boy or a girl. One sees the Catch-22. No Derridean
language game or sociological role change will make the stakes of the sexual difference
disappear, those stakes being the immortal (desiring) terms that one is unconsciously
bound to seek again and to repeat.
Although one can only agree with Elizabeth Grosz that the issue of the phallus is
political, it is to a politics of ultimate being and suffering that Lacan points, not to the
politics of altering the male patriarchy as a sociological entity by good will or law.
There is always a politics of desire at issue in Lacans theory that the feminine is an
identicatory position of passivity vis-`a-vis the phallus, whether one is male or
female; rather, one is masculine or feminine.
As an abstraction, then, the phallic signier represents sexual difference, not only
as a signication of itself, signifying what it is to be a man for a woman or a woman for
a man, a lover for a beloved or vice versa, more importantly, it serves as the bar that
makes such a division the mark of the human over the animal. Choices arise out of
jouissance conditions, not instincts. That men or women can substitute one meaning
for anotherbased on substituting one love object for anotherenables the human
creature to think with mental complexity, rather than in terms of the strict behavioral
semiotics to which even the most sophisticated ape is restricted. This is the sense in
which the phallic pivot paradoxically separates and connects knowledge to sexuality,
making it possible for meaning to function as a dialectical system of social exchanges of
signiers (S1 ) and jouissance objects (a) that ll ones lack (/S), while still communicating something to the other.
In the Rome Discourse (1953) (The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis) Lacan points out that the symbol only means pact; it is
not the content of the gift per se that counts, but the exchange signied as an act (p.
50). Analogously, the phallus is a symbol of desires ratio or desires cause, Lacan says,
because a relation of identitya pretended twoness made out of oneis not a relation
of desire. In desire, lacking and wanting imply one another. The error in male logic
leads to the idea that two are one. the woman supposedly exists as an essence that
enables man to deny that anything lacks in his being: /S 'aS().
|
Both
fantasy and ideology enable men to deny that The Woman as essence does not exist.
One will recognize the logic of the impossible real in such negations. From this, a
paradox follows: Man is man only insofar as he retains a false belief regarding Woman,
a belief that surprisingly belongs to the feminine side of sexuation where the real,
unconscious, and contingent prevail. This contradiction leads Lacan to the feminist
proposition that the masculinist illusion of wholeness is based on a fantasy essentialization of the woman (who exists), such that some myth of the whole, essential, primordial
mother continues to serve the male, unconsciously, as a guarantee to a stable, logical
dependable universe.

On the Signication of the Phallus

25

Such essentialization differs, however, for men and women, and is further broken
down depending on the desiring structure on which a persons thinking depends. While
a normative or obsessional male may divide women between categories of mother or
whore, for example, a psychotic male makes of his woman the woman who combines
all the properties of mother and sexual woman. When Derrida argues that the sexual
difference makes no difference, or when Hel`ene Cixous argues that the ecriture feminine is
a foil to the phallic signier, one wonders how their totalizing arguments go beyond
Jones, Horney, Deutsch, or other theories of a symmetry between the sexes advanced in
Freuds day. How do they move forward the debate regarding what the sexual difference
is, and why so much is at stake on that question?
In the 1950s, Lacan argued that the phallus no longer poses a question bearing
only on having an imaginary organ; but also a question concerning being. Being and
having intersect in the visible world of the mask or appearance, where one believes one is
what one has: With what objects will one identify? What partial traits, Freuds Einzeger
Zuge, translated by Lacan as unary traits, will build up particular chains of jouissance?
What counts is that their dialectical interplayloss and rendingconstruct the
particular conditions of jouissance surrounding the object one loves, the object
referring not to a person or a whole person, but imaginary identications, real traces,
and symbolic naming, glued to the primordial object residues that rst elevated desire
to the demand in drive. The drive is itself an agent alongside desire: Together, they
compose the unconscious subject of lack (/S) and the object he or she seeks in jouissance
(a) via the structure of fantasy (/S <> a).
One seeks a replica or semblance of something lost in the rst place: the
(imaginary) phallus, the urinary ow, the feces, the breast, the voice, the gaze, the
phoneme, the nothing, around which constellations of meaning build up. We think
with our lost primary objects. We are ourselves made up of those identicatory (symbolic/imaginary) traits, as well as the real of the marks they left behind as indices of
their loss. In this sense, memories or recollections are the continual return of a series or
collage of single strokes, organized around varying partial objects that cause desire.
Freuds Einziger Zuge refer to Doras memory of the image of Frau Ks beautiful
white body, or her sensory recollection of her fathers cigar smoke. What counts is not
Freudian wish fulllment, taken as a way to dene psychic reality, but ones being as the
phallusas an object of desirewho is valued as something particular, rather than as
nothing in particular. In that the Others desire determines ones place within the social
gaze, ones emptiness as a subject encounters suspension, anticipationthe time of
desire that is the subject (/S)and a horrible dependence qua individual awaiting the
response granted him or her in the others gaze.
By submitting ones lack-in-being to the symbolic Other which incarnates social
law as phallic, as purveyed by a given master discourse, both men and women who take
language at face value follow the reality principle of a local universal symbolic order
that, paradoxically, bespeaks a lack-in-(its)-being. In losing a part of ones Ideal being
by being (or acting) for others (the Other), the subject can be dened as an act. In
Slavoj Zizeks terms, the act has the structure of a symbolic castration at the level of a

26

Chapter 1

lack-in-being. For Lacan, loss is a paradoxical because one must live in society by the
sacrices and exchanges that enable one to recuperate parts of ones Ideal ego. Sadly,
one must concede a great deal to the Other if its illusions of consistency, harmony, and
wholeness are to be retained. Even then, one pays a price for what is repressed in the real
because the real returns in other forms to repeat the material of a trauma.
Metaphor or synecdocherhetoricare not at issue in the relation of the penis
to the phallus, then, but the way one is inscribed (or not) for sexual difference.
Having and being do not concern having or lacking the penis, but the being one has
evolved as a response to the signier for the Fathers Name, functioning in reference to
the mothers unconscious desire. One may conclude from this logic that the link
between the penis and the phallus is not so much hidden as it is obvious. Freud refers to
the ancient meaning of the phallus as a simulacrum. But Lacan gured out something
else. Through his own decades of analytic work with patients, he came to see that the
question Freud was really trying to answer was why the sexual difference bore on the
constitution of identity in the rst place. What beyond the biological sense perceptions
that govern organ reality had sexual reality (Wirklichkeit) to do with psychic reality
(Realitat)? In Lacans terms, sense data is itself inscribed for and by meaning.
Lacan rst discovered the absence of an inscription for sexual difference in
psychosis. Gradually, he realized that sexuality is not foreclosed at the level of biological behavior or function (in psychosis), but as an identicatory inscription for being as
masculine or feminine. Yet, symbolic and imaginary meanings name one in a self
myth of an Ideal ego, which gives most people the necessary distance from the primordial mother to separate and create their own psychic reality beyond hers. Only in
psychosis is this not true. Schreber went as far as becoming Gods wife to retain his
primary identication with his own mother as The Woman who exists, Schreber living
from one single identity for being.39
The imaginary phallus would be opposed to the laws of the symbolic, then, in
the sense that symbolic equals culture. For a child is given being as an object of its
mothers desire, which is deected imaginarily by the lack intrinsic in it. The mothers
unconscious desire is usually turned outward, toward the symbolic-order phallic signier(s) that symbolize difference and authority for her, insofar as difference constitutes a nonidentitarian principle. Thus, the penis as an organ can never be thought of
merely as a fact of nature, insofar as it is always already interpretedinscribed for
meaningas a fact of difference and as a symbol of desire.
Although Lacan did not replace Freuds terms, it should be clear that he gave
them entirely new meanings. Jacques-Alain Miller asked him why in Television: Why use
unconscious [Unbewusste] since it was such a negative term and since Lacan did not mean
by it what Freud did at all?40 Lacan answered that Freud had not found a better word
to try to describe what he was getting at, so why go back on it? One can propose a
similar logic in keeping the term phallus by which Freud sought to distinguish between
biology and mentality.
Moreover, In Lacan, the masculine is not opposed to the feminine but, rather, is

On the Signication of the Phallus

27

dened as being asymmetrical to the feminine, this asymmetry itself functioning as a signier that constructs the way desire evolves within language. In hysteria, for example, the
structure of being organizes itself around the question of the split in identication between identifying oneself as a woman, while privileging the identication with the father
over that with the mother. That sexual identications structure themselves around a
(biologically) unnatural splitwhich is interpretedis what Lacan called sexuation.
The imaginary phallus is signied by the phallic signier, which Lacan also called
the master signier (S1 ) that enunciates ones principle identity theme in the symptom
(). In the real, the phallus signies positivized jouissance, while it stands for reality, or
the prevailing local universal view of reality (taken as truth), in the symbolic. At this
level, Lacan equated it with (secondary-process) language and called it the signier of
the Fathers Name. While Lacan speaks of an ethics of psychoanalysis that concerns
desire, wherein desire is the ratio of phallus, Irigaray, and others have misunderstood
Lacans theory here, imaginarizing (or essentializing) it by reducing it to the penis.41
On the masculine side of the sexuation graph, identication with the phallus is
with its Fort! Da! movement of presence/absence, not with the some superior organ
properties that mark character or power. This is one meaning of castration: /.
First, the (imaginary) phallus is there, and then it is lacking in reference to the sex who
does not have it. This early childhood drama, whose meaning is that of representational trauma, enables one to understand the source of male narcissistic identication
with the phallus as a response to the double castration that marks him: Boys are dened
as boys, rst, insofar as they construct their identities away from the mother qua
feminine (or same as); secondly, insofar as their identities are directed toward
masculinity, which is itself an abstraction.
Thus, by dening masculinity as the imposition of difference onto sameness, the
cultural Other produces the effect of castration as an imaginary differencethe cut
between the image of the phallus and the naming of that image. Giving voice to this
experience places a narrative within the unconscious, a narrative woven around fantasies
that push the male to account for himself by assigning the phallus some meaning
beyond its organ reality. This particular cut between an image, a name, and the real of
effects shows that a minimal difference not only produces a maximal effect on each
man, but also denes culture over nature in terms of sexual difference.
It is hardly surprising that the small phi () denotes the rst form of the
subject of unconscious desire that Lacan later writes as a barred S (/S) and calls the lackin-being, the inverse face of desire. Lacans arguments, demonstrating that the logic of
gender is not biological per se, show an equation of desire and jouissance with
psychic reality (Freuds Realitat). Gender is structured for and by meaning, from beginning to end, not as the biological reality of a cause whose effects are a blind, instinctual
push or urge toward reproduction, or toward some anonymous other, or toward some
super gene.
The basis of psychoanalysis, as redened by Lacan, is that there is no sexual
rapport of harmony between the sexes because the rst taboo is against incest or a

28

Chapter 1

Oneness of jouissance with the mother. The taboo itself creates desire as the mark of
castration that causes repression, as well as the quest to ll up the concrete lack with
every object at ones disposal. Castrationor /S is, thus, the sign that the primordial objects must evaporate bit by bit in order that a sense of self or being can be
assumed as a difference. Even though cultures mythologize this no into a Oneness,
pretending that each person is always, already whole, even the concept of a whole self
has the same logic as that which establishes a logical basis for law (xx). In the second
masculine formula for sexuation, one has a logic of culture as possible (xx) as long
as castration (or lack) has been accepted.
The minimal structure of the social becomes the third term of the Fathers no, or
the phallic signier as that which divides the psychic rapport between mother and
infant. Each self or ego is made out of two individuals referring to a third term.42
This structural reality places the character of a split and paradox at heart of the social.
Not only is sexuality not biologically caused, it is a constellation of responses (or
images, words, and affects) that unveil the phallus and castration at the base of that
which orients desire as neurotic, normative, perverse, or psychotic relations to the
object (a). Insofar as ones being is never far from the sexuality one has or is, being is not
just an identity state, then, but emanates from its own roots in fantasy, desire and
jouissance. One is insofar as one responds to the Other to (re-)create the unconscious as
sexuality at the point where desire and jouissance are constituted as a primary-process
language (la lalangue) that returns into the secondary-process language that created it in
the rst place to speak a parole that goes beyond grammar.
A child must lose the primoridal objects that constitute his or her psychic Realitat
as a meaning apart from Wirlichkeit, Lacan concluded. This occurs, not only as a response
to the mothers love, but also in the attachment of the childs being to the mothers
unconscious desire and jouissance, the bases to psychic reality which construct The
Woman as the grounding (mythical) gure who predominates over any reality one
might call phallic, and over any terror linked to lack and named castration; or to the
loss Lacan referred as the void () created by the rst separations or cuts away from a
seeming Oneness with the mothers gifts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction.43

2
Freuds Female Sexuality (1931) and
Femininity (1932)
Oedipus Revisited via the Lacanian Pre-Oedipus

Before considering what Lacan nds in his return to Freud that further illuminates the
enigma of female sexuality, let us again take up the question of what Lacan meant by
sexuality. One could argue that Lacan discovered the link Freud soughtbut never
foundbetween the pleasure and the reality principles. Having desexualized the reality
principle, Freud could never place libido in it, any more than he could locate the
signier in Es or Id. Lacan postulated that the ego is itself libidinized by its own
identications (or narcissistic investments), and that what Freud called ego resistance is
the equivalent of any persons refusal to question the Weltanschauung of his or her
unconscious knowledge. Lacan equated ego narcissism with the closures of the master
discoursepunning on master, to be me, which is homophonic in French with
matre/metreby which any person negotiates relations with others, ego to ego in a
pseudodialectic of exchange.
There is more than one catch to Lacans theory of a whole egos resisting.
Why, one asks, would an ego tailor its speech and language to resist hearing what the
other is saying? Lacans answer is that the ego is inherently unstable. Constituted by the
words and demands of an outside Other and by identications with the others of ones
surroundings, from infancy on, the ego is constructed as divided among the social
Other, the others Freud called ego ideals, and the Ideal ego unconscious formation that
stands at a pivotal point between the imaginary and symbolic orders. Lacans innovation was to have grasped that the ego is not only not a whole agent, mediator between id
and superego as Freud thought, nor is it whole within itself.1 In Lacans teaching, the
(Ideal) ego is created as a symbolic order constellation, itself divided between the
imaginary identications imposed on an infant by the primary ego ideals of others, as
well as the social expectations and conventions forced upon the infant. Both come from
the outside world. In this sense, any ego that is not psychotic will be formed as a
conictual structure. It seeks to please the others and the Other who will hopefully love
it and, thus, verify it as Ideal, a preformed Ideal.

29

30

Chapter 2

Yet, given ones mirror-structure dependence on others for validation and valorization, one ends up caught in the crossres of love/hate, jealousy/aggresstivity, competition, manipulation, and duplicity. The ego shows its true colors as a bric-a-brac
fabric of aspirations, lies, and misrecognitions. Its resistances, then, bear the structure of
a protest against any cut into its own fragile, imaginary vulnerabilities, based on
idealized images of self. Underlying ego duplicities, Lacan shows a further catch.
Sexuality is not only not commensurate with the pleasure principlea principle of ego
constancy or entropy in Freuds thoughtbut responds, rather, to the reality principle,
or the superego; that is, required conventions of a preexisting Other.
Freuds theory of a commensurable maturation between ego and libido is false.
We remember Freuds postulation of a regressive pre-oedipal oral stage of development, followed by an anal retentive or acquisitive stage, marked in behavior by possessiveness and control. His nalor idealstage of genital maturity is distinguished
by reciprocity and giving. Lacan did not agree with this developmental model of the
ego. Insofar as the ego is not a whole agency of mind that can manifest stages of
maturation, developmental sophistications, or even defense and mediating properties, it
is, rather, a constellation of identications whose tendency is toward xity and repetitions rooted in an unconscious formation of Ideal(s). In other words, the ego is split off
from how others truly see it.
This is quite a different view of the ego from Freuds dialectical agency, susceptible to learning, changing, mastering, and mediating. Lacan, emphasized, rather, the
subject of desire whose subjective knowledge eddies up from the unconscious real.
While symbolic order conventions are the equivalent of social requirements and imaginary identications are misrecognitions of who one is, the real of jouissance or
suffering does not lie. Nor do the concrete affects surrounding lack and loss, or the
repeated enigmata of symptoms, all of which bring discontinuities, cuts, and aporia into
illusory ego consistencies and tenuous well-formed narratives.
In Phobia and Perversion, Daniel Machado writes: The Study of Little Hans
means that the subject as child could be in analysishe had a symptom which could be
analyzed. Hans was witness to the existence of sexuality in childrenbecause sexuality
means suffering and jouissance. It has nothing to do with sexology. Sexuality in psychoanalysis is only a condition for neurosis. That a child could suffer from sexuality to the
point of making a neurosis is what Hans teaches Freud.2
Sexuality is not sexology, in Lacanian teaching, but rather suffering and jouissance: Lacan locates the discontent or malaise that Freud found in civilization in the
disturbance of human sexuality where each person is subject to the mysterious desires
of his or her own Other. In Freuds day, it is generally thought, jouissance was
forbidden, or not socially tolerated by the Other of upper-class symbolic rules and laws,
to the point that individuals in this social milieu sacriced their sexual jouissance to
superego moralities. Morever, while Freuds theory of sexuality was based on the myth
that love and sex can join in a harmonious sexual relation with one another if one has
developed a genital (i.e., generous, giving) character, the model Freud gives for such a

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

31

relationship is the ideally harmonious parental couple of mother and father, and prior
to that, mother and child. Object-relations theorists later rened this parental dyad into
the ideal harmony of mother and infant. Life, literature, and clinical data prove the
opposite. Love does not lead to the Oneness of harmony in sexual relations, nor in
those between spouses, or between parent and child. Rather, as Jacques-Alain Miller
argues, the mother/father couple does not automatically give children an example of
sexual beings. The parental couple of Mother <> Father is not the sexual couple of
Male <> Female.3
But to appreciate Lacans innovations in rethinking the linkage of sexuality and
anatomical gender to epistemology, one must grasp the logic of his formulas of
sexuation. Although he evolved four, his rst two were the all (), and the not all ():
These delineate an asymmetrical opposition between man and woman concerning
how knowledge functions for each. Indeed, from Le seminaire, livre IX: Lidentication
(19601961) on,4 Lacan began to elaborate a logic of the not all based on an Aristotelian notion. Aristotles negation was a simple division between a subject and its
attributes.
Lacans functional proposition replaced Aristotles subject-copula-attribute by
the hole or empty set, which gave him a way to represent the subject of the unconscious
outside any known attribute.5 Although, in feminine sexuation, Lacan seems to use the
Aristotelian universal quanticator, negated for him, (x), the universal can only be
inscribed outside itself and, thus, has no actual existence (Morel, p. 166). When Lacan
concludes that there is no universal thinkable on the side of Womannot even the
proposition of there may be as is plausible on the masculine sidehe speaks of the
logic of discordential grammar which passes, not through the body, but results from a
logical exigency in the word (Morel, p. 108). Thus, Woman as already pastoute: has
access to the phallus (Morel, p. 172).
x z
x

S()

Gradually Lacan took up the problem in his formulas of a logical slippage

between Aristotle and Frege (Morel, p. 59). Even earlier, in chapter 14 (The Signier,
as Such, Signies Nothing) of The Seminar, Book III (19551956): The Psychoses,6 he had
opposed the notion of a totality to that of the ensemble, arguing that since a totality
supposes a relation to a correspondent whose structure is solidary, one is within the
enclosure of the all while, in truth, the ensemble differs from the totality by evoking an
open relation based on supplementarity, not correspondence (Morel, p. 60). There is
no all, Lacan says, except as empty, or as a propositional function of contingency. The
logic by which one inscribes oneself in the phallic function is as the all of a sham, a
masquerade, or the not all that brings on the real: One is all enclosed in the logic of
difference from the mother (the male signied by the ); or not all enclosed within such
logic (the female signied by the ). Lacan goes even further in connecting male

32

Chapter 2

sexuality to the all of identifying with the penis, while the more global bodily eroticism
of the woman has the logic of the not all, a supplemental relation to the unary genital
orgasm (Morel, p. 60).
That Lacan gives philosophical value to the ways one thinks or moves in
language as functions of an interpretation of the lack or negativity inscribed by the
sexual difference is an entirely original theory. Morel adds a word of caution, however,
concerning Lacans use of mathematics: Because Lacans mathemes do not function in
other writing(s), nor form a system of their own that one can elaborate or deduce new
formulas from, they are not mathematics proper (p. 60). That is not to say, however,
that they are not of the real. Nor that they cannot be used in other writings.
Freuds essay on Female Sexuality was completed in the summer of 1931,7
restating many of his ndings from the 1925 essay on Some Psychical Consequences
of the Anatomical Difference between the Sexes. Indeed, Freuds return to the topic
was probably caused by repercussions that that particular essay had produced among
analysts, particularly the English, for at the end of it, Freud critiqued several of their
papers, an unusual practice in his writings. He reproached the analytic authors as if each
paper had arisen spontaneously, rather than as a series of reactions to his own, at the
time, revolutionary article. Even though Female Sexuality enlarges upon the 1925
essay, particularly in its fresh clinical material regarding the intensity and long duration
of the little girls pre-oedipal attachment to her mother, he adds that this is an element
he nds characteristic of male or female femininity in general; the interest in the
mother.
In the 1931 essay, Freud retains his view of the normal Oedipus complex:
Tender attachment to the opposite-sex parent and hostile feelings toward the same-sex
parent describe the way male sexuality is linked to thought and behavior. But, for the
rst time, he examines in detail the idea he had advanced in Some Psychic Consequences . . . (1925) in which female sexuality, which he had called a dark continent,
is constructed along different lines from the normal Oedipus complex. Two problems face the girl that do not face the boy: She has to give up her rst love objectthe
motherin exchange for a male partner; and she must renounce the clitoral zone of
genital pleasure in favor of the vagina if she is to become a feminine woman, a suitable
partner for a man.
Lacan does not address this picture at the level of organ reality. Rather, he
critiques such an ideal of the One, or the harmonious heterosexual couple. Not only is
the Oneness toward which love aims an impossibilityfor heterosexual or homosexual
coupleslove itself proves that the most basic partner of each person is his or her
unconscious Other, not the other or beloved.8 By stressing that problems and conict
issue from the nonrapport, Lacan argues that Freuds genitally mature happy couple is
an impossibility given the asymmetrical development of the male and female at the level
of identication and relation to a logic of the all or the not all. Moreover, Freuds happy
couple incidentally reveals that the evolution of the sexual difference is not based on a

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

33

difference in organ pleasure per se, given his discovery that clitoris equals penis in
childhood masturbatory pleasure.
Lacan deduced something quite different from Freud. He postulated that children learn the sexual difference in reference to imaginary ideals of masculine and
feminine in a given symbolic order. In Seminar IV, Lacan began to describe the real as an
order of trauma constituted, in part, by the infants taking on sexual difference as an
experience of castration, or the forbidding of the pleasurable innity of a continuous
Oneness between mother and child. The one who teaches sexual difference, then, is the
real Father who desires the mother sexually. Such desire works as a function of
psychic separation or castration for the infant who begins to be tormented, not only by
the intermittent losses of the corporal objects that cause desire, but also by the incipient
assumption of identity based on lack, the fathers no communicating shes not all
yours, you are not one with her. Such a splitbetween mother and infanthas
radically different consequences for each sex, however.9
Such a no, a rst experience of the incest taboo, founds society on the laws of
separation, difference, substitution, and exchange. Rather than deduce, as did Freud,
that a cultural superego construct is individually formed and must, later, be modied as
to its repressive inuences, or decide, as did Herbert Marcuse (among others) that one
can liberate society at large by a free love/free sex removal of superego repressions,
Lacan argued in 1972 in Letourdit10 that the equation of phallic (genital) enjoyment with the phallus as an imaginary object of desire is fallacious. The value given the
infant qua imaginary phallus is derived from a particular mothers unconscious desire
vis-`a-vis the symbolic phallus and her own lack-in-being. One cannot logically equate11
the nonrapport between the sexes, with the symbolic father, taken as language, and
successfully argue that language prohibitions cause the division, or the inverse.
Nor can solutions to the traumatizing effects of no be arrived at by deconstructing language so as to build a new real (Morel, p. 19). The link that must rst
be to Woman is made, rather, at the level of the dire (or saying) that comes to take the
place of the real in an analytic discourse where the unconscious speaks in substitutive
metaphors and displaced metonymies that bear on the signiers in terms of which one
exists (or not) as an object of the Others desire. Morel points out that the zero level of
the object-cause-of-desire is representable for the unconscious as symbolized by the
subject on the basis of lack, while the number one is given by the Freudian second
identication that Lacan called the unary trait (S1 ). But the number two cannot be
symbolized in the unconscious because it is a real number, denoting the impossibility of
a sexual rapport of oneness between two (Morel, p. 112). The unconscious does not
speak of harmonies, then. And consciousness covers up the impasses in real jouissance. The social (or phallic) interdiction to Oneness creates a mask of semblances,
Lacan maintained, that divides the sexes.
This places difference or division at the elevated level of the unary trait of
difference that has social valuethe masculine(whether it describes a woman or a

34

Chapter 2

man), because it is equatable with language and the law of differentiation. The feminine
marks the site of a sexual masquerade that fetishizes the body or body parts, not only
because they bring unary traits of jouissance into fantasy, but also because they are on
the slope of the interdictions (excesses) that place the primary objects that cause desire
on the real slope of primordial repression. This leads Lacan to speak of the problem of
the feminine as being equivalent to the truth of metonymy, or the dit (the signied of
the sayings [dire]), which tries to re-present the unconscious subject by the modalities of
grammar and demand. Here the subject is actually an equivalent of the evanescent
object (a), which is topologically closed off from language. As a nonbeing, the small (a)
is absolute and nondialectical, its only residual traces being the excesses of jouissance
or sinthomesby which one interprets ones own absent unconscious dits in the real
through the truths uttered in socially inappropriate words, in (true) lies, in bodily
symptoms, and so on (Stone trans., Letourdit, pp. 2021).
More germane to a contemporary study of sexuality (and sexuation) than
Freuds notion of a necessary heterosexual resolution of the sexual difference is his
elaboration of the early female attachment to her mother at a pre-oedipal moment. So
compelling is this period, Freud argued, that he retracts his theory that the Oedipus complex is the
cause of neurosis, adding: We have long given up any expectation of a neat parallelism
between male and female sexual development. Further on he writes: Our insight into
this early, pre-oedipus phase in the little girls development comes to us as a surprise,
comparable in another eld with the effect of the discovery of the Minoan-Mycenaean
civilization behind that of Greece (Freud, Female Sexuality, p. 226). In this same
passage, he describes this phase as, elusive, lost in a past so dim and shadowy, so hard
to resuscitate and without any apparent awareness. Lacan stressed that no one can
remember something that happens before they have the language by which to describe
that experience to themselves. Since then, linguistics has taught us that no one possesses
a minimal grammar adequate to describe the world to himself before age ve or six, the
age Freud marks as beginning the oedipal period of identications as masculine or
feminine.
Lacans topological structural solution to Freuds impasse in understanding at
this point is founded on a blockage in Aristotles own logic; that is, Aristotle never
separated logic from language. Although, his propositions regarding what is particular
() or universal ()such as: Every man is mortal; thus no man is immortal
contain a negative function, they presuppose it positivistically. Lacans solution to
Aristotles inability to explain this negative part of his logic was to approach the
negative/positive division as residing in language itself and, furthermore, to view the
divide as constructed on the basis of the traumatic assimilation of difference, whose Urparadigm is the sexual difference. In 1958 Lacan spoke of differences in love and desire
between men and women. In 1960, he introduced the forms of desire as the object
(a).12 In 1971 he put forth a logic of the pas tout (the not all) as a basis of feminine
sexuality in Dun discours qui ne serait pas du semblant13 and elaborated his formulas of
sexuation, rst in Letourdit (1972), and then in Encore (19721973).

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

35

The previous chapter developed Lacans theory of the phallic signier as a crucial
reference in the construction of sexual identity. In Lacans ecrit On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (19571958),14 he equated the universality of the phallic signier with language itself in the sense that the symbolic is always
present before any infants birth into what he than called the social Other. Not only
does the symbolic order of language give an infant his or her identity by structuring her
subjectivity, it also creates in her the unconscious fantasies and desiresa history
others impose on her.
The error of supposing that a child can consciously remember events that
happened to her before she has developed a sufcient grammar for describing the world
in terms by which she interprets what has been presented to her, does not even touch on
the question of the source of the unconscious roots of those word memories. But the
error has been repeated by object-relations theorists of the stature of Melanie Klein, and
others as well. Such a mistake is based on the assumption that phonemes are an innate
biological set of cognitive tools, hard-wired into the brain, and readily available to
anyone for remembering the primary fantasy material of early infant life, and even prior,
before birth. In such theories, memory would function like a kind of prehensile
language organ.
But Freud recognized something else: the primordial mother as object, not as
subject. Delving even deeper into the problems caused by the early attachment of a girl
to her mother, Freud suggested in 1931 that female dependence on the mother is at the
root of the specically feminine neurosis, hysteria, which he characterized as a dread of
being devoured by the mother (p. 227). What Freud described as an immaturity of the
psychical organization characterized by projection (blaming the other) is as such not
neurosis. Lacan depicted this immaturity as the normal narcissism of the master
discourse.
While Freud suggested that the hysteric is hostile to an overly invasive mother,
Lacan, unlike Freud or contemporary object-relations theorists, for whom the category
borderline resonates, made a radical distinction between (neurotic) hysteria and the
psychoses (schizophrenia and paranoia). Moreover, he valorized a kind of normal
paranoia as the condition of the subjects being divided in the imaginary realm of the
ego between an Ideal image of self and the splitting effects on that Ideal caused by the
gaze of others (ego ideals) and the power of the symbolic Other to valorize those Ideals
(or not).15
But, Lacan does not examine the hysterics relations to her mother. His emphasis
is, rather, on the manifestation of hysteria in the daughters efforts to keep others from
seeing that her father lacks anything, even to the point of her identifying with her
fathers castration and impotence, as did Dora. In trying to answer her existential
question What is a woman? an hysteric seeks to know what her father wants unconsciously. Lacan added that the strong attachment of certain women to their fathers,
noted by Freud in the analytic clinic, nds its root cause in the lack of a clear signier
for genderthat is, a set of associations that would add up to a preponderantly

36

Chapter 2

feminine identity emanating from the earliest installation of the Ideal ego unconscious
formationthat would answer what a woman is in a particular symbolic order. The
identication with the father that separates female hysteria from the normative (even
obsessional) woman is one resolution of the oedipal assumption for gender, taken
as a set of identications that dene one as sexuated.
We remember that Lacan rst rewrote the Freudian Oedipus complex (On a
Question . . . , pp. 199200) from which one takes on sexuation as Fathers Name/
Mothers Desire Mothers Desire/? j Fathers Name (Other)/(Phallus) In emphasizing that the mothers desire is unknownthat is, unconsciousLacan focused in
1958 on the language of the Other that assigns meaning to a childs sexuality via
identications with culturally dened concepts of the masculine or feminine in macrocosm, and within a given family in microcosm. In that the Fathers Name meant
language at that point in Lacans teaching and the mothers desire remained enigmatic
as to her own unconscious resolution of the division between the sexes, one cannot
know what symptom the child will become within the family.
By the 1970s, Lacan had understood that the object (a) continually introduces
the stoppages of jouissance into language, placing discontinuities and inconsistencies in
being, body, and language. Based on his acknowledgment of a radical inconsistency in
the Other (), Lacan rethought sexuality and sexuation once more. At the point where
a person identies with one or more object traits, repressed as dits and sinthomes in the
real, individuals seek to ll the primordial void by making an equivalence of their Ideal
ego with a form of the object (a)such as the voice of authority, the queen of the
gaze, the nurturer whose base identication is with the all-satisfying breast. Or, Like
Rabelais, one may elevate the feces to the point where words, things, and goods become
coequivalents that in and of themselvesas knowledge (S2 )seem capable of suturing the hole in the Other.
An hysteric might be unconsciously identied with the (imaginary) phallus that
she supposes can escape castration. In this sense, she imagines herself as strong enough
to sustain her father, her fantasy being that she can both ll his lack and help him escape
his castration. Lacan writes the hysterics fantasy thus: a//S <> 0 (S. IV). In this sense,
she identies herself as castrated object with the uncastrated Woman who could
possibly exist and create a whole Other (S. IV, cf. chs. 6 and 10). Identied with the
lack of being the father in male sexuation/S rather than with women who dene
themselves as castrated and, thus, must join in the masquerade around the sexual
difference, the hysterics jouissance identication is as an object (a) that will try to ll
the void in the Other (), rather than with the a that would be fantasy partner to the
lovers lack-in-being (/S).
Serena Smith distinguishes between normal hysteria and pathogenic hysteria in
The Structure of HysteriaDiscussion of Three Elements. If however, hysteria is a
structure, not a sliding scale of behavior, the distinction to be made is between a
normative woman who, in accepting the lack-in-being (/S) speaks a master discourse
(S1jS2 ) that represses castration, and the hysteric. Paradoxically, the woman in the

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

37

master logic has assimilated it as a structural reality. She thus identies with, or as, a
master (phallic) signier (), or superego. In discourse structure terms, she speaks from
the position of agent or authority in the master discourse: S1 j S2 //S J a.16
The two new details Freud adds in this essay of 1931 are the discovery that the
mother is as important to the girl as her father, and that the pre-oedipal attachment
disappears from the language of conscious memory. Lacan taught us that the attachment disappears in memory, although it remains present in the structure of language
in the dires and sinthomes. Nonetheless, Lacans early description of the imaginary as a
virtual real, and his increasing awareness, that the real is constituted from the beginning
of life as a base ordering of radically repressed traumata that cause symptoms, obviated
his earlier theories that stressed the signier. In these he focused on the lack-in-being
created by alienation behind the words of language. But even in 1957 in On a
Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (19571958) (Ecrits,
pp. 19798), he substituted the word pregenital for pre-oedipal, inferring the infants
dependence on the object (a)on desire as causalas well as on the mothers love.
Insofar as the infant rst identies with the mother via the objects that cause
desirethat is, with corporal parts: the breast, the feces, the urinary ow, the (imaginary) phallus, the voice, the phoneme, the gaze, and the sense of being nothing (that
arises, for example, at the moment of the mothers disappearance)the loss of a
particular object (a) that grounds the infant in the illusion of being (whole)is
shocking. It is not surprising that Lacan will place Woman on the side of the (a) in
sexuation. Moreover, he adds to Freuds comments on bisexuality that the bisexual
disposition is stronger in women than in men who have usually eroticized only one
sexual organ. In that the object (a) evolves more diffuse properties of being in corporal
jouissance(s) than the penis, it is logical that Lacan locate it on the feminine side of his
sexuation graph. There, the object (a) is proximate to the real void which touches on
the object as loss, or as unary trait.
Freud used the word object (love object, etc.), which has been understood phenomenologically by object-relations psychoanalysts to mean a person, actual thing, or
an organ one valorizes as a replacement for the mother. Lacan, typically, retained
Freuds word object, but gave it new meaning. While individuals love others and things
by investing jouissance in them, thus forging concrete attachments, it is not the person
or thing in itself that Lacan stressed, but the links or unary traits left over from loss of
the primordial objects that rst caused the infant to desire something or someone. In
this sense, the object (a) is the pointillism of everyday life: a particular scent, or a lilt of
the voice, that elicit desire in the infants effort to retrieve a part of the lost object. But
from the start, there is this paradox: The object that causes desire is not the actual thing
the infantand later the adultwants. The traits are real, but the objects sought are
symbolic or imaginary lure objects. Whether infant or adult, one desires the particularity of the conditions of enjoyment that initially linked the subject as a subject of
desire (/S) to the fantasy objects he or she later imagines can ll his lack and confer on
him or her the homeostatic constancy of Oneness.

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Chapter 2

Such objects become dynamic in the elds of the partial drives Lacan called the
oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory, where constellations of meaning surround the object
eld that acts in and upon language. This occurs in The Viscissitudes of the Drives as
Freud argued in 1915, by repression (of fantasy), sublimation (of the drives), reversal
into its opposite of projection, and turning around upon the subjects own self in
masochism.17 Images, signiers, and real impasses attenuate the subjects encounter
with his own lack by sublimation, repression, projective denial, and sadomasochism.18
Even though nothing in Freud would lead one to link his concept of female
sexuality directly to Lacans idea of object-cause-of-desire, insofar as Lacans distinction
between masculine sexuality and feminine sexuality is not based on gender but on four
possible interpretations of the phallus and castration, the new element Lacan stresses in
the phallic function is that the real organ enjoys(+)and desires an object (a)
that will cause its pleasure. The real phallus is sexual, by contrast with the imaginary
phallus whose signiers culminate in the macho graftis that try to account for the
nonsensical gap between erection and detumescence. The imaginary phalluss sense
(the meaning of Sinn, as opposed to the meaning of Bedeutung) concerns being and
power, not information or pleasure. The jouissance phallus contrasts, as well, with the
symbolic phallus whose meaning is the negative of lack or castration()which
makes desire possible, enabling it to function as an evanescent wanting, rather than a
libidinal demand.
On the feminine side, Lacan calls the object (a) the plus-de-jouir, or the excess
cause in desire, whose uniquely positive enjoyment is present under many guises in all the
objects sought in the drive. Gilles Chatenay describes this excess as the real, of [ones]
enjoyment.19 Even though the objects that substitute for the lost object (a) appear and
disappear, as Freuds Fort! Da! paradigm indicates, the object (a), nonetheless, radiates a
diffuse jouissance that contains real remnants of unary traits that serve as the literal
edges that bind themselves to make a hole, as well as the symbolic scars (S1 ) left over
from the cuts of losses (cf. p. 7, ch. 1). The traits cannot, then, be undone or
deconstructed in analysis, nor can the losses be repaired, but a fantasy (/S <> a) can be
traversed: What is traversed is not the subject, however, who is pure absence, nor the
object aspect of pure positivity, but the dialectic played out around the (+,) of the
phallic function of having, losing, and (re)nding (Morel, pp. 3334).
In Lacans teaching, feminine sexuality undergoes all the vicissitudes of
jouissancethe real of genital pleasure (), the wants inferred by lack (desire) (/S),
and the encounters with the void of pure anxiety at the heart of real losses (). Yet,
even though the phallus has a positive side of jouissance, it is the real of any primordial
object as it functions in fantasy, correlated with the drives, that gives rise to the denials,
myths, and quests that determine the myriad treatments of Woman insofar as she is
reminiscent of an excess to the phallic norm.
One might equate The Woman with the (a) that tries to join the couple as two +
a, or One + a. Functioning as an irrational number (#3), the (a) does not support the
two, or the couple, as One. Rather, it is founded on the fact that it cannot support the

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

39

two, for between mother and infant there is always the One plus the Other, as well. Yet
the Other can never be taken as One. Lacans larger point here is that there is no couple,
for each person in the couple intervenes as a ternary, as an object (a), as a gaze conferred
by others (S. XX, p. 49). A feminine man may, for example, evoke the social discomfort
enshrouding the evanescent Woman, unveiling, as he does, the phallic lie that pretends
to be a symbolic whole. Stepping, like the mystics of old, into the place of Woman,
bedecked in enigma and mystery, such a manfor example, Socrates who remains an
enigma for his studentsunveils the real. A decidedly masculine woman may also push
askew the social masks of the unied masquerade, unveil its lie by embodying unexpected forms of the (a) that perforate imaginary wholes and social facades with
the truths of the real that turn Kantian beauty into the psychoanalytic sublime of
unboundedness.
Lacan gives Freud credit for seeing a structural logic here. The logic of the two
sexes is not analogous. There is no Electra complex, no symmetry of the sexes. In
other words, Freud ascertained that the difference between the sexes would not exist if
the difference did not make a difference. The logic of this nd has the same structure
as Lacans understanding that the postulation of a supreme being, exception to human
law, gives grounding to the law, just as Zeno of old understood that the concept of limit
is made possible only in reference to innity.
Stuck in biology, Freud did not think in terms of a logic implicit in his
discoveries. Rather, he retained reductionist ideas of the Oedipus complex as typical
only of male children who love their mothers and feel negativity, even hatred, toward
the father, whom they view as a rival. In trying to gure out the larger ramications of
how males ever get cured of their violence toward each other enough to work together
in a social body, he advanced another simplistic biological answer: Males see the female
genital, judge women as castrated, and, thus, as corporally decient or lacking (in the
Lacanian imaginary), and, perforce, bond together. In other words, Freud equated the
logic of structurewhich lies outside the world of the visiblewith the visible in the
world. In this, he was an empiricist before his time.
Lacans more sophisticated account of the Oedipus complex, based on a reconceptualization of Totem and Taboo (19121913),20 depicts the Ur-father of the primal
hoarde as Freuds mythic effort to designate a real father of jouissance. Leonardo
Rodriguez writes: It was to the subjective impact of the universal cultural law prohibiting incest that Freud gave the name of the Oedipus complex.21 Lacan, as we have
already said, gave the name real father to the manifestation in the family of the
fathers sexual desire for the motherbe it imaginary Daddy, an uncle, a lesbian
partner, and so onand the name symbolic father to the function of castration, or
the effect of the interdiction of incest between the mother and the infant (S. IV, p. 269).
Now, this gives a radically new meaning to the incest taboo, as well as to Freuds
discovery of a pre-oedipal period. Insofar as incest is usually attributed to a prohibition
of sexual relations between father (uncle, brother) with the daughters or sisters, Lacan
reads Freud as having uncovered an even more profound taboo. This one is placed as an

40

Chapter 2

interdiction of psychic Oneness between infant and mother, a taboo against foreclosing the third term of no or Otherness by which exchange is born in the substitutions
necessary to the fall of the object (a), lest the infant become psychotic. Thus, loss of
the (a) gives birth to society, rather than to psychosis. Lacans hypothesis ascribes a
meaning to the incest taboo that concerns a survival of the species at a psychic level,
rather than a reproductive or genetic one (cf. Essays on the Pleasures of Death, ch. 5).
Lacans interpretation of male group bonding in Totem and Taboo, hypothesizes
that Freud put forth a logic of male subjectivity and sexuation, but could only explain
his own mythical theory of the beginnings of society in male bonding as a form of
oedipal guilt caused by having killed the greedy Ur-father. Freud, therefore, could not
ascertain the true logic of male sexuation.22 Lacan dened male identication with the
group of males, rather, as an identication with the symbolic phallus, the positivized
phallic signier that represents difference from the Ur-father as castration; that is, as
a psychic reality, not a biological one. But given that oedipal competition also tugs at
the lawful social bonds, Lacan pursued the logic of lawful cooperation in the realms
of history, myth, religions, and government, where identication with a leader who is
supposed to know the truth, functions as a guarantee of how to act for ones own
good (good taken in Jeremy Benthams sense that ones utilitarian good is also true).
Insofar as every cultural truth also has the structure of ctionthat which
maximizes ones good qua personal desire23 Lacan argued against Immanuel Kants
voluntaristic categorical imperative in which the good of one is the good of all; the
group. Rather, he claimed, the ction of an omnipotent Ur-father is a social supposition (even a requisite) of the One exceptional being who stands outside and above the
law in order to guarantee its validity. Thus, any Ur-father can be seen as another form
representing the real father of enjoyment whose symbolic effect lies on the slope of
superego interdiction to Oneness.
Lacans theory that an identication with the abstract signier for difference
that is, castrationis taken as the base of law and reality means that although Freud
did not place Totem and Taboo in the lineage of his writings on the Oedipus complex,
Lacan did. Freud never got beyond the visual and biological interpretations of The
Three Essays on Sexuality (1905) where he rst tried to describe the difference
between the sexes thus: A male decides he is superior to females because of his
narcissistic interest in his penis, which he see as superior because of its size and visibility
in contrast with the female organ. He quickly resolves his own Oedipus complex by
coming to identify with men at the level of the law, internalized as the superego.
Lacan retained only the structure of Freuds observations: The sexual difference is
constituted asymmetrically. But where Freud falls prey to imaginary thought, Lacan
proposed that the phallus is linked to the particularity of fantasy through a propositional (symbolic) function, rather than directly to the real organ, or the imaginary body. Indeed, an explanation of the substance of jouissancemasculine or
femininenecessitates a topological logic of three dimensions (real, symbolic, and
imaginary), not a scrutiny of two sexes (Morel, p. 23).

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

41

On the one hand, the male error seems imaginary. Imaginarily, males may
mistake their being marked as different from the mother as an attribute of being the
phallusthe desired object. Thus, he confuses being with sexuality insofar as the
privileges granted him seem to concern his body. Actually, male privilege is granted by
the Other whose attributes are symbolically (empirically) countable. It is not an
imaginary phallus he valorizes at the level of cause, then, but difference as a countable
symbolic value, difference as interpretations not subsumed by imaginary consistencies
and misrecognitions.
In Le seminaire, livre IV (19551956): La relation dobjet, Lacan described each sexs
relation to the object (a) and to its lack in terms of the imaginary father; that is, any
gure or signier that represents fatherhood, be it Daddy, an uncle, a priest, a river god,
or any other such paternal sign, is not the real father of jouissance who communicates
interdiction, or the symbolic father whose function is to introduce castration (or lack)
into being, but a sign Lacan dened here as a mixture of the imaginary and symbolic.
Rejecting Freuds incomprehension of female sexuality, Lacan puts forth a logic
in which females confuse their entire body as being the phallusthe beloved object (a)at
the point where love and desire equate her sexuality with her bodily beauty. Put another
way, Lacan shows that a male is a male only insofar as he is a signier that represents a
subject for another signier. He represents himself as a male to another male via his
subjective identication as different from the mother qua Woman. At the level of
empirical controls, a psychotic lacks this identication for difference. Schreber, for
example, identied with his mother in a push toward incarnating The Woman-wholacks-nothing, and settled into the delusion of being the wife of God (cf. S. III).
Such a mental refusal of separationa refusal to lose objects from the Other
(O)indicates one resolution of being that Lacan called the limit of freedom; an
identication with a suffering that is antithetical to any myth of joyful transsexuality.
Thus, psychosis, as a refusal of the oedipal no, fails to evolve the symbolic lack that
builds the capacity for dialectical thought around a third-term effect, produced by the
fall of the object (a). The psychotic is afxed, rather, in a lethal proliferation of mirrorstage narcissistic refractions in which all others are equivalent to his or her Other as full,
not decompleted, and all beings are submitted to the (a) he or she cherishes.
But most males internalize the oedipal injunction to difference. In compensation
for this castrationthis alienation from being One with the rst object(s) of love and
desire, given by the motherthey identify their being and knowledge with the structures of patriarchy: reality, language, and law, playing by the rules of the game of any
local universal encoding of symbolic requisites. Male identication is, thus, dened in
terms of the social body, which he, in turn, defends to the letter and spirit of the law. If
not, he is outside the law, on the side of the feminine (or the negative masculine)a
place of joyful identication for the perverse subject and of sheer unmitigated torture
for the psychotic.
The female is dened asymmetrically as not all within the order of the symbolic,
not all under the phallic law. Insofar as she remains identied with the mother whose

42

Chapter 2

primordial being is corporal and real, the female is closer than the male to an identication with the real of the drives. This leaves open a question regarding females who
identify primarily with their fathers. But, nonetheless, both sexes are identied with the
real cuts out of which the void is rst created by the losses of the (maternal) objects
comings and goings. That these objects give enjoyment as a status quo of simulated
wholeness means that the mother enters into the category of Woman, not only as
sexual, or feminine, but also as holding out the hope of constancy as a deferral of the
impossible real.
Very different is the effect of the castration complex on the girl, Freud says.
She acknowledges her castration, admits the sexual superiority of the male and her own
inferiority, with three possible outcomes: (1) She turns her back on sexuality altogether,
giving up her pre-adolescent (i.e., active/sexual) proclivities as well; (2) She clings to
her threatened masculinity and develops a masculinity complex. The third response a
woman can adopt to what Freud calls castration is (3) the normal feminine attitude
in which she takes her father as a love object, thereby arriving, via castration, at the
feminine Oedipus complex. That is, by accepting that she is not a man, she becomes a
woman, a sexual partner to a man who is not her father, thereby accepting denitive
femininity (Freud, Female Sexuality, p. 232).
Since Lacan viewed castration as a lack-in-being that characterizes both sexes, he
saw both as required to ll that lack. While woman is drawn to the males jouissance
phallus via his social power, as well as by his savoir and his fantasy image of her, his
attraction for her passes through the deles of her imaginary lures that represent the
partial phallic object as sublimated sexuality. Male sexuality is denoted by Lacan as
and (a), while female sexuality depends on words and identications that ll the void of
loss () and suture the lack-in-being (/S). But insofar as sexual pleasure itself is
concerned, Lacan adds supplemental capabilities to the woman that emanate not only
from her not identifying sexually with only one organ but also from a potentially
limitless corporal enjoyment insofar as (s)he is not all identied with an abstract
principle for law, language, and reality. Such a principle subordinates most men to the
singularities of the positivized symbolic phallus and its mate, the superego. Feminine
sexuation acts on both sides of the sexuation graph, bringing together sexuality, ontology, and epistemology.
Thus, Lacans theory of sexuation puts forth a radically different image of the
realities and causes of female sexuality than does Freuds. Most biological females are
mentally castrated within a contradictory and paradoxical logic of double negation, he
argues, because they are identied with the desiring and evanescent object (a,) the
negativized phallic signier (j/S), and are proximate to the real of lost objects
(a)j[]). While the male sexuation symbols are and a, the female ones are /S and
. And these verities obtain whether the man is heterosexual or homosexual, and
likewise for the woman. Thus, Lacan does not divide the sexes as homosexual or
heterosexual, but in terms of epistemological places built up as masculine or feminine
responses to lack and loss.

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

43

Castration is not a fantasy, Lacan says, but is the real operation introduced by
the incidence of the signier in the rapport of (the) sexes. Loss must logically precede
identication with the signier. While man conates desire and love with his festishized penis and its fantasy objects (a), the Woman desires to be loved from the place
where she represents the decompleted or incomplete Other () for others, and thus she
seeks reexively to know who she is in their eyes. Quite different requisites are put on
the male for obtaining jouissance. To enjoy a woman, the mans father must be
(mythically) dead in the realwhich Lacan denes as the impossible place of contradictory elementsof the impasses that reappear in the symbolic. The Oedipus myth
is, thus, a structural operator of the real father (S. XVII, p. 144): The boy desires his
mother, but cannot have her. If he gets her, he has overthrown the basic law of exchange
by which sociey subsists. Freud erred in equating jouissance with the dead (Ur) father,
Lacan says, thereby missing the point of what myth is. In enunciating the impossible
ideal, myth moves to the logical structure that requires the fathers murder as the
condition of the sons jouissance; this is the antithesis of Nietzches foreclosure that
would have God dead (S. XVII, pp. 13839 and 143 45).
In Identication, Joel Dor refers to Lacans abundant work in rethinking
Freuds three modes of identication. In 1962, Lacan said: The affect of anxiety is,
indeed, connoted by a fault in the object, but not by a fault in reality. If I no longer
know anything about myself as the possible object of the desire of the Other, as Dor
continues, anxiety arises as a small step from an identication that has been shaken.24
With these theories, advanced in the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan stressed the sexuated
choice of identication as masculine or feminine, a choice not determined by primary
or secondary biological sexual characteristics but by the identity given a child by
others and the Other: //S. Up to 1974, Lacan had spoken of sexuation /S formulas
or sexual identications.
But in 1974, he advanced a new termoptions of sexuated identication,
arising by the signier as predominantly masculine or feminine. That is, language
creates ones imaginary body and denes one as a signier that represents a subject for
another signier in a chain of articulations:
S1s ---------- S2
x z
/S

The unconscious, structured like a language, cuts into or across the imaginary consistency of the biological body, bringing into language the effectsthe dits or sinthomes
that create affects; not biology. This is the sense in which psychoanalysis can use the
symbolic of ones dires and sinthomes to enable an analysand to recongure (reinterpret)
the real of the dits that speak his or her desire from the radically absent place of the
unconscious Other.
Such a view of (sexual) desire is far from Freud who maintained in 1931 that the

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Chapter 2

pre-oedipal relation explains many puzzles of feminine sexual life. In married life, the
wife treats her husband as she treated her mother, regressing to conicts she had with
her mother. Here Freud asserts another way in which the feminine Oedipus complex
differs from the masculine one. Girls do not rival with their mothers (or each other) out
of competition for their fathers, but on the basis of conict with their mothers for the
fathers attentionconict Freud attributes, again, to the magical power of the visible,
to the daughters seeing their mothers as castrated.
In her course, on La difference des sexes, Genevi`eve Morel points out that in his
sexuation graph, Lacan describes a function on the feminine side that cannot
be written in the real of the unconsciousx xwhere there is no exception to
not being castrated. Women see the realities of a double castration on the male
side,
Man
/S

insofar as the symbolic names the male () as different from woman, yet he still
depends on her to ll his lack (/S) in myriad ways.
But women do not consider themselves castrated insofar as the male organ is
perceived imaginarily by both sexes as a separable partial object. Beyond these points,
Lacans focus is, rather, on the point of exception in the feminine universal (Morel, pp.
102103):
x x
x x

Where there is no generic or universal Woman, no Ur-woman exception to the rule of

all being alike insofar as none is a man, women are mythologized as retaining exceptional feminine traits or knowledge, or as possessing supramasculine powers. But they
do not become abstract signiers or principles that guarantee symbolic-order law, as
does the Ur-father on the masculine side.
In the feminine logic, the double negative on the top line creates a double
noninscribable functionthat is, the real. One cannot inscribe the point of exception
necessary to support a universal on the feminine side since the father (or his substitutes)
are on the other side of sexuation.
xx
the father

no sexual rapport

x x
absence

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

45

Thus, one ends up in points of impasse. The formula for the real, that which does not
stop not writing itself, can only produce a positive number (the real squared) (Morel, p.
103): x x. Since the consistency of the whole, or all, resides on the male sidethe
universal of men xx is based on the father (xx)(Morel, p. 104).
Schema of the Man

Morel points out that Women remain concerned to supplement the masculine sexual
formula written as xx. One reading of this formula is that the father cannot
supplement his daughters lack. Taken as an exception, he alone assures a universal
consistency of the all to a social symbolic, that is, a limit; Creon versus Antigone. Lacan
reproached Freud for his theory of a universal Oedipus, just as he critiqued the
Aristotelian universal. Even though Lacan had a theory of the universal of men, it is
based on a logic of contradiction: No man can be an exception to the law in addition to
being its originator. This contradiction partially resolves the Oedipus complex by
giving man a way out of his being all enclosed within the symbolic. Insofar as he is
phallically castrated, he has a possible motive for reaching out to the other, to a partner,
through his lack: /S '
| a. But the phallus serves him contradictorily, also, negating the
possibility of a universal male sexuality. The phallus is an obstacle to the other (the
partner) for he desires the Other (sex), already constructed as his fantasy (Morel,
p. 105).
On the feminine side of sexuation, Lacan adapts a model Aristotle rejected.
What happens if one negates the universal quanticator x? One ends up with
no universal of the feminine, even no logical limit to its contingencies. Lacan proposed that insofar as woman doubles herself, constituting a nonidentitarian logic of
samenessthere is none who is not the same; that is, without the phallusthere is no
every woman as a generic universal phallic class. Such a class has, at least, the male
identicatory mark of difference as a psychic basis for attributing specically masculine properties to difference. On the other hand, there is not one woman who is not
not all (xx) under the local universal all of being somewhat outside the phallic
exigencies of the symbolic. This new kind of logic led Lacan to postulate identicatory
sexuation as that which necessitated modern logic and the mathematical theory of
ensembles (Morel, p. 104). Looking to the French grammarians Damourette and
Pichon, Lacan picked up on their use of a double negative that is not forclusive (Morel,
p. 106). He described the feminine negation of the universal as discordential.25
Even though there is a universal of the masculine symbolic functionxx
(one can say of any x . . . ,), the possibility of this lies beyond itself in a logical
exception. Having rejected the old-fashioned logic that derived negation binarily by
simply negating the copula, the verb to be, Lacan did not leap immediately to the
conclusions of modern logic that all statements are relative to a possible exception.
Rather, he combined Aristotles negation-by-separation with Freuds universality of the

46

Chapter 2

Oedipus complexthat is, castration or separation of the infant and mother leads to a
nonrapport of the sexesthat creates the obstacle that the phallic signier puts under
an early interdiction (Morel, p. 105). The feminine of this universal possibility lies
beyond itself in a negation of the universal: xx.
In speaking of a universal masculine function, Lacan says psychotic men are not
located within it while the feminine introduces a vacillation between what is phallic
(symbolic) and what is not. Yet, the biggest obstacle to the sexual rapport comes from
the male side, making of the feminine not all an ambiguous negation that marks itself as
an inconsistency. Moreover, the silence of the Other (feminine) jouissance (), when
added to the fantasy and the word of love, make up what Lacan called the feminine
pastoute (x), which passes through the phallic word, not through the real body (Morel,
pp. 107108).26 Morel argues that the word of love supplements the womans
disappointmentnot in the mother, butin the father (p. 123). Thus, while jouissance equals love for a man, a woman needs the words of love. That is, for Lacan,
existence has to demonstrate itself for either sex. It cannot be a simple enunciation of
discourse.27 Existence demands a material proof, an inscription. Lacans sexuation
graph is written thus (Morel, p. 111):
Man

Woman

(xx) Necessary
(xx) Possible

Real
(x x)
Contingent (xx)

That is, the double negative of Womans nonexistence ((x x)they are all alike
cannot be inscribed in the real. While the number 0 can be inscribed as a lack of
something (/S) and 1 can be inscribed as an S1 , a unary trait of identication, the
mirror-stage number 2 cannot be made out of two persons whose refractions are lost in
confused illusions of Oneness.
It is precisely the confusion between the numbers two and one that constitutes
psychosis. Lacan started his career as a medical doctor, a psychiatrist who worked with
psychotic patients for more than thirty years. In this period he made a long series of
discoveries regarding the cause of psychosis that might be described as the identication of two as one, or the indifferentiation between a child and the other, or the
foreclosure of a signier for difference that creates lack whose inverse is desire for most
people. That is, if a child identies with the other as a totalitya superego posture
later he or she will not have the dialectical base of intersubjectivity from which to
address others as (ego) ideals, similar to but different from him or herself. Insofar as
there is no pregiven, innate inscription for (sexual) difference, but a oneness of seeming
rapport between two separate individuals, the psychotic subjects refusal of the Father
signier creates an unstable third term in this subject for whom an imaginary prosthetic
element functions as an ideal and the Other is taken as already complete. The Other is
decompleted only when it offers a threat. The prosthetic imagined Other, then, falls
apart in a psychotic break.

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

47

Having refused the signier for difference, the psychotic lives in a profound
identication with the primordial mother. Thus, the psychotic forecloses imaginary
castration () between the symbolic and imaginary that comes from dropping the
object (a). The dropping of primordial objects ordinarily creates identity boundaries
as a space of freeplay between imaginary being and symbolic thinking. Psychotic
foreclosure refuses this loss, thus creating a surplus jouissance around the organs and
objects implicated in desire. Foreclosing the real fathers desire for the motherthat is,
symbolic castrationmeans that the psychotic must identify with prosthetic imaginary fathers who serve as supplemental gures of the law. But the only source of law in
which the psychotic truly believes is the mothers voice, her superego dicta: She (or her
substitutes) serves as The Woman Who Exists and provides the missing signier of law
as an all-pervasive superego voice (or gaze).
While the idea of a logic of the same on the slope of the feminine may clarify
some things connected with psychotic structure, Lacan does not actually speak of a
logic of the same, or a foreclosure of the phallus, for the feminine. Rather, he
advanced the notion of a discordential logic of the no between the enunciation (the
subject as desiring) and the enunciated (the subject as spoken). One could describe the
logic as a feminine discord opposing masculine rules: the masculine xx versus the
feminine xx (Morel, p. 107). In her proximity to the thing in itselfthe maternal
Good one might describe as the real objectthat Lacan locates on the feminine side
of sexuation, not only is the mother confused with giving symbolic gifts that will
stop the infants imaginary frustration via a real organ, such as the breast, males, later,
unconsciously solve the oedipal demands of difference by splitting women between
prostitutes and virgin (mother)s. While Freud thought girls ee identication with the
mother because of disgust with a literal castration, Lacan credits Freud with having
discovered, rather, the lineaments of the dialectic surrounding the object a where the
inside and outside concern proximity or distance from the real of sexual excitement, not
different properties belonging to the object:

Insofar as extimacy and intimacy place perception and perspective within proximate realms, distance from the pure real of the object does not bear on incest as a
morality or a genetic malady, but as the limits of mental and psychic confusion and
collusion where the extreme merger with the object may result in psychosis, where two
are (mis)taken as one. This is why the sexual difference needs to be created by the real

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Chapter 2

fathers giving of the symbolic law as a no to psychic Oneness. The phallic effect
places males and females at a distance from the mothers embodiment of essential
(libidinal) objects. Later, any dyad or couple will abound with nonrapports, although
the supposed Oneness of two brings the myth of a grounding in unity as well as the
death zone of the contradictions and impossibilities that usher the real into the life of a
couple.
Although Freud conated the object with a person, and the cause of feminine
conict with the mothers capacity to elicit disgust regarding her supposed castration,
Lacans description of the object (a) as the excess or surplus value in jouissance, can be
applied to the same passage where Freud erred in attributing psychic cause to organ
reality. Lacan suggests that the girls disgust with her mother, noted by Freud, has much
more to do with the young females thrust toward individuation, toward difference or
Otherness, than with biological organs per se. The object (a) satises in the particular,
supplementing jouissance requirements derived from the structuration of desire in the
earliest interpretations of the phallus and castration. But why would conict or hostility
be aimed by a daughter at her mother, Freud asked? On the one hand, childhood love
knows no bounds, demands exclusive possession, and wants the intimate and extimate
to be the same. But, Freud noted, the conict between mother and daughter has no real
aim. The principal reason it is doomed to end in disappointment is that it is incapable
of providing satisfaction. That is, oneness of two is an illusion.
One can see in Freuds description of the childs goal of attaining all the mothers
love for (him or) herself, and its vicissitudes in later life, a hazy sketch of Lacans object
(a)an object representing a lost objectan object sought with the goal of reexperiencing a totalizing satisfaction. The primary object can never be (re-)found in its
original form, for it was only ever illusory. One is, thus, cast back and forth in life
between the fantasy, the drives, and the incomplete Other:
(the bar of nonrapport between man and woman)
/S j x
z
(lack-in-being)

S() (incomplete Other)

xaz
fantasy
(drives)
The Woman

Lacan stressed that although the object (a) sought in satisfaction is never the actual
thing one hopes for, this in no way attenuates the ardent and active human activity
by which individuals pursue persons and objects with the manifest goal of being
satised.
Little girls also turn away from their mothers, Freud suggested in his 1931 essay,
because the mother prohibits the pleasurable activity of masturbation (p. 239). He
concluded in his 1932 essay that little girls stop masturbating because the sight of the
male genital organ makes them think they have an organ deciency. They give up their

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

49

own pleasure and decide to wait for the substitute replacements of husband = organ,
followed by baby = organ. Morel gives logical sense to Freuds imaginary reductions of
visible phenomena to the thing of fulllment. The little girls deception by her father
gives rise to the common analytic and literary fantasies some women have of being a
singular parent to a child, Morel writes. In fantasy, these women believe their mothering
can compensate for any taint of castration contamination. They wish to mother
from the place of the ideal father. As such, they become exceptions to the rule of
castration: xxon the masculine side of sexuation. Such fantasies not only satisfy
this mothers desire to be on the masculine side, they concomitantly have the effect
of denying the feminine trauma in the real, based as it is on a double negation:
x x.
Freuds essays on the anatomical difference between the sexes have been dismissed both because they are incorrect, and because he uses those differences to
establish a theory of how mind is formed. Only when one accepts that Freud was trying
to understand the mental meaning of the conicts and asymmetries that clearly mark
the development of mind and being or, that when he speaks of women he is trying to
understand why individuals with no deciency feel oppressed by men all the same, can
one grasp how he arrived at the biological and behaviorial reductionist conclusions,
such as those advanced in his 1931 essay: If we survey the whole range of motives
brought to light by analysis for turning away from the mother: That she neglected to
provide the little girl with the only proper genital organ, that she did not feed her
enough, compelled her to share her mothers love with others, never fullled all the
expectations of the childs love and, nally, that she rst excited and then forbade her
daughters own sexual activityall these seem adequate as a justication of the hostility nally felt (p. 234).
Although Lacan does not directly answer Freuds comments, he deduces a
fundamental lack-in-being (with the exception of the psychotic), posited at the site of
the mothers unconscious desire toward each child as correlated with her own experience of castration. His sexuation tables, moreover, imply that the girl is burdened by an
impossiblethat is, identitarianlogic of the real which, having the negative
(number-line) properties of real numbers (fractions), are inscribed as a weightiness of
loss(es). Both sexes equate woman, alternately, with the mother of the drives and as a
sexual object within the drives. Insofar as the drives are qualities, not (empirically
countable) quantities, Woman is quickly mythologized. Lacan taught that myths begin
precisely at the point where something is hard to quantify or qualify precisely because it
is known only in terms of the jouissance properties that emanate from the real object
(a), from the void (), or from the negativized phallus () (S. XVII; cf. ch. 8). We
remember that Lacan equated the Borromean knot with structure and placed the a at its
center, with the void located between the imaginary and real () and the split between
image and wordrst located between absence and presence of body partsbetween
the imaginary and symbolic () (S. XX, p. 9):28

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Chapter 2

One values what one can count clearly and see easily. Yet, the unconscious
count begins with valorizing the 0 that grounds being in the holes created or
hollowed out in the real by the unary traits of identication. These signieds are then
esteemed as the 1 or (S1 ) of difference in the symbolic. The 2 that merges the mother
and infant into an imaginary, illusory one cannot be counted in the unconscious.
That is, imaginary numbers are nonsensical and unthinkable. Lacan refers to unconscious counting as that which begins in the particular jouissance meaning of the drives,
created by the real remnants left over from the loss of objects that rst caused desire.
Unconscious counting is an affair between 0 and 1. The positivizable residue of the lost
objectsthe unary traitsbind themselves to holes and to the body. They consist of
four that have different topological properties: The feces, for example, seem more
substantial than the solipsism of the oral drive, rst marked by the milk that ows
silently between the mothers nipple and the babys mouth. Because the feces are visibly
solid and have dimension, they lie at the base of a later link between the visible and the
jouissance surrounding a counting that is scopically libidinal. One counts money, cars,
friends, orgasms. The feces are also on the border of the quantiable symbolic in an
imaginary equation of feces = phallus = having.
Insofar as the mother is the rst conveyor of the drives, Lacans conation of
mother with Woman and jouissance gives a logic to Freuds picture of woman in
Female Sexuality. Although Freud found no universal law of ambivalencelove/
hateexcept as a characteristic typical of obsessional males, he argued in 1931 that the
strength of the early female attachment to the mother gives rise to the daughters
subsequent ambivalence. Why, he wonders, do boys retain their attachment to their
mothers without becoming hostile to them as girls do? Still, this may not be the case for
boys, he suggested, since there is more work to do on the pre-oedipal in boys and on

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

51

processes we have only just come to know of (p. 235). Still Freud never directly
theorized the subsequent split between a supposedly asexual pure mother and the
impurity of sexual women that marks male confusion toward the mother. Not only
does the requisite of sexual difference cause this split, Lacan maintains, it is further
widened in the distance imposed by the incest taboo. Indeed, rather than describe the
male infants phallus as an object of the mothers desire, Miller says it is closer to an
almost natural barrier to jouissance.29
Although these oedipal issues concern identication, Lacan was at pains to
provide a logic of how identication(s) are constructed, while still attending to the
conditions of meaning via distinctions Aristotle had made between the logic of classes
and attributes. Thus, he ended up linking mentality to sexualityas sexuationvia
that which appears between a subject (who is empty [/S]) and jouissance (which is
positive [a]). Lacan wrote the subjects enjoyment as a functional proposition of the :
(Morel, p. 66). But there is one relation to this signier for menxjxxall
are castratedand a different one for womenxxnot all are all castrated. The
consequent access the woman has to the phallus is contingent: ajjS() (Morel,
p. 173).
Lacan presents a far different picture from Freuds phenomenological, observational, and positivist view of what a little girl asks of her mother regarding the nature of
her sexual aims during the pre-oedipal period. The answer Freud garnered from clinical
material was that the aims are both active and passive. The child wants to do what has
been done to her (or him). Based on this observation, Freud stated paradoxically that
the early mother-infant relation is an a-sexual relationship, even though much of the
activity in it includes the real of corporal care and touching. Lacan objects that this view
of development leaves out the concrete real of sexuality, while abutting in an erroneous
conclusion: The mirror-stage dyad of mother and infant is romanticized as the paradigm of an ideal adult sexual coupling (Freuds genital maturity) based on a belief in the
harmony of the One.
Freud wrote in his 1931 essay: The rst sexual or sexually tinged experiences of
a child in its relation to the mother are naturally passive in character. It is she who
suckles, feeds, cleans and dresses it, and instructs it in the performance of all its physical
functions. Part of the childs libido goes on clinging to these experiences and enjoys the
various gratications associated with them, while another part strives to convert them
into activity (Freud, Female Sexuality, p. 236). Given his discovery of infantile
sexuality, Freud did not have to make a great mental leap to propose that libidinal
energy is constructed in the earliest maternal care.
Lacan argues that Freud, nonetheless, confused the unique, particular elaborations of the partial drives around the objects-cause-of-desirethe oral, anal, scopic,
and invocatory drives (whose fates vary with the structure of desire that marks ones
oedipal fantasies as primarily normative, neurotic, psychotic, or perverse) with the adult
genital relation. Lacans sexual nonrapport means, among other things, that there is no
genital drive: That is, there is no signier for a direct rapport between organsnor

52

Chapter 2

between man and woman, or infant and motherthat would give rise to a genital drive
whose clear reciprocities would function automatically and cyclically as it does in the
animal kingdom. Each persons partner is actually a relation to the Other (sex) of his or
her earliest unconscious fantasies and to the repressed object(s) (a)representative of
the drivethat constitute the particular conditions of jouissance in his or her fantasies.
In trying to puzzle out the mysteries of feminine sexuality up to 1931, Freud
sought to understand the sexual difference via a contradiction in passive and active
behavior, these being the characteristics he assigned respectively to feminine and masculine sexuality. But, in 1931, Freud saw that all children want to convert passive
behavior into active behavior: Do to the other what was done to them. Why, he asked
in Female Sexuality, do little girls not want to wash and dress their mothers as they do
their dolls? Why seek a substitute gure, while directing an oral, sadistic and nally
even phallic impulse toward their mothers? The answer he gave to this question was
later developed by Melanie Klein: Infants fear being devoured by the mother, so they
want to devour her in turn (p. 237).
Seen through a Lacanian grid, the identication with dolls is not gender specic,
but an imaginary identication with images and with the symbolic effects of language
that constitute a childs unconscious Other, which later seems as if it were detached
from the mothers unconscious desire. Relating to enigmatic objects of desire, a child
places its libido in language through metonymies whose referents may be the breast, a
button shaped just so, and nally the amorphous desire to be held. This is quite a
different theory from Freuds concept where two people relate harmoniously as whole
bodiesboy and girl, or infant and mothermirroring each other in a totalizing way
through corporal completions where two whole selves create an ideal merger into one.
Lacan gives us, rather, a mathematically complex relation of parts of two beings
dependent on one another. But the excluded middle of intuitionist logic is not valorized, as Kirsten Hyldegaard argues.30 Rather, Lacans bars, schemas, graphs, and use
of the picture, all work toward giving a logic of the negative functions of lack, loss,
castration, and cuts that intervene in all seeming totalities, such that even a triad cannot
be formed without a fourth link (the knot) that unies the orders by bisecting the triad
into three realms, the knot itself making the fourth category of the symptom/sinthome.
Lacan questioned all theories that reduce perception to consciousness, or to the
visible imaginary, or to intersubjectivity, or self/other relations. In such theories, no
negative functions intervene at all except as simple seeming totalities. In the absence of a
logic of negative functions, such as intuitionist logic, there is always an equation of
perception with systems of consciousness, and the visible with the imaginary. When no
unconscious splits intervene in being, body, or knowledgeas they do in Lacans
formalization of three jouissancesthere is no way for libido to attach itself to
meaning. In conscious life as depicted by Lacan, three forms of castration introduce
alienation into language (a positivized castration []); an encounter with the void in
being and knowing experienced in moments of loss (); and the dits of the unconscious
which language tries to translate in the dires of sense, or in the meaning of jokes, dreams,
and so on, of the negativized (potentially separable) phallus [].

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

53

In stressing the incompleteness of the Other as a set () in Seminar IX on

Identication, Lacan also emphasized the Others impotence to respond, which comes
from the limits of its knowledge. In bringing together Freuds conscious and unconscious with Aristotles universals and particulars via the contradictory logic that topology makes truth functional, Lacan proposed three jouissance functions that enter
language alternately as cuts, knots, or gaps in seemingly imaginary consistencies. The
real actually cuts into an imagined whole, uncovering hole(s) in symbolic narratives
and in corporal homeostases. These attest to an ek-sistence of the real in conscious life
(cf. La troisi`eme jouissance).
Giving a very different theory to the cause of mentalityto cover over the real
and to negotiate desirethan Freud did, Lacan, nonetheless, maintains the sexual
difference and the (oedipal) paternal metaphor as the basis of how meaning is woven
together in the particular identictory structures that constitute sinthomes. Indeed, the
orders begin to intersect and weave themselves together as units of memory/mind long
before two years of age when the infant advances to the mirror-stage identication by
assuming a minimal image of a whole body gestalt, based on identifying with other(s).
Later, he or she translates such primordial material through transformations that refer
to the initial objects that cause(d) desirethe Ur-lining of the subjectonce an
incipient base of a grammar is acquired. In Lacans teaching, any totalizing, holistic
identication is a misperception, a fact he denoted by postulating the subject as an
empty place(/S) lled by imaginary identications of alienation and jouissance (1+1,
etc.), where 1 = i, or imaginary numbers, equal an ideal image. The rst signiers to
represent the subject through identications are master signiers (+1) or S1s.
Thus, Lacan writes: 1+1, 1+1 etc. (Holland, p. 64; Lacan S. IX: Lidentication, Jan. 1962). When he added together the results of this formulation, he gave his
rst form of the paternal metaphorName-of-the-Father (Other/Phallus)as well
as the denition of a signier as representing a subject for another signier (Holland, p.
65; Lacan, Lidentication). Herein, infant perception is rst created in reference to the
concrete realities of the experiences of loss (0) and alienation (1) that interpret the
mothers unconscious desire vis-`a-vis the Father signier, the phallus, and castration.
Later, the powerful effects of language as a body of knowledge (S2 ) assign a place of
identity to a child within the social eld. From Lacans viewpoint, during the early
period Freud is describing, the desiring responses of an infant have already begun to be
written in the Other in imaginary, real, and symbolic topological units, each of which
encircles the object (a) in the center. When object satisfaction is lost, an infant seeks to
retrieve some trace of the objects real metonymic properties (+1 or S1 ), or unary traits.
Metaphorical substitutions of one thing for another are much more sophisticated
functions which occur later as oedipal requisites: i +
.
The rst losses of the object are registered as a tearing and splitting, as a breach
between a supposed preexisting surface of smooth material thought to compose a
whole body surface, and a sense of nothingness. Jeanne Lafont points out that the hole
is rst before the surface itself.31 This tearing away between the surface of the body
and the object of desire is where imaginary perception begins to constitute the virtual real

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Chapter 2

as a play between the rim and hole that constitute primordial perception on the side of
jouissance from the start of life, rather than as a passive biological registering of sense
data. The topological hole is created in the symbolic as a point zero of jouissance
density, around which the libidinalization of language and fantasy begins to loop itself.
These rst splits are holes whose everyday existence masks their great topological
sophistication (Lafont, p. 17).
In La Topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan, Lafont refers to Lacans Seminar IX on
Identication where he presents the four objects (a)voice, gaze, breast, and
fecesas having no specular image. The lack of a specular image in the Ur-lining of
the subject enabled Lacan to distinguish between a false imaginary, which leads to
mirror illusions, and a true imaginary that points to the holes in libido and knowledge
where fantasy, desire, and anxiety seep into language via the body. Thus, the unconscious formation of the Ideal ego I(a) is opposed to (a).32 The topological referent by
which the hole is known concretely is the surface or rim of an organthe mouth, the
anus, the aperature of the earwhich have been erogenized in the process of losing and
rending the object that rst structures desire as the desire for an objects return.
Lacans new writing, which includes unary strokes as well as topological forms,
stresses that the desire(d) object was rst composed of identicatory single strokes that,
in turn, link desire to images and words. Although these inscriptions constitute the
knowledge out of which the infant seeks to repeat or maintain a consistency in
jouissance by fusing with other persons, this is not the true meaning of what Freud
called an incorporation, Lacan maintained.
Although Freud explained incorporation in Totem and Taboo (1913) as the
cannibalistic consumption of the Ur-father by the sons whose hope was to acquire his
power and womenhis jouissanceLacan thought, rather, that incorporation (Einforleibung) was related to either foreclosing (Verwerfung) or afrming (Bejahung) the
Fathers Name. The rst mode of Freuds identication with an interdicting father
corresponds to identifying with the father in the real, an operation Lacan explains by
the three algebraic axes of the torus as a central void lled (or not) by the (a):33

Lacan pointed out that the impossibility (the number 2) of imaginary fusions leads,
later, to identication with a belief referred to a Fathers Name signier, taken as a
guarantee or knot () of the three orders of knowledge. Such differences are between
imaginary introjection (projection) of unary traits (1) and incorporation of the

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

55

particular sinthomes, master signiers, or dits (+1), that bespeak the real father. Lacan sees
Freuds myth as an imaginary narrative that tries to explain the elusive real whose terrain
Lacan maps.
Another feature of the pre-oedipal phase, Freud suggests in Female Sexuality,
is that because little girls are sexually stimulated by their mothersalbeit unawares
they often fantasize that their mothers have tried to seduce them (p. 238). JacquesAlain Millers clarication of Freud here broadens this to the near universal experience of the effects of castration. All representations compensate for the trauma of
separation from pre-oedipal jouissance. Miller interprets Lacans reading of Freud on
the pre-oedipal phase to mean that since there is no signier for jouissance, no social
permission to enjoy, language and images will always cover and veil the libido. Thus,
little girls do not automatically fantasize a mother who seduces them. They fantasize,
rather, a replacement for lost jouissance that is inseparable from the mothers proximity
to the real of the sexual drives. On the fathers side, Lacan writes (Morel, p. 111):
Mans side

Men j the father

On the mothers side, he writes:

Womans side
one by one J J

Later effortsof either sexto recuperate primary jouissance will be linked to

(substitute) mothers (or a mythic ideal Woman who is thought to exist as the feminine
essence); or, in Lacans terms, jouissance brings together pleasure and pain, Eros and
Thanatos, because of its closeness with the feminine real and its proximity to loss (J)/, a
proximity based on the presence of the void. Although the innite makes itself felt as
such, on the side of real numbers that exist precisely to infer the subtraction of an
incomplete ensemble, subtraction posits an enda closed setto a seemingly innite
ow of feminine desire, caught as it is in the regress of lack and loss. At such junctures,
no woman thinks about limits or the nite end points of real numbers. Rather, desire
seeks an object (a) to ll the lack within the logic of the not all which redoubles feminine
jouissance by linking the void in the Other () to the nonexistence of The Woman:
x (x). There is no essential Woman and no whole, self-sufcient mother.
Even though desire will always bear on the symbolic phallus (), when raised to
the level of secondary jouissance (or identication with the Ideal ego symbolic construct) it is also inseparable from the signier for a Fathers Name()/around
which belief systems build up and elaborate the various structures of desire. Lacan
called such belief the sublimation of the sinthome/S1 which he placed in the real.
One must always keep in mind that in Lacans rewriting of Freud, two reals are at stake:

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Chapter 2

the biological natural one that enables reproduction, and the real of psychoanalysis
where sex runs into the impasses caused by the fact that it can only be approached on
the bias of language (Morel, p. 128). Thus, jouissance can only be apprehended when
approached via desire/lack.
In this sense, desire has the familiar triangularity of Freuds oedipal structure,

as well as a triangularity that Lacan captures in rewriting the Aristotelian universal.

Lacan points out that Aristotles fallacy in his syllogism (A) with its attributes (I1 ,
I2 )A: Every man is good; I1 : Some animals are men; I2 Thus: Some animals are
goodlies, not in the substitution of an attribute for a subject, but in the fallacy of the
rst enunciation (A) insofar as it depends on the limitation (I ) which leads to a false
conclusion. This syllogism, says Lacan, is a master discourse (Morel, p. 69). No
universal should be based on an existence that is simply deniedthat is, that some men
are evilLacan argued in Letourdit (19721973). For example, sexuation (masculine and feminine) depends on the particular truth-functional logic of contradiction
where the universal contradicts the existential. Unlike Aristotle, Lacan placed the
existential element (or quanticator) in the position of Mistress (Morel, p. 79).
We remember that the term quanticator was invented by Apulee, the author of a
treatise on Plato, to designate the small words that characterized universals and particulars for Aristotle: any, no, someprosdiorismes. Lacan called his own quanticators quantors because he did not want to allude to a quantity of attributes. For him the
denition of quantor is what links a variable in a propositional function. Before being
linked, the variable is free, standing only by its own proper name (Morel, p. 74). In
other words, having accepted the proposition that men and women dene themselves
as such in reference to a third thingthe sexual differenceand are thereby linked
by that variable, Lacan proceeds to the Aristotelian universal statement that all men are
castrated, which he then negates by a true (not false and thus not contradictory)
existential proposition: One man is not castrated () because he stands (in myth)
above the laws of men (x). On the womans side, he departs from Aristotle altogether
and proposes a universal negative (xx): all are not all castrated. He follows this by a
particular afrmative (x x): There does not exist even one who is not castrated. On
the mans side, something of the universal remains, while on the womans side, an
existential contradiction takes over a seeming universalization and, thus, is closer to
modern logic (Morel, p. 77).
In Lacans words, it is not on the universal qualication that the negative is
brought to bear (Le seminaire, livre IX: Lidentication, Jan. 17, 1962). Freud questioned the
little girls desire toward her mother. Lacan focused on desires substituting someone or

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

57

something else for the mother: S(ubject) j /S (subject division) j a or things that
will ll the lack created by the separating: 1/2. The losonge symbolizes being alienated
by language and separated from primary jouissance (
j <> ), placing the structure of a split at the base of thought/S <> afor both sexes. In 1931, Freud
described the turning-away from her mother [as] an extremely important step in the
little girls development. It is more than a mere change of object (p. 239). The further
impact of such a change, based on clinical material he had observed, indicated a
marked lowering of the active sexual impulses and a rise of the passive ones (p. 239).
The negative consequences of this are profound, not only as a turning away from
clitoral masturbation (which Freud called a repression of masculinity), but because
dependence on the opposite sex, the father-object, increases the girls passivity. Paradoxically, Freud recommended the development of femininity, at the same time that he
outlined its injurious effects on the young girls sexuality and behavior.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Lacans having returned to Freud here lies
in Lacans insistence that Freud had found a structural logic that was separate from the
content-specic conclusions he had drawn. Indeed, Freuds many impasses and quandaries led Lacan to posit a new logic of sexuation whose base is epistemological. We have
said that the cause of conict or mental anguish is not only repressed sexuality, or
subject division, but also that the structures of desire from which sexuation arises are
four interpretations or attributes of the propositions regarding the phallus and castration. These yield normative desire, based on a strong belief in a Fathers Name and
repression of the unconscious; or the neuroses that deny the sexual difference that founds
the unconscious; or perversion that repudiates the difference; or psychosis that forecloses it.
In constructing the analytic real of the unconscious, the rst logical time is
that of the natural, biological difference. The second logical moment occurs when
sexual discourse transforms the natural organ into a signifying instrument regarding
enjoyment: J/. The third logical time is that of having assumed sexuation in
reference to one of two different modes of (genital) phallic jouissance: the masculine or
the feminine (Morel, pp. 12829):
J
X x
M

Although both males and females have equal access to genital (or phallic) sexual
pleasure, females have a supplemental sexual pleasure that males do not (usually) have.
Lacan called it the Other jouissance and located the enigma of the feminine elsewhere
than in this supplemental sexuality. The feminine mystique, if you will, concerns,
rather, the structural effects of womans proximity to the real and to the object a, which
place her in a special relationship to the cut that governs the drives.
Insofar as there is no essential whole Woman existing to ll up the real hole in
the Other, or give an answer to the male lack that continually questions her, Womans
existential being is constantly jeopardized by the real. In Seminar XX, Lacan says he likes

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Chapter 2

topology because it is interested in spaces and places and works with symbols and
letters, but without any concern for how they represent themselves in space, even
though his entire teaching always brings these back to individuals. In chapter 1, he calls
the space of sexual enjoyment for both sexes compacity, or, a common space
having the same structural impasse: A unique relation to the absolute Other. This
means that each man relates to Woman rst as an absolute alterity, and only later as
an other per se.
In The Hypothesis of Compacity in chapter 1 of Encore: Seminar XX (1972
1973), Genevi`eve Morel tells us that a compact is dened in a space by the notion of
closed and bounded aspects of metric spaces, such space being (uni- to quatri-) dimensional: from a real line, to a plane, to space, up to time. While Lacan denes male
compacity in terms of closed space and female compacity on the basis of open
(nonbounded) sets, jouissance, for either sex, is compact or bounded.34 The man
confronts the womans sexuated body, which he must approach by the object (a,) the
fantasy particular to him. As he takes women one by one, he always seeks a repetition
of the trait that causes his enjoyment. In this sense, man must seek his pleasure
contingently, from the
S()
z
Other:

x
The

This is, for him, an equivalent of the feminine pas tout, which opposes his dependence
on the fantasy a she embodies and the One of phallic jouissance on which his pleasure
depends (Morel, La difference, p. 75). The Woman, by contrast, approaches her
jouissance as a supplemental doubling due to her not being all under the phallic sway:
The

z
x
S()

She is not all [pas tout] () on the slope of the barred Other who escapes the superego
injunction imposed on the man who is under the phallic boundedness of the all () of
the closed sets. Woman is, rather, under the phallic function which interprets the
phallus as a signied; the one minus ((x)j), the difference between the sexes
(Morel, La difference . . . , p. 96).
The mystery for Freud in Female Sexuality was centered on the study of
Victorian woman subjected to male superego requisites of cultural requisites of the
phallic all, referred only to the positivity in jouissance ((x)j +). Why do libidinal
forces suddenly go in a different direction for women than for men? Freud asked. He

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

59

answered: Biological factors subsequently deect those libidinal forces [in the little
girls case] from their original aims and conduct even active and in every sense masculine strivings into feminine channels (p. 240). This gives one to think that biochemistry will one day nd a male chemical substance and a female one, he suggested,
immediately countering this statement with the observation that biology has not, for all
that, isolated the causes of neuroses under the microscope: Psycho-analysis teaches us
to manage with a single libido, which, it is true, has both active and passive aims (p.
240): (x)
This is the single libido Lacan translates in Seminar XX into jouissance,
agreeing with Freud that there is only one (phallic) libido. And it is male pas tout in the
sense of being a strictly genital jouissance, referring to the singular experience of orgasm
for either sex.
By this Lacan does not strictly mean the penis, but the phallus as a sexual signier
of difference or castration, as well as jouissance. It is in the name of this duality that a
division of the sexes is pronounced that puts men in one desiring posture and women in
another. Although the phallus (as signier of no to incest, the signied) is related to
the penis as a real organ and is an image of it in the imaginary, its principle status is
symbolic insofar as it signies both jouissance and castration. When Lacan says the
libido is masculine, he does not equate it with the biological male or female, then, but
with masculine or feminine jouissance and castrationactive or passive postures
adopted in sexualitywhich he calls identication as lover or beloved. In this sense,
the difference between the sexes is situated by language at a signifying level where oedipal
identications create sexed positions in terms of unconscious desire.
Lacan argues that this symbolic status of the phallus is well exemplied in Freuds
On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplied in Anal Eroticism (1917)35 where
Freud established a series of symbolic equivalences between the boy and his penis
excrement, money, and other metonymic substitutions, all referring to the symbol phallus
dened as a positive element (+) that paradoxically opposes itself to lack (). By connecting the penis to the feces in male perception, while connecting the phallus to the
castration complex, one sees further evidence of Freuds efforts to solve certain biological enigma by postulating equivalence relationships in the visible imaginary. When
Lacan argued in 1958 in The Signication of the Phallus that a boy can pass from being
(identied as) his mothers object of desire to having the phallus (that is, being able to
desire something else), he put forth a new psychoanalytic axiom that goes beyond Freud:
The primacy of the phallus is correlated to the outcome of the castration complex.
Developing Lacans four negations in the sexuation formulas, Genevi`eve Morel
portrays the rst as the sexual nonrapport marked by bars over the phallic, the universal,
and the existential quant(icat)ors: ,,. However, Morel says, Lacans bar of negation does not work like it does in modern logic, where negation is placed before the
proposition one denies. Not only is sexuation not true mathematics, neither does Lacan
link the negating bar to the object under it (as did Aristotle). Rather, at the point of an
impossible rapport on the feminine side, one nds the phallic function marked by this
principle negation: It is not that: x x/xx. This means that the womans
jouissance is only gured in reference to the phallus taken as the key signier which

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Chapter 2

marks a gap or hole between the sexes: ( . . .) (Morel, La difference des sexes, pp. 94
96). The second negation, then, is castrationboth possible and contingentwhich
means accepting to inscribe oneself as an x, as a variable that represents one as
sexuated within the phallic function of difference and lack (p. 96). The third negation
is that of the negativized phallus or the postivized one: /;+. What Lacan means by
this is that at least one man says no to castration in the symbolic, thereby gaining the
status of leader. This is not the foreclosure in the real that marks psychosis, but a
structural paradigm of the grounding of law and logic in power, status, and submission:
xx. On the feminine side, Lacan eliminated the universal negative by a double
contradiction, marking, rather, the absence of a point of exception that would support a
(local) universal: x x. This formula goes with his There is no The Woman,
exception to the law (of the father), who instigates law on the basis of a true/false
paradigm where the false is actually falsusas in the semblance of an Ur-father
not false by empirical proof (Morel, La difference des sexes, pp. 96103).
Thus, the fourth negation that Lacan calls the feminine not allxxis
logically discordential, calling up Peirces empty set as an equivalent of the unconscious,
rather than Irigarays idea that Lacans xxuniversal of menplaces madness and
foreclosure on the feminine side (Morel, p. 104). In the eld where the economy of
negations means something, only the negations related to castration produce signifying feedback which, retroactively, resignies earlier losses that were constituted by the
cut that rst produced the logic of separation. It is not severance or weanings Lacan
means by separation, however, but that these experiences leave traces that can be reremembered or repeated as countable unary traits that were initially inscribed at the
moment of the infants losing the objects mobilized when desire was rst constructed as
a limit to memory. Based on Lacans psychoanalytic logic, the phallus-castration oppositions will be mapped onto all other (earlier or later) oppositions: masculine/
feminine; active/passive; lover/beloved.
Lacan argued that Freud, without realizing it, posited the result of an interplay
between the Oedipus complex and the castration complex, between different kinds of
negations and lacks. But Freud did not realize that these negations were not biological.
In his seminar on The Transference,36 Lacan offered a new interpretation of Platos
Symposium in the rst eight chapters, rst arguing there that active and passive sexual
postures concern whether or not one is in the position of the lover or the beloved. Such
a theory takes away any gendered notion of sexual behavior, thus contradicting
Freuds conclusion that the entire problem of female sexuality is contained in the
existence of the passive aims of the feminine libido. Lacan interprets Freuds stress on
feminine passive aims and masculine active ones as another way of saying that women
depend on love at the point where men confuse love with sex.
Freud concludes in Female Sexuality that girls oscillate between choosing the
abandoned mother-attachment and the father- object. His view typies male sexuality
rather than depicting its paradoxical logic: Dependent on the superego injunction to
enjoy, while prohibited by the incest taboo, Lacans greater focus was on the fact that

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

61

no universal (master enunciation) determines a sexual logic. Rather, the exception

conrms the rule of difference by denying the universal, showing the universal as empty
and merely possible, not necessary (Morel, La difference des sexes, p. 71).
By fusing the quantors of modern logicthe (exception) and the
(universal)Lacan does not, however, give them a symmetrical status. Moreover, he
keeps some afnity with Aristotles every and some, although he modies them by
giving priority to the some. Most men (those who are not psychotic) are all, under the
requirement of castration (x), because they have deferred to the real fathers desire to
have all the womenat least the little boys own mother. Here, then, the exception
(x) gives the rule. Later, in sexual relations, the male experiences this symbolic no as a
limit on the innite push to enjoy the other via the fragile conditions imposed by
tailoring his own fantasy to the Others desire.
Lacan, like Freud, placed a more complicated sexuation structure on the feminine side, insofar as it does not obey Aristotelian logic (Morel, La difference . . . ,
p. 76). Unlike masculine sexuality, the feminine one is an open ensemble that is not
limited by an existential quanticator (xx). Although Aristotle retained the
principle of contradiction in his logic, he considered it undemonstrable. Lacan asserted
the principle of contradiction as basic to science, even arguing that sexuation sets forth
the logic: Inconsistency is permanent from the moment a does not equal a (Morel,
pp. 7879). Thus, feminine sexuality, in containing a double negativethere is none
who is not castrated(x x)opens onto the contradictory logic of the impossible
real (what does not stop not writing itself ): Aristotles universal negative, without
value, and C. S. Peirces empty ensemble, lacking a negating principle.
Lacans conclusion passes outside such blockages, beyond such contradictory
abutments, specifying the feminine as also proximate to innite sexuality, insofar as
xx means that not all of them are all castrated. This adheres to a contingent logic,
derived from an open compact space that counts lovers (or orgasms) one by one, on a
continuum of successions. Such a logic of the particularone by onenegates the
universal (). Following the French grammarians Damourette and Pichon, Lacan, as
we have said, named this logic discordential. This does not mean discordant, however,
but a nuance between a probability and a desire that something might be so (Morel, La
difference des sexes, p. 106). Put another way, Lacan arrives at an understanding of the
feminine as dwelling on the side of the question, in the domain of the uniqueness of
unary details, itself introducing into the closed bounded sets of masculine epistemology
and sexuality the unbounded open sets that make room for the place(s) of equivocation,
the logic of inconsistency, and an ungraspable vacillation that Lacan lovingly named the
not all.
In Morels terms, a feminine inconsistent logic (a logic such as Bertrand Russell
tried to construct in mathematics) contains the coexistence of two contradictory
positions: Being in the phallic function and not being in it. These are two inconsistent
positions that cannot be joined into one (p. 108). One can only conclude that a
feminine epistemology is of a piece with the supplemental feminine jouissance Lacan

62

Chapter 2

placed beyond the phallus in his chapter God and Womans Jouissance (Seminar
XX, p. 74).
Lacan had developed Freuds postulation of three modes of identication in Le
seminaire, livre XXI (19731974): Les non dupes errent, and earlier, in . . . Ou pire (livre XIX
[19711972]), where he had stated that subjects reject their natural sexual identications based on anatomy: They only recognize themselves as speaking beings, in order
to reject this [anatomical] distinction by identications (Morel, p. 52). Before arriving
at his formulas of sexuation that connected sexuality to ways of knowing, Lacan, as
we have said, used the terms of sexual identications or options of sexed identications. By this, he
meant that one chooses a masculine or feminine sexuation by the intermediary of the
phallic signier. While a normatively (castrated) person (male or female) will choose
(on the masculine side)will identify with what the Other desires in classifying a
real man or womana perverse subject will identify with jouissance itself insofar as
it lls the Others lack. The Lacanian hysteric and obsessional are closer to Freuds term
of bisexual, except that by bisexual, Lacan does not mean identication with anatomical
traits or organs. He refers, rather to the family and culture-specic masculine and
feminine traits that marked the mother and father and environment (Morel, p. 53).
By going back to Freuds three types of identication from Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Lacan increasingly stressed the rapport between
sexuation and the rst and basic human identication with the lack in the Other: .
Having characterized this as the hysterics identication with her father, he adheres to
Freud in depicting this as the basic identication of any subject (except the psychotic)
with initial cuts between the object of satisfaction and the infants body. Insisting on the
particularity of the signier in composing the Ideal ego that defends against the void in
the Other, Lacan stressed the desiring subjects identication with a unary trait. Indeed,
the hysteric, sometimes, has identied with only one such trait. Lacan emphasized the
sinthome Dora chose in identifying herself as sexually uninvolvedsimilar to her fathers
impotenceas well as her identication with her fathers cough, a sign of malady.
Rather than identify as sexuateda bric-a-brac of multiple identications not
marked in this caseDoras ight, her identication with a castrated father, are marked
(Morel, p. 54). It is the primordial Freudian identication Lacan stresses in sexuation,
then, not the other two levels of identication that concern group identity: ego to ego in
a collectivity, or identication with a leader bearing a prestigious Fathers Name, and,
thus, worthy of representing an Ideal (/) for a cohesive symbolic order group.
The signication of the phallus, Lacan writes in 1958, lies in its being the
privileged signier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent
of desire (Ecrits: A Selection, p. 287). What is veiled/Otheris its relation to the
Others desire. The phallus plays its role veiled, while paradoxically manifesting the
Others desire as that which must be recognized (p. 288). Here, Lacan says, is signed
the conjunction of desire in that the phallic signier is its mark, with the threat of
nostalgia of lacking it (p. 289). In this sense, its meaning turns around the personal
demand for love and the social demands for particular conditions of being that elicit

Freuds Female Sexuality and Femininity

63

love. If one has the required phallic attributesthat is, those valued by the
Otherone is given being in the social gaze; one is blessed; one is desired. In this
sense, the demands for love are subjected to the function of the mask, to ones accepting
the identications and semblances the Other requires in the power dynamics of desire
and love (p. 291).
Not only do desire (a/) and love diverge, desire comes from being the
phallus for the Other, rst for the mother, while the phallic function refers to the
mothers unconscious desire (/?) vis-`a-vis the masculine subject, her unconscious
fantasy (Morel, p. 48). By approaching the sexual difference on the bias of jouissance
and language, and not in terms of development, Lacan argued that sexuation comes
from a logic that occurs in three logical times: (1) the natural difference between the
sexes; (2) the sexual difference itself; and (3) the time of the choice of sexmasculine
or feminineby the subject. His construction must, however, be approached by the
opposition of two reals: that of biological science and that of the psychoanalytic
discourse (Morel, La difference des sexes, p. 127).
As early as the 1960s in his Remark on the report of Daniel Lagache, Lacan
wrote the formula for male desire as Man/ (a); and for female desire as Woman/
().37 The masculine here is negative, bearing the mark of castration rather than the
positive mark of jouissance, insofar as it signies a renunciation of masturbation in
favor of choosing a partner. The other, the partner, will predominate over the males
narcissistic investment in his own body. The woman desires, instead, from an incomplete place, which constructs an excess of supplemental jouissance in her response
to the totalized desire of male jouissance. While the man is troubled by desirethat is,
by (non)performance anxietythe woman is burdened, rather, by a demand for love,
lest she touch on the empty place of the void in the Other (Morel, pp. 4950). In this
sense, Lacan depicts the boy as leaving the oedipal nexus by joining the group and
submitting to its social conventions, while the girl enters the Oedipus by the problematic of castration she must solve, not only in terms of her mothers unconscious desire
vis-`a-vis her own veiled castration, but also in how she valorizes the Fathers Name as a
paradoxical signier. The Fathers Name signier represents not only an imaginarily
castrated man, then, but a symbolic function and an organ fetishized in the real.
In the real, the phallus signies positivized jouissance, which impacts variously
on males, in excessive valuation or elevation of the orgasm, double castration, seduction,
and so on, (Morel, La difference des sexes, p. 47). In the symbolic, the phallus compensates for a lack, thus representing the cure for its own aw by commanding the
prevailing local universal symbolic view of reality: S1 , S2 , a. At this level, Lacan
equated the phallus with (secondary-process) language and called it the signier of the
language paradigm equated with the law, language, or reality taken as the Others truth.
On the masculine side of the sexuation graph, identication with the phallus is not
however, static, but moves with the Fort! Da! rhythm around the presence or absence of
the object a that lets desire and fantasy enter language. This is one meaning of
castration. First the (imaginary) phallus is there and, then, it is lacking in reference to

64

Chapter 2

the sex who does not have it, and, moreover, is susceptible of being lost by the sex who
thinks he or she has it. This drama of the real, whose effects create a representational
trauma, enables us to understand the link between male aggressivity and its base in ego
fragility as one response to the double castration that marks the male.
When, in 1971, Lacan began to develop a logic of femininity that dropped any
Freudian equation of the feminine with a castration opposed to a masculine virility, he
hypothesized the feminine as formed, not only as a way to work with the phallic pas tout
of a contradictory universal symbolicxxthat is determined as universal by a
negation, not all under the phallic identication of a given symbolic-order convention
of reality. And, furthermore, this identication outside the law culminates in a sexual
jouissance supplemental to male phallic enjoyment. This is a feminine enjoyment of the
pas tout located within the realm of innitude.38
Femininity is neither to be found in appearance nor in the traits inherited from
the Other. Rather, the womans rapport with the imaginary remains crucial (Morel, La
jouissance . . . , pp. 54 55). Imaginary identications give women a way to think about
themselves as loved, as well as offering a precise antidote to the symbolic/phallic/
having equation. This equation marks the masculine concern with work, prestige, and
the immediacy of orgasm, as opposed to the feminine preoccupation with supplementing her narcissism by various means of attenuating the lack that is being. Lacan might be
read as arguing in La troisi`eme (1975) that the third jouissance between the imaginary
and symbolic () is unconscious fantasy, a kind of meaning playing at the edges of
clear signication. Such meaning is libidinal in contrast with the closed master
discourses that mark symbolic-order uses of language as phallic alienations from the
real.
Insofar as man relates to the phallic signier and the object (a), not to Woman
per se, except insofar as she grounds him in a myth of the mother that unconsciously
guarantees an essence of the whole, masculine knowledge and being are protected from
any encounter with the void. Lacan situates jouissance outside the body, in the fantasy
and in the drives. And the drives come from outside the body, making a split between
aim and goal in response to the phallic signier that anchors and orients them as
normative, neurotic, perverse, or psychotic (La difference . . . , Morel, p. 56). Neither
fantasy, drives, nor phallic signier are in the body. These principles of jouissance are
outside the body, which Lacan call a desert of jouissance that takes on a semblance of
consistency from language. Bodily homeostasis is closely linked to the law of a
particular phallic signier that orients by organizing ones relation to lack. In conclusion, let us remember Morels stress on the degree to which the drives being outside the
body calms the real and gives one a position in the symbolic order of the group.

3
Feminine Sexuality, or Why the Sexual Difference
Makes All the Difference
Lacans For a Congress on Feminine Sexuality (1958)

Lacan commented in his Congress on Feminine Sexuality (1958) that nothing had
been heard about feminine sexuality since the 1920s and 1930s when Sigmund Freud,
Karl Abraham, Ernest Jones, Karen Horney, Helena Deutsch, and many others talked
and wrote prolically about the true nature of woman.1 While this was true in 1958,
it seems strange to refer to nothing heard, given that since the 1960s reams have been
written about female sexuality in terms of psychological prole, physiological analysis,
and feminist rights. Everyone is familiar with Masters and Johnson on clitoral orgasms,
Judith Butler on gender trouble and bodies that matter, Irigaray on the two lips, and
myriad others on the inability of men to satisfy women sexually, the greater sexual
pleasure in lesbian life, and so on.
In addressing the topic of feminine sexuality by considering the ways in which the
debates of the 1930s were taken up again and carried forward by Lacans return to
Freud, we will continue to focus in this chapter on: (1) what Lacan means by sexuality;
(2) what he notes as particular to feminine sexuality (as opposed to masculine sexuality); and (3) what some of the consequences of his theory are in regard to current
feminist debates. We remember that Lacan coined the term sexuation to describe a
subjects choice of sex as masculine or feminine in assuming an active or passive
position vis-`a-vis his or her object of desire. Ones psychic sexuation does not conform
to anatomy or gender, but to the structure of the paternal metaphorLacans rewriting of the Oedipuscomplex out of which his or her desire arises as an interpretation
of the mothers unconscious desire vis-`a-vis her own castration.
Lacan establishes a logic of feminine sexuality wherein a certain precise relation of
identication, desire, and jouissance constitutes not only a uniquely feminine organization of sexuality, but an epistemological position as well. And until Lacan returned to
Freuds efforts to articulate the logic of feminine sexuality as different from masculine
sexuality, this dark continent had, indeed, lain dormant. Moreover, Lacans statements about feminine sexuality have not yet been fully explored, nor have his work on
hysteria or his theory of a feminine supplemental jouissance. Far from being a phal-

65

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Chapter 3

locrat who would annul feminine sexuality, as some have thought, Lacan opined in
Scilicet that feminine sexuality was fundamentally perverse;2 that feminine jouissance was
rst genital and secondly a supplemental bodily enjoyment that can go on innitely,
even after genital enjoyment.3 Lacking a universalizing signierThe Woman
that would point to some essence of Woman, human beings who do not identify with
having a penis, identify, rather, with the real which inserts a lack in the symbolic ().
The real itself delimits the voidwhose differential oppositeon the
graph of sexuation attributes signiers of having to being. These symbolize masculinity
as a countable identitythat is, that which has valuein the symbolic sphere of
public worth.
In this sense, feminine sexuality is not equal to masculine sexuality. It is
different from masculine sexuality. It is asymmetrical to it, even though both are
constituted dialectically within a combinatory. Put another way, dialectical meaning is
establishable only on the basis of oppositional terms; thus, there is no learned representation of the feminine or the masculine, except in terms of one another. Surprisingly,
this means that the masculine and feminine are not simple binaries, interchangeable
collections of words and letters that constitute a logos, as Derrida has argued. Rather, the
secondary feminine is constituted by a logic of that which differs from the symbolic
xxis even radically Other to it, while the masculine is dened, paradoxically, by
its differences from the primordial femininexxthe masculine being an abstraction, a representative of whatever a particular society denes as the social norm of
masculinity.
One will understand that not only are the masculine and the feminine redened;
sexuality is redened as well. Freuds surprising nd at the beginning of the twentieth
century was that sexuality is not in and of itself natural, nor does it coincide with its
reproductive ends or, necessarily, with pleasure. In other words, sexuality is constructed,
but not by a desiring self in some Foucauldian recasting of a free will of desire into a
sexual self-fashioning. It is laid down piece by piece from the beginning of infancy,
from the particular master signiers Lacan calls identicatory traits (S1 ) that come to
constitute any persons libido in terms of absolute unary traits that Lacan called both
S1s and the object a part. Jean-Paul Gilson characterizes Lacanian sexuality as an
eroticism submitted to the law of the signier by the fact of the parole pulsionelle (drive
signier). This means that the erogeneous zones are actually constructed as primordially repressed traces of the lettreLacans word for the join of language to body
(vocal lettre joined to letre [being]). Freud supposed a pregiven causal substancethe
libidoat work in the vicissitudes of the goals, ways, and means of the drives. Yet,
both Freud and Lacan stressed that on their path toward sexual pleasure, the drives are
marked by tension and conict. Lacan argued that this is because sexuality is more often
in the order of missed or traumatic encounters, than those of satisfaction (Trobas, p.
125).
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921), Freud implied that xations to
unpleasant and repetitious ways of thinking and being, and rather than developmental

Feminine Sexuality

67

stages, govern sexuality in a logical time, not a biological one.4 Lacan described the
constant ebb and ow of sexual excitations as the ups and downs of jouissance in the
eld of the partial drivesFreuds positive libidowhich continually places the real
of repressed bodily tension (i.e., the desire to ll lack by aiming the drives toward
libidinal goals one just misses) in language and thought. Freuds polymorphous perverse
infant is, in Lacans teaching, a myth, a signier by which Freud sought to represent the
real of constantly intrusive jouissance that touches adults and children alike. Yet, one
cannot equate sexuality with jouissance. And this is the surprise. Sexuality describes a
consistency of meaning between body and thought that quickly bears on the death
drive; that is, the xions in archaic memory that keep people attached to static fantasies
that block them from realizing Eros in the newness of desire. Sexuality appears in the
excitements that make one attempt to recapture the jouissance lost in the myriad cuts of
the signier (;) and the constant losses of objects () that caused desire in the rst
place.
It was through his work on the logic of psychosis in his doctoral thesis and later
in Seminars III and XXIII that Lacan gradually came to an understanding of how human
sexuality is linked to jouissance as masculine or feminine, regardless of the gender
that is, the biological sexof a person.5 Sexuation, in other words, derives from the
way a subject is split by language (or not) in the oedipal experience of identifying as
primarily masculine or feminine and with preference for a particular libidinal mode:
a
(j/S)
J(a); ; S2
; /S

of
of
of
of

psychosis (the object as real);

perversion (game, fantasy, fetish);
obsession (the symbolic as imaginary);
the hysteric (the imaginary as the real)

By the 1950s Lacan had gured out that the structure of psychosis lies in an
indifferentiation in identication between a mother and child. The object a never falls,
but continues to be hallucinated as the fullness of no lack. The psychotic subject does
not undergo the alienation or castration (that Lacan symbolized by /S) of losing the
illusion of being One with his or her mother. This is one response to the oedipal call for
identication. The signier for the Fathers Namethat is, the signier for difference
itself, the phallic third term taken as the difference between the masculine and
femininecan be foreclosed (Verwerft).6 Russell Grigg writes: Using the four discourses,
it is now possible to say that in psychosis the master signier, S1 , is missing from its
place; and this has the consequence that the S1s do not locate the subject within (social)
discourse, but outside it (Lacans Four Discourses, p. 35).
One might say of hysteria that the S1 is also missing from the place of master
signier as the agent of speech or thought. What locates the hysteric within social
discourse is her attachment to one key phallic signier, an S1 put in the place of the
other, not a body of knowledge per se (S2 ), as is the case for the obsessional. Lacan
responded to Roman Jakobsons communication theory of discourse with his own

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Chapter 3

psychoanalytic denition of discourse, based on the idea that discourse makes a social
link and love is a sign that one has changed discourse: A change of discoursethings
budge, things traverse you, things traverse us, things are traversed . . . , and no one
notices the change. . . . I can say until Im blue in the face that this notion of discourse
can be taken as a social link . . . , founded on language, and thus seems not unrelated to
what is specied in grammar, and yet nothing seems to change.7
Arguing that although psychosis is outside discourse, it nonetheless has a logic, a
rationality, Lacan was able to go on from there to formulate the differential logic(s) of
neurosis, perversion, and the normative masquerade. As we remember, these are four
identicatory (oedipal) responses by which a subject inscribes him or herself for the
sexual difference in reference to the symbolic phallus (), imaginary castration (),
and the loss of the object a (/S;). Here sexuality constitues mind as libido in that it is
constructed in reference to separation from the primordial objects that cause desire for
their return precisely because they were lost. Thus a central loss, the loss of the ongoing
search for jouissance, places a no in the center of language for everyone but the
psychotic. The concomitant lack-of-being that Lacan named castration determines that
no one be all masculine or all feminine in the unconscious, except the psychotic who
has the illusion of Being all one sex, one with the primordial mother (and, in this sense,
has no unconscious, no repression). Sexuation is never separate from being, then,
insofar as castrationan interpretation of the phallic signierdetermines the parameters of sexuation by way of the responses to it that create oedipal identications
in the wake of traumatic experiences of the loss of primordial objects, as well as the loss
of being all One sex.8

The Unconscious
In the third phase of his teaching, from 1974 to 1981, Lacan equated sexuality with the
unconsciousrepressed memoriesarguing that an unconscious part of the mind governs conscious life, as Freud rst thought. But at the site where Freud located biological
instincts, Lacan found the language bank of each subjects memories (the treasury of the
signiers in the Other) and the drive xations (jouissance constructed for meaning) by
which language and sexuality are linked to each other, although they ultimately compose two different meaning systems: the representational system of language one might
call secondary process and the jouissance system of fantasy and desire one could
characterize as primary process. The human animal uses language to symbolize (and
hide) the real of jouissance. That is, the object of thinking, speaking, writing, and
reading is to acquire, reproduce, and maintain jouissance, which Lacan dened as a
logical (or imaginary) consistency in the symbolic. In this context, one cannot possibly
separate sexual being from conscious or unconscious thought because their base desiring
substratum is the symptom (or sinthome), which is a Borromean signifying chain of
endless associations of words, images, and traumas that continually realign themselves

Feminine Sexuality

69

so as to produce jouissance. One loses jouissance in cuts and castration(s), which, in

turn, motivate one to use language at all. Moreoever, conscious use of language is
subjectivized in being linked to the imaginary body that produces thought as jouissance
(S. XX, p. 131).
Jacques-Alain Miller returns to Lacans che vuoi? graph (You say that, but what
do you [really] want?) of 1960 to argue that the demand or drive is itself an object of
jouissance where the interior signifying chain (s[O]) of the graph concerns the effect of
meaning and the superior chain(S[]) concerns jouissance. In other words, jouissance
is not natural or instinctual. It depends, in Millers felicitous phrasing, on a sens-jouis
[a sense of a meaning enjoyed] where the word sens implies both meaning and the
sense of the ve senses.9
But although no one doubts the existence of the demand for jouissance, be it for
the jouissance of food, love, or sex, the unconscious is another matter entirely. How
does one prove the existence of the unconscious? It is by denition, Lacan stresses, the
Unbewusste, the unknown, the dark-sided face of God. Nonetheless, Lacan taught, the
unconscious is there, not only where Freud found it (i.e., in dreams, wit, parapraxes, and
the Fehleistungen), but also always residing in language in unary traits which are the
unbroken lines of master signiers of identication from the real. The unconscious
reveals itself when the speaker stumbles upon an impasse (of the real) that produces an
enigma, a question, or a doubt that conscious memory cannot adequately represent at
the level of language. Because Freud never gured out how the unconscious comes to
think, he gradually dropped the idea that an unconscious (structured like a language)
part of the mind governs conscious thought. Lacan maintained that Freuds early nd
was correct; Not only does the unconscious think, it thinks in language, in words,
whose structure works by (secondary) metaphorical substitutions for the (primary)
metonymical displacements that record traces of evaporating lost object(s) of desire.
Freud had also intuited that concerns of memory and language bear on sexuality.
But what is Lacans proof that the unconscious thinks, moreover, in the language of
sexual reality? Lacan maintained that Freuds never having backed down on his theory
that sexuality confers its realistic character on the unconscious, despite the disagreements of analysts such as Karl Adler, Gustav Jung, and others, meant that the cause
motivating conscious behavior was something hidden. For Freud this was rst the
interdiction of sexual enjoyment with ones mother, whom Lacan describes in Seminar
VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis as the primary good, indeed, the only Good.10 Does this
mean, then, that the unconscious fantasy of incest constitutes the foundation of
sexuality for both sexes? It would seem so, at least at the level of the demand, where the
demand for love (i.e., recognition) was rst structured as the aim of (re-)capturing the
mothers gaze, voice, even incorporating simulacra of her breast (a thumb, a pacier,
etc.), as a way to maintain a consistency of oneness in jouissance. Having removed
Freuds explanation of causality from the eld of biology and literal sex acts to the eld
of language, Lacan demonstrated in the third and fourth periods of his teaching, how
language is linked to the drives via jouissance.

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Chapter 3

In To Interpret the Cause, Miller postulated that the Freudian Oedipus

inscribed by Lacan as the paternal metaphortranslates itself from an unknown
jouissance to the phallusization of jouissance; that is, to a signicantization of
jouissance. And this is something a bit different from what we have seen before:
F
M

O(ther)
J(ouissance)

Here we are at a level where something that is not a signier is substituted for by
something that is a signier. Indeed, the secret of the Oedipus is that it enables
jouissance to be inscribed in the symbolic order. And that is why at the moment Lacan
found the phallus as the signier of jouissance, placed there where the residue between
the libido and language is an excess or surplus of jouissance(the [a])he could say
that something that is not a signier is substituted for by something that is a signier:
The signier for sexual difference. And this movethe oedipal movecauses jouissance to be given meaning.11 One can infer, then, that jouissance substitutes for what
one has repressed about the primordial mother of the drives and the oedipal mother of
unconscious desire.
Maintaining that Lacans return to Freud gave a unied eld theory of psychoanalysis in his elaboration of precise laws of cause and effect, Miller says that in
sexuation, for example, biological sex is signicantized for psychical sex insofar as the
infant is the mothers phallusthat is, a third term between the mother and Father, as
signier, who is interpellated at the level of sexual jouissance. Lacan puts together the
series of The Woman, jouissance, baby as phallus, and the object (a) in answer to how
biological sex takes its meaning as psychic sex. In Seminar XX, he proposed that there
is paradoxically no signier for Woman: no The. Since there is no universal
womanalthough there are myths of great women and histories of unique gures
Woman as an essential being or category does not existnot even as a mother (S. XX,
pp. 7273 and 80). She exists as a countable being insofar as she is in the symbolic
order where the Other names her as a signier: the daughter or the wife of; the partner
of; the possessor of; the woman who has, does . . . , and so on. But there is no generic
class of women who constitute themselves as such except in reference to the phallic
signier of the symbolic order; that is, as not [being] all within the symbolic order of the
difference from Woman by which males dene themselves as men.
This is where the (a) comes into play insofar as jouissance is inscribed via the
pathway of the drives (oral, anal, invocatory, and scopic). In the third period of his
teaching, Lacan argued that jouissance is constituted by the effects of language or
representation () given by the Other (O) in reference to the object of desire. But he
also means the primordial Other, as he argues in Television in 1975. The primordial dite
maternelle or la lalangue (the earliest murmerings) create the particular conditions that will
later produce jouis-sens for each subject in the gaps between the word and the image of a
thing (j/S).12

Feminine Sexuality

71

At one level, one could say that jouissance is a case in the particular real of each
infants lost maternal murmerings that surround each object that causes desire. At
another level, each drive eldoral, anal, invocatory, scopicis constituted by the
effects of an interplay of the S1 , (unary trait) identications, with their co-respondent
objects that rst caused desire such that jouissance not onlyreplaces lost primordial
objects or the enigma of the mothers unconscious desire, but does so in a logic of
negations or castrations that Lacan formalized in his Borromean structure of interlinked categories that compose the signifying associations of the Other as real, symbolic, and imaginary. The logical responses to primary and secondary castrations
follow: Loss of the (a) yields confusion about who has/is the phallus, producing a cut
in the Other. The lack of objects and the lack of being all one sex are the causes that
produce the effects Lacan calls the phallic signiers no. The losses are lled by the
substitutions for lack that are language and law.
Human sexuality is, perforce, constituted on the bias of language, which remains,
de facto, an imaginary body which is beyond or Other to the jouissance of the real
body qua physical organism. It follows that the interdiction of jouissance (that Freud
calls the superego) will itself be an effect of language built upon a paradox: When
someone says to you, Do not enjoy. Its forbidden, the immediate response is a desire
to enjoy the forbidden, to transgress the law. This, in turn, divides a subject between
lived jouissancethe silence of the drives J()and the language that determines
ones alienated reality in the Other (). We can see that Lacan made a dialectical turn
or torsion here at the point where Freud ran into an abutment. By trying to dene the
reality of the unconscious in terms of organ reality, Freud ended up in the untenable
position of having to deduce mind from organ function.
In Le seminaire, livre XX (19721973): Encore, when Lacan rst began to elaborate
the theory that characterizes his third period of teaching, he argued that the unconscious thinks by enjoying in language. Lacan gave multiple glosses on how the unconscious thinks in language. In 1964 he had conceptualized it as alienated, describing a
concrete division or gap between the speaking subject and the unconscious memory
bank of his or her words (/S).13 The point is that the gap is itself a function in language.
In other words, the subject is not composed of only language or writing, slipping from
phoneme to phoneme, as post-structuralist theory has maintained. But the gap is not
outside language, either. Indeed, the gap is an effect in language around which a persons
cause was rst organized in the paths of desire, via the loss of objects. Lacan called this
the logic of alienation:

Alienation

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Chapter 3

The object (a) has the shape of a torustridimensionalindicating that it is both

inside and outside the gap, its properties transformed by metaphorical substitutions
that displace metonymical desire.
If unconscious thoughts are, moreover, as Freud maintained, Vorstellungen
things that stand before something else; that is, primary fantasiesthen, preconscious
thought is made up of Sach and Wort Vorstellungen. Preconscious language would be a
second-level Vorstellungen, then, and as such has the double structure of metaphor where
one thing can be substituted for another. In preconscious language, subjects think at
one step removed from the unconscious real of metonymic displacements contained in
the drive signier that Lacan described as representing the already represented [an
image of an image], but absent, unconscious idea. The Vorstellungsreprasentanzen would
seek to give form to the repressed memories of experience that Freud called elementary hallucinations and Lacan called primary fantasies. But what has been introjected is not the object itself, a` la Melanie Klein, be it letter or image, but a signier,
which is not usually taken as a thing. It ordinarily (except in psychosis) functions
dialectically to make meaning in reference to another signier. The object-of-desire,
either absent at the level of the Niederschriften, as in unconscious fantasy, or present, as in
hallucination, is not a signier. Nor is the master signier of unary identicatory traits
dialectical. It is absolute and, thus, links directly to desire and starts producing word
pictures that speak to the sexual longings of fantasy (/S <> a), fears of loss (),
reications of phallic pride ( ' ), and so on.
Lacan argued that Freud had chosen a variety of words to represent different, but
similar, phenomena. Freud tried to say that only in the articulation of the subjects own
wordsbe it in analytic free association or the recounting of a dreamcan he or she
perceive something of his or her own unconscious language of ideas (Vorstellungen). Although this language was laid down in an initial synchrony as Niederschriften, or traces,
which are retrievable later in images and words because dream messages return via the
laws of metaphor and metonymythat is, distorted by condensation and
displacementthey must be deciphered in the analysis of repeating fantasies and
symptoms, both of whose guide is always a signier.14
Miller has claried Lacan and Freud further to show that even though the words
one speaks (S2 ), ones knowledge, hide unconscious traits (S1 ), some part of these
details can still be recuperated through attention to the lettre or drive signier because
they coalesce around what Lacan called the object-cause-of-desire. Indeed, the structure
of fantasy (/S <> a) denotes just this: The subject is pushed by (unconscious) desire to
seek something lost as a substitute for the rst object-cause-of-desire. Desire resides in
the fantasy as lack because the object (a), denoting the radically lost object-of-desire,
can only rend itself in the traces of jouissance in the signier, in an image, or in
affect.
Perhaps an example from the Dora case will clarify Lacans reworking of Freud
here. When Herr K. asked Dora for a kiss beside the lake, saying to her, My wife gives
me nothing, nothing describes the wife at the level of an object-cause-of-desire within
the series of eight primordial objects-cause-of-desire Lacan listed in Subversion of the

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73

Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.15 That she gives
nothing to him means that she is not the cause of his desire. She causes him to desire
someone else. In this example, one sees language functioning metonymicallythat is,
Herr K.s desire emanates from the Other qua unconscious, as repressed, thus placing
some real part of his being-for-jouissance in the eld of language where desire peeks out
from behind the egoistic narcissism that usually hides ones desire.
Put another way, the pleasure principles goal is fundamentally autoerotic. It
seeks pure body pleasure of a primary homeostasis. But the reality principlebased on
the secondary-process law or functioning of the interdiction of pure jouissance
thwarts the autoerotic aim, its goal being, rather, to maintain the ego goal of secondary
homeostasis or imaginary consistency. Lacan pointed to this paradox: The reality
principle keeps subjects imprisoned in identifying their words with their narcissistic
ideals and prevents them from admitting the truth of the sexual unconscious. In
conscious life one is usually lost in a forest of words, only ever close to the unconscious
goal of realizing desire when the actual referent is a drive object (S <> a), made so
because a trait of the object retains some remnant of lost desire. Lacan will later speak
of drive representatives as the language of the lettre, or divine details that join the
signier to the object a, in his Hommage fait a` Marguerite Duras.16

What Is Sexuality?
In chapter 15 of Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, From Love to
Libido, Lacan compares the unconscious to a pulsating bladderrather than to the
cellar or platonic cave of familiar comparisonwhich alternately reveals and conceals
the subject of the unconscious.17 The subject that is alternately revealed or concealed
there appears in the light of the partial drivesoral, anal, scopic, invocatorywhich
necessitate us in the sexual order (pp. 18889). That is, the push for jouissance makes
a demand, issuing from the real, a demand to the Other to give satisfaction and, thus,
ll up lack-in-being. But this is not easily accomplished, for love ordinarily bears the
burden of negotiating between drives and desire.
In chapter 14, The Partial Drive and Its Circuit, Lacan makes a major
departure from Freud in arguing that all emotional investments, most particularly the
transference relation in analysis, manifest real love, not a transference neurosis. And he
asks the obvious question, given that psychoanalysis is a clinic of sexuality: Does love
represent the summit, the culminating point, the indisputable factor, that makes sexuality present for us in the here and now of the transference? (p. 174). Lacan stresses
that the central import of Freuds writings concerning the drives and their vicissitudes,
rejects such a view in the clearest possible way: Freud says quite specically that love
can in no way be regarded as the representative of what he puts in question in the term
die Ganze Sexualstrebung . . . the tendency, the forms, the convergence of the striving of the
sexual, insofar as it culminates in Ganze, in an apprehensible whole, that would sum up
its essence and function (p. 175).

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Arguing that the drives are partial with regard to the biological nality of
sexthat is, reproductionFreud separated them from love, attributing them,
rather, to an archaic and autonomous id. Lacan, argues, to the contrary, that the partial
drives enter human relations (the analytic one included) as love, real love (pp. 17677),
that the transference is what manifests in experience the enacting of the reality of the
unconscious, insofar as that reality is sexuality (p. 174). The purpose of love is not to
be correlated with its biological result, Lacan insists, for there is no representation of
(no signier for) reproduction, no drive signier that represents the totality of the
sexual tendency in the psyche (p. 204). In other words, there is neither a reproductive
instinct, nor a genital drive per se. But, if this is the case, where do the drives come from?
Lacan argued that even though the partial drives dwell on the side of the real of the
biological organism, they have the structure of the signier. Sexuality comes into play
only in the form of the partial drives. The drive is precisely that montage by which
sexuality participates in the psychical life, in a way that must conform to the gap-like
structure that is the structure of the unconscious (p. 176).
Let us go step by step in considering what Lacan means by saying the drives have
the structure of the signier, and the unconscious has the structure of the gap. Doubtless, statements like this have led certain critics to reduce Lacans words to a topology
of non-sense, to metaphorical forms of literal gaps, or to literal representations of
letters and sounds. But this is not what Lacan meant. By jumping forward to chapter
16, The Subject and the Other: Alienation, in The Four Fundamental Concepts, we can
answer the two questions just asked with some precision. This will allow us to go
forward a bit in understanding Lacans rethinking of what sexuality is and how it bears
most pressingly on the necessity of redening knowledge in reference to the masculine
and feminine that give it its contours.
In the opening sentence of chapter 16, Lacan says that if psychoanalysis is to be
constituted as the science of the unconscious, one must set out from the notion that the
unconscious is structured like language. From this I have deduced a topology intended
to account for the constitution of the subject (p. 203). Let us go slowly. The
unconscious is the reality of sexuality in function; the unconscious is structured. Like a
language. In other words, sexuality is structuredthat is, imposed from the outside.
Lacans point here seems compatible with sociological feminisms. One learns ones
sexual identicationsones sexuationfrom the symbolic order, but as correlated
with imaginary identications, not biological anatomy. Yet, his is not a sociological
theory of role behavior, for the interpretation of an infants gender begins before an
infants birth into the economy of the Others desire. The mother cannot help taking a
position toward the childs possession of the imaginary phallus (or not). Lacan argued
that since both the masculine and the feminine have the phallus as a referent, the phallic
signier becomes a symbolic-order interpretation one must perforce give the infant,
taken as the phallus or third term between the mother and the father. The meaning given to the childs sex becomes the phallic signier of his or her la lalangue by
which language will try to represent the real of what the sexual difference actually

Feminine Sexuality

75

means in a primordially repressed place that emits fragments of sense all the
same.18
But how is sexuality imposed from outside the biological organism? Lacan takes
Freuds radical discovery in the 1925 essay On the Psychological Consequences of the
Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes as a point of departure.19 Not only is the
sexual difference not innate to anatomy for the male or female, as Freud had previously
thought, the very notion of femininity as a universal category is incorrect. Lacan stated
this as: Woman can only be written with a bar through it. Theres no such thing as
Woman . . . indicating the universal . . . because in her essence . . . she is not-whole . . .
The Woman (la[the]) is a signier. With it I symbolize the signier whose place is
indispensable to markthat place cannot be left empty (S. XX, pp. 7273). The
nature of things being the nature of words, Woman is a signier constituted by
language as an interpretation of the oedipal symptom one might describe as the ction
of a father.20 One truth repeats itself over and over in analytic treatment: Being a woman
or a man is not natural or normal. Each subject of analysis unveils in microcosm the
norm of human suffering that fuels the social macrocosm. Each analysis repeats endless
variations on but one theme: Each subject feels in some way that he or she is a failed man
or a failed woman.
Freud realized this at a structural level. Describing an ultimate impossibility in
psychoanalytic cure in 1937 insofar as the feminine position is rejected by men and
women alike, he focused on masculine (castration) anxiety and feminine (penis) envy.21
Lacan translated these terms into the positions of lover and beloved, masculine and
feminine,22 arguing that psychoanalysis must begin at this point of impasse, of the sexual
nonrapport, there where biological men spend their lives trying to be itthat is, a
real manand women spend their lives trying to gure out what a real woman must
do to attain pleasure in jouissance and status in the symbolic. Lacan says in Seminar XI
that the ways of what one must do as man or as woman are entirely abandoned to the
drama, to the scenario, which is placed in the eld of the Otherwhich strictly
speaking, is the Oedipus complex. . . . The human being always has to learn from
scratch from the other what he or she have to do, as man or as woman (p. 204).
In 1974, Lacan said of the oedipal experience that the family order translates
only one thing: That the father is not the genitor and that the mother remains to
contaminate the woman for the petit dhomme; the rest follows from that.23 The
mothers unconscious desire will bear on castration and the phallic signier. In other
words, the fathers position in the family affair is at best unstable. The real part in the
oedipal myth says this to the son: Your father is not your fatherthat is, not an
interdiction to your desire for your mother. And in the order of the real, the order of
the drives, this is true. The father is a ction in the symbolic order. But, a necessary
ction lest psychosis ensue in the unimpeded Oneness of mother and child.24 And that
is the point where woman contaminates her child for the petit dhomme; that is, both the
mans offspring and the phallic symbol of sexual difference mark the cause of mans
desire, not the organ qua potent or impotent, but the beloved qua cause. How does the

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Chapter 3

mother deal with the phallic function insofar as it marks her castration in a different
way from the mans? Not [being] all in the symbolic, womans jouissance goes beyond
the phallus onto a supplemental plane that lets women possess the men and makes a
joke of putative frigidity (S. XX, pp. 74 75).
Although each subject assumes his or her sexuality via concrete identications
with particular signiers and with the palpability of the object-cause-of-desire, the
central identication around which all others coalesce concerns the effort to align a
sense of being as a man or as a woman with anatomy. Yet, one asks, why, if sexuality is
not natural, should anyone be concerned about this difference? Poststructuralism has
given us the answer of either/or, both/and. And certainly Freud had already asserted
that everyone is always both one and the other in the unconscious: bisexual. Lacan
wrote the logic of the polymorphous perverse signier in Seminar XI by the vel of
alienation (p. 211):

In other words, in constituting the being (of the subject) from the Other of
meaning, a part overlaps. This part, lost from consciousness, is what Lacan describes as
the non-sense or object (a) in the middle. This a part, the excess in jouissance, becomes
the cause of the subject of the unconscious, the subject itself taken as an object, a
response of the real.
Psychic malaisea problem of beingwhich Freud described in Symptom,
Inhibition, and Anxiety (1926), derives from a lack of alignment between a subjects
sexuality, the (a) part, and his or her experience of the law of lack on which the social
is based.25 Freud called these misalignments pathologies. Lacan called them structures
of desire. In either case, they are constituted as particular orientations in reference to the
paternal metaphor whose coordinates are the mothers desire and the signier for the
Fathers Name. Psychosis, for instance, is the condition of having no inscription for
being either masculine or feminine, while neurosis is characterized by the refusal to be one
or the other. Perversion repudiates the necessity of making a choice at the level of being,
thus dramatizing a particular psychic relation to castration in fetishized scenes and
rituals where the real of jouissance is transformed into social law.
Lacan departs from Freuds use of myth and story to give us the paternal
metaphor as the structure of the oedipal myth: Freud, vindicated by Lacan. One cannot
say, as did Jung, that the unconscious is a rich container of primordial material, made of
sparkling images or poetically shimmering words. Rather, the unconscious is sexuality

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77

in function, all conscious life circulating around the central dilemma of an impossibility: How can one be a real man or a real woman when neither is signied in the
unconscious? The masquerade of identifying as one or the other means precisely that:
To play at being a man or woman in order to be in the social eld of exchange and
difference. Lacans is quite a different concept from Judith Butlers notion of
masquerading the masquerade, however. Her imaginary theory leaves out the real of loss
and the cause of suffering from the lack-in-being that necessitate the masquerade as a
sham in the rst place. When Butler postulates the loss of an originary homosexuality as
the cause of mourning, she assumes that all desiring structures function in terms of the
same logic. For Lacan, sexuality is established in the eld of the subject [the autoerotic
subject of experience (s)] by a way that is that of lack (S. XI, p. 204). We can
understand several things by Lacans words here. Not only is sexual difference constituted on the basis of lack, lack is also equatable with the structure of a void place
created by alienation, not lack of an originary homosexuality. One cannot equate
homosexuality or heterosexuality with the void.
Whether one focuses on the drive as orienting a subject in the eld of sexuality,
or whether one looks at the drive as the psychical representative of the consequences of
this orientation, Lacans point remains the same. The sexuality of a subject is deduced
from something other than sexuality itself. And that something else is constituted by
the joining of two lacks where one kind of meaning overlaps with another. The signier
of meaning (the Cartesian I think) obscures the subject qua sentient being (the
Cartesian I am), alienating each part from direct awareness of the real of his or her
lived experiences. Thus, alienation is occultation by the signier; that is, castration of
the real. The second vel Lacan writes in Seminar XI, the vel of separation, refers to an
earlier lack; the real intersection that Lacan locates at the level of the living being who
loses a part of himself by reproducing himself through sexthrough the drives
which introduces the subject to the second death (beyond the biological death of the
animal) in the dependence of the living being on another person for satisfaction
(p. 205).
In love relationsbe they heterosexual or homosexualindividuals seek their
other half in their partner. The mystery of love seeks its resolution, not in a complementary partner, then, but in a sexual partner who has enough particular jouissance
properties that he or she is thought to be the lost half of oneself. Put another way, loss
occurs at the level of the real that Lacan placed on the side of the feminine in the
sexuation graph (S[]). But the loss that enters the partial drives, among them death
drives, does not refer to a lethal feminine element, to a bad mother, to loss of a breast,
or to any other attribute of woman qua Woman. Rather, lossall lossrepeats the
primordial loss of das Ding or the primary Good where the mother is sexualized
around the object (a). Continually lost in bits and pieces (the breast, the gaze, the
voice, etc.), not as a whole person, she will only ever be whole in the nostalgic
memories that (mis)take the part for the whole, and jouissance for the essence of
woman.

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And, although these particular losses constitute the partial drives within the eld
of the real around partisan objects, the larger issue is that a child must experience a
break in the continuity of jouissance provided by the mother in the imaginary and the
real in order to join society. In this context, one sees why Lacan placed jouissance on the
slope of the death drive. There is no universal Eros because of Thanatos. That is, two
do not make a harmonious one, as Freud thought. Rather, oneness reduces everything
to dust. The one (the psychotic) who believes in a universal Eros lives outside the
symbolic order, rigidied when confronted with the possibility of exchange or reciprocity. Although most people are not psychotic, the experience of loss obliges every
subject to confront the unbearable fact that the void is in ones own sense of being, not
outside it in heaven or hell as, for example, religions claim. Thus, subjects cling to
semblances of das Dingthe object (a)in order to retain the illusion that the
mothers semblance at least, and various names-of-the-FatherGod the Father, for
exampleserve as guarantees against loss, as shelters from anxiety.

Masculine and Feminine Sexualities

The point is that sexuality is not where we think it isthat is, in sexual acts, be they
those of ordinary or extraordinary copulations, peep show exhibitions, or any other. It
(ca) is, rather, in the parade (deles) of signiers that makes up the subjective chain of any
persons knowledge (S2 ) about jouissance. But let us stop for a moment to dene the
word parade. In dictionary terms dele means a naturally enclosed corridor, so narrow
that one can only pass through there single le. Lacan chose this word to stress that no
subject has access to all language, only to the dele of his or her own signiers where
sexuality is fastened down by the jouissance that marks sexual fantasies with perverse
traits. But much more than sexual fantasies is at stake. Lacan taught that the key to any
persons life choicesmate, career, ideology, or whateverlies in the way jouissance
inscribes itself ineven ashis or her thought. From this point of view, sexuality
cannot be dismissed or glossed over in any responsible establishment of a theory of
what knowledge is and how it functions.
A further clue to a subjects sexualityhidden as it is in the secrecy of
fantasieslies in the particular traits that mark what Jacques-Alain Miller calls the
conditions of love. These are concrete details that sketch the ideals one seeks in terms
of physical appearance, social standing, ways of being, such as voice tone, and so on.
Such divine details establish a concreteness to the oedipal experience that determines
the kind of person with whom one will identify in love.26 And all of a subjects chosen
relationships are marked by these traits, not only the one specic choice of a life
partner. Put another way, sublimation does not mean neutralization of the drives, but
the eroticization of human relations.
Freud concluded his 1925 essay On the Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes by saying that although masculinity and femi-

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79

ninity are the two central axes on the basis of which male and female beings dene
themselves, masculinity and femininity remain theoretical constructions of uncertain
content (p. 258). Lacan demonstrated how the content of each is shaped by a logic
that gives a certain predictable structure to it. And since these structures are ahistorical
at the level of the local universal, marking, rather, jouissance knowledge positions within
language, not knowledge as content, it is crucial to any feminism to consider that no
matter how the attributes that characterize the specics of the masculine or feminine
vary from historical moment to historical moment, the logic of their asymmetry will
remain constant.
Feminine sexuality will be constituted by an imaginary identication with the
real of a lack (S[]), a castration that is interpreted in the symbolic order of the
masculine as based on an imaginary identication with the symbolthe lowest common denominator of visible language attributed to the malethe phallus ()
insofar as it marks difference via its properties as a potentially separable image belonging to neither sex. Since the sexual difference itself is an abstraction, a third term, the
feminine real always escapes the rules of the symbolic, in part, while masculine identication with the symbolic order suffers from foreclosing the real. Lacan returned to
Aristotles categories of the universal and the particular into which he had integrated his
discoveries regarding the masculine and the feminine, thus supplying the causal connection Aristotle could not make, thereby demonstrating how the masculine and the
feminine come to exist as recognizable places that are concretely constructed in the three
different orders of language (the symbolic), images (the imaginary), and the real of
trauma as registered in anxiety, envy, or excitement.
The masculine denes itself in terms of One signier, the S1 of the master
signier that gives substance to the idea of a unied reality principle. The feminine
denes itself in a double reference that refers both to the lack of a natural signier for
law in the symbolic, the (S[]) representing encounters with the void in the Other, and
to the positivized phallic signier which anchors the feminine in the Name-of-a-Father
(taken on as a reality principle). Although these psychic identications do not adhere to
anatomy, each one is, nonetheless, constituted in the precise terms of a sexuation logic
whose pivot is the central lack of a signier for Woman (The Womanqua essential
categorydoes not exist) and the inadequacy of the phallus to its task of representing
man qua man in groups of symbolic ensembles.
There is no essence of Woman, no female nature, no natural woman, no
eternal feminine, not even a guarantee at the level of Woman qua mother. The the
(La) that makes of Woman a universal category is barred in Lacans sexuation graph
(La). And the phallus is only a symbolic-order constructa representation of the
effects of differencethat denotes the effort to dene man qua man in terms of his
difference from Woman. This little bit of reality is elevated to the function of a
signier which, paradoxically, will give rise to the concept of Man as the norm, the
standard. Put another way, the standard or norm means the symbolic order where the
rules of the game are established on the basis of the local (universal) Law (of

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Chapter 3

difference). When a woman enters this terrain, her rules become the boys rules. The
salient feature in the construction of sexuality around difference is this: Both male and
female desire (/S) nd their cause(s)-for-being on the side of the pas tout, among the
primordial partial objects (the breast, the feces, the gaze, the voice) that give rise to the
(partial) drives (oral, anal, scopic, invocatory) that materialize language for jouissance
around the void place cut in the beginning by their loss.
Jouissance is caused at the level of the (a), which determines how each subject will
then treat the loss occasioned by the lack of a signier for The Woman, or The
Mother. The answer arises on several levels. Is one the lover (/S) or the beloved (a) in
sexual identication? What unary traits compose ones fantasy scenes and object(s)?
From what drive eld(s) will one choose semblances to ll the void: Will consumption
go toward the anal (acquisitions and controlling) or toward ingesting (food, words),
for instance? The (a) is constructed out of the particular experiences of each subject, the
point being that whether a subject is biologically male or female, phallic (or genital)
jouissance is always excited by the object (a) of ones own references. In a larger sense,
the sexual difference makes all the difference in that the feminine calls to the masculine
whose quest is not primarily for orgasm per se, but for the reparation of the feminine pas
toute where desire was rst structured for both sexes around the real of loss:
Masculine

Feminine

S()
a
The Woman

Contemporary feminist conation of the masculine with the male voyeur and the
feminine with the position of victim, not only misses the subtlety of distinguishing
lover from beloved as positions taken on in the masquerade, it misses the more
fundamental principle within sexuality itself: The desire to enjoy another, that Socrates
observed in his students, does not have sexual pleasure per se as its goal, but capturing
the more than you in you of the others agalma. In the chapter On the Baroque in
Seminar XX, Lacan says: The unconscious is the fact that being by speaking, enjoys,
and, I will add, wants to know nothing more about it . . . know nothing about it at
all (p. 105). Lacan points to a paradox here. What we call idle talk is not idle at all.
We enjoy as men or women in the precise words we choose. Miller has claried
Lacan here by his own return to Freud. Jouissance and language are incompatible,
Miller argued in his course of 19871988, Cause and Consent (To Interpret the
Cause, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, p. 31). Subjects do not come in language
all the time. Language is, rather, a supplement to desire that marks a loss of jouissance,
rather than a surfeit of it. It even serves as a defense against that loss. Moreover, Freud
signaled that jouissance can be ignored by the subject who can easily dwell on the
repetitive side of Thanatos.27

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81

What Lacan calls a jouissance of speaking or thought in Seminar XX: Encore is,
rather, the partial drive dwelling in language, pushing language to satisfy its jouissance,
such as the demands made for love (or at least a modicum of recognition), and so on:
see me, hear me, feed me, take care of me. The unconscious function of sexuality is in
language, then, but as the desire for love, not as a pregiven jouissance. We enjoy when
we speak, Lacan says, and dont want to know anything about it. What we enjoy in
language, I would suggest, is repeating the jouissance knowledge that already anchors
our xions (xation/ction) of being, our repressions of desire. In 1972 Lacan proposed that the repression of jouissance is not a property of the male or female, but of
the metaphorical function wherein one meaning is substituted for another, the laws of
rhetoric paralleling the way the drives are inscribed in language. We deny, repress, joke
about, dismiss as nothing, the real of the (sexual) impasse that language touches on all
the time.
In his course of 19931994DoncMiller continues his clarication of
Lacans later claims that jouissance is a meaning system.28 But rather than refer to a
diffuse sexuality, ever present in speech, Miller refers to the particular conditions that
give rise to desire, touching via fantasy on the real of jouissance. While Lacan focused on
the sexual difference as constitutive of an impasse between the sexes, Miller hones in on
the precise organization of the details that give rise to the search for jouissance as the
search for a set of concrete conditions, sometimes conscious, often radically unconscious. This is a different picture from Lacans depiction of a global jouissance in
language. The I dont want to know anything about it of unconscious desire resides
on the masculine side of sexuation, within the eld of language. Miller points out that
no one wants to know anything about the particular sexuality behind his or her language,
because language, by alienation and repression, already guarantees being by lling up
the hole in the symbolic order () from which anxiety emanates as real:
Masculine

Feminine

S()

And the masculine side, the eld of the reality principle of language, exists to
deny this fact: The Other or second jouissance that Lacan places on the slope of the
pleasure principle resides in the eld of the feminine which opens onto the corporal real
of Thanatosstructured by identication with the losses of objectsthat lies beyond
identication with the closure and Oneness of phallic jouissance. Yet, there is no the
masculine or the feminine because both are, nally, inseparable insofar as each exists only
in reference to the other. Lacans arrows indicate this, as does the long and painful
battle of the sexes, a battle not only between the genders, but between the masculine and
feminine in relationships, the longest revolution of masculine versus feminine wouldbe harmonies with no ending in Oneness possible.

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Chapter 3

Lacan corrected the biological bias in Freuds postulation of a reality principle

and a pleasure principle, pointing out that Freud could not solve many of the problems
he kept raising because he believed the pleasure principle and reality principles to be
oppositional. Freud did not understand that there can be no opposition except in terms
of relationship, no thesis/antithesis without dialectic. Examining the relational aspect
of these two principles, Lacan came to see that the fundamental structure of any
persons being, as constituted in the experience of the paternal metaphor or the oedipal
myth, is rst a response to the enigma of the sexual difference within the eld of the
visual, or the world of forms where oppositions have the character of that which is
potentially separable. That is, in the imaginary the little boy (and the father) have the
penis and the mother does not, a reality that each child later translates as a castration
trauma. Lacan calls this the impact of the primal oedipal scene on him or her. Veering
away from Freuds anatomical reductionism, Lacan states in 1958 that the biological
difference is translated by the child into a plus or minus of value that then functions
mathematically. The plus or minus is confused with the primordial demand for love,
however, taken as a demand for more which converges with the desire to be the
phallus, that is, the one who has (all the mothers love).29
The distinction between having the phallus and being the phallus enabled Lacan
to understand the masculine and feminine as a division more fundamental to being than
that of biological male or female. Having or not having is psychic (tychic, of the real) in the
determination of the subject of the unconscious. And the real is an impasse whose social
effects go from the prostitute at the bottom rung of the social ladder to Medieval
eschatologys splitting of being into the high function of mind/spirit and the base,
animal function of the carnal/esh. Lacan confronts us with a logical extension of the
proposition he calls an untenable truth: The reality of the unconscious is sexual
realityan untenable truth (S XI, p. 150).
But the language of the tout (S1 j S2 )that is, the use of language to seek the
closure of an answer in keeping with the masculine logical mode of the necessary
reveals the impasse in its own search. The quest for meaning turns on the demand for
love, which aims toward the nonclosure of the pas tout, or the feminine contingent
(xx)/S'athat
|
one might describe as the implicit question posed by the masculine to the feminine. One sees in the one-way directionality of the arrow from left to
right the impossibility of intersubjectivity that Miller describes as the impasse at the
base of Lacans efforts to design the mirror-stage in the Schema L.30 Although he never
worked out its precise causes, Lacan nonetheless took seriously the formula Freud
defendedthe untenable reality of sexuality. Why is it an untenable reality? he asks
(S. XI, p. 150). Why does most everyone impute a low motive to sexual realities? Since
Freuds day we have made a little progress in understanding sex, Lacan says, just a bit. It
is now admitted that sexual division ensures the survival of the species, that if a species
does not reproduce, does not copulate, it dies. So we can say that sex and death are
fundamentally connected. We can even say to philosophers and theologians, Lacan

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83

continues, that existence, thanks to sexual division, rests upon copulation, accentuated in
two poles that time-honoured tradition has tried to characterize as the male pole and
the female pole, be it as anima and animus, or sun and moon, and so on.
Other things are grouped around this fundamental reality, such as the knowledge
that the elementary structures of social functioning are inscribed in a combinatorythat
is, oppositionalpair such as Yin and Yang. For example, it is matrimonial alliance,
not natural generation, that links man to woman; the law of generation being the law of
the signier, the You are my wife conferring the meaning of you may bear my
children (S. XI, p. 150). But the difculty of linking the reality of the unconscious,
insofar as sexuality is its reality, to an archaic junction in thought, is stupendous, Lacan
says in 1964, immediately countering would-be objections to his proposition by
pointing out that pansexual theories, such as Jungs, that neutralize libido, miss what
Freud made present in its function: The libido is the effective presence, as such, of
desire . . . which is there at the level of the primary process (S. XI, p. 153)at the
level of the primal fantasies by which an infant negotiates its rst demands.
What seemed stupendous to Lacan in 1964 has since been radically developed
and elaborated in the Freudian eld around an ever-increasing knowledge of what
constitutes the real and jouissance. Indeed, the theory of jouissance or libido, taken as a
real substance that moves in the body and coalesces around vital organs, negatively
(Thanatos) and positively (Eros), places psychoanalysisthe talking curein conict with medical discourses that treat the symptom and not its cause. If, in fact, sexual
energy is rst and foremost constituted around the objects-cause-of-desire, as energy that
courses in the biological body in a silent witness to blocked jouissancewhose
referents are the particular constitution of each subjects primordial experiences of
jouissanceone can say that jouissance inhabits language, but negatively, and
positively.
In answer to the question What is sexuality? Lacan says the nodal point by
which the pulsation of the unconscious is linked to sexual reality . . . is called desire . . .
the function of desire [being] a last residuum of the effect of the signier in the subject
(S. XI, p. 154). The operational word here is the effect of the signier in the subject. The
residue left over by the effects of the signier is the (a), the kernel of ones being, ones
cause as hidden in the fundamental fantasy, a cause that makes of the subject an object
resonating in his or her own discourse as a metonymy of being (a little shita rien, a
nurturing maternitya good breast, etc.). And not only is desire rst constituted by
the effects of speech that create being and subsequently depend on the demand in drive,
that is, on asking the Other for what one wantswhich one does not necessarily
consciously knowmoreover, the (masculine) reality principle of language and law is,
by denition, a resistance to the (feminine) pleasure principle on which reality depends
as an escape from the strictures of the symbolic. When one desires objects, saying I
want this or that, it is not (usually) physiological need that speaks, but the more than
need in need, the desire to be as in being wanted. Thus, the function of desire

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sexualizes objectsthat is, makes a libidinal investment inforbidden objects (S. XI,
p. 155). One wants what the Other forbids. The law of no begets desire. And so,
paradoxically, as Jacques-Alain Miller argues in Duty and the Drives, one desires the
most where there is prohibition. Here, law and desire are one.31
Freud opposed the pleasure principle to the reality principle because he could
only think of reality as desexualized. Lacan teaches that no libidinal investment can be
desexualized even though the sexual element may be repressed through denial, repudiation, or foreclosure. The jouissance investment in the phallic signier () is precisely a
desiring identication with some ideal of the Fathers Name, desire lying between
sublimated sexual reality and jouissance as an imaginary mode of consistency. In this
context, any investment of (cathexsis of ) jouissance one makes in others (and in causes)
is sexualized. Sublimated means eroticized, not neutralized; moreover, it is sublimated
around the signier for the Fathers Nameaway from the mother in the signifying
name of the father. Thus, group phenomena, beliefs, ideologies, political platforms,
are sublimations. Yet the symbolic Other defends its existence as Other to itself,
defends the purity of its laws or rules, by denying any sexual element in group
identication (although this has not always been true in History. Lacan gives the
examples of Socratic philosophy and courtly love). At a fundamental level, however, in
any era, law is the law against sexuality, the forbidding of jouissance that comes to
guarantee the solidity and unity of a social body organized in opposition to and denial of
the real of the drives.
Lacan adhered to Freuds view of the pleasure principle as sexual, but not because
there is an innate or instinctual id pushing individuals to attain satisfaction. Rather, the
pleasure principle is the quest to recapture the jouissance lost in the primordial
experience of the cut. There is, however, the Catch-22 already mentioned: First pleasures are quickly xed as experiences one wants to repeat, even as anticipated consistencies. And repetition works against change, against desire, thereby placing death right in
the center of life. In seeking to nd satisfaction (ll up the hole in the Otherthe
place of an interior emptiness), any subject will continually bump into the effects of
loss. Lacan locates the experience of the real of the body on the side of the feminine,
insofar as women identify with a logic of the not all, but he does not mean a lack of
sexual organs by this. He means that woman is dened as not all within the symbolic
order. This is not a pregiven or an innate reality, as we know, but a knowledge that
arises out of the symbolics and imaginarys structuring the real for meaning. The point
is that the real is not biology or Marxist materiality or some kind of spirituality. It is a
radically repressed category of meaning.
Genevi`eve Morel writes that feminine symbols only take on a sense in the
imaginary and are, thus, subjected to other symbols in the unconscious. Moreover,
Freud sensed this or he would never have attached such a surrealistic idea as the
castration of the womanthat is, femininityto a complex of castration, or to a
mythically castrated mother. Yet, Lacans thesis is this: An infants early experience of
the mother is of continual losses of the object(s) of desire. And even the invisible

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85

object(s) (a)the voice or the gazebecome appended to images of the infants

environs. The symbols and images of woman cannot be isolated from those same images
and, moreover, many feminine images, both visible and invisible, will be registered in
the unconscious on the side of a lack. The image seems stablefull and whole. But it
disappears. This is why Lacan writes it as a 1: It has a negative function that inscribes
both loss and opacity. The mirror-stage drama surrounding the Fort! Da! of the Freudian bobbin-reel story is repeated myriad times. Every time the mother takes away the
object (a) grounding the infant in an illusion of its being whole within the scopic eld,
the void of absence is opened up ( j a). Only the mastery of languagesubstituting
words for evaporating thingsallows the mirror-stage infant a way to substitute the
world of words for the evanescent semblance of the world of things. Words come to
seem more reliable (more real) than the images whose meanings are more proximate
to the world of silence and the arbitrariness of the content, or the names(s) given them.
Lacan introduced us to a structural reality of the unconscious insofar as the phallus, the
One signier for the male, is immediately conated with the concept of gain due to its
comparative visibility, but most particularly by its signication of a difference left to be
interpreted for the infant from the mothers la lalangue.32 If one considers Lacans theory
in Freudian terms, the same as the mother means lacking the organ that differentiates
her from the father. While the breast is real, primordial, and inseparable from need and
the frustration concomitant with getting food, the phallus is that around which other
objects are organized in the abstraction of mentality. The problem Lacan solved that
Freud did not concerns the particular way in which this knowledge about who has the
phallus is inscribed for meaning, a knowledge which, although repressed, determines the
outcome of each subjects sexuality as a way of relating to the Otheras knowledge of
the normative masquerade, neurotic denial, perverse repudiation, or psychotic foreclosure, all positions taken toward the object (a) one seeksin persons, activities,
intellectual pursuits, work endeavors, and so on. In other words, repression, denial,
repudiation, and foreclosure are four attitudes vis-`a-vis the phallus, habits of mind
one might equate with Lacans modal logics: Foreclosure is concomitant with the
impossible (no one has the phallus); repudiation, with the possible (none does not not
have the phallus, thus, all may have it); repression is concomitant with necessity
(someone has to have iti.e., the law, the power); while neurosis leans toward the
contingent (either you have it or I do; the difference makes no difference).

Feminine Sexuality
At the level where one becomes a woman by identication, Lacan points to a logical
contradiction within the sphere of the feminine. There is no woman who is not under
the lawthat is, who has not been castrated (except in psychosis). That is, there is only
one symbolic, only one register of language and the signier, not different symbolisms
for everyone. It is in this sense that Fenichel could make the equation girl = phallus.

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Lacan follows Fenichel here to show that the womans body becomes her equivalent of
not having the phallus, thus becoming the focus of adornment, her body being the
phallus. So why would the little girl inscribe a lack in her unconscious? Morel explains
that insofar as the rst and real privations for any infant derive from frustrated (i.e.,
imaginary) demands for the breast, for example, any subjectmale or female(who is
not psychotic) installs himself or herself as having a lack-in-being, but the little girl
(unlike the little boy) registers the particular lack of the phallus, a symbolic object
attributed to boys, as a privation.32
And there is no exception to this within the spheres of normativity or neurosis.
By denition, a woman is one for whom there is no exception to the law of being under
the law. Insofar as a woman is a woman in differential opposition to the masculine
signier for difference, the signier Woman dwells under the law of castration (Freud),
difference (Lacan)[xx]). This double negative creates a strange effect at the level
of universal meaning, the effect being that no woman is all under the law (xx). In
other words, a law that does not base itself on an exception to itself cannot nd a basis
in the universal except as a logical impossibility. Thus, women dwell closer to the real of
the drives because they are not dened as being wholly in the symbolic order of the
group. In having one foot outside the symbolic, women have the other foot in the real,
the place of loss from which the most radical of jouissance effects emanate.
In De la femme aimee a` la femme desirante (From the Beloved Woman to the
Desiring Woman), Carmen Gallano describes Lacans contribution to the enigma of
Woman as having situated her sexual being within the logic of the pas tout of castration.33 But he does not mean what Freud did by this. Having deduced that castration is
a response to the lack of a penis, Freud thought the oedipal father was the cause of
Penisneid (penis envy). The oedipal father is not the cause, Lacan said. Castration is
caused, rather, by the loss of jouissance from the body because the signier for limits
(the no) cuts into the childs libidinal pleasure of oneness, installing lack alongside
the deferrals of desire. One is not all (pas tout), one does not have everything, one cannot
be just anything. There are limits, lacks, losses, for everyone, except in psychotic
delusion where metaphor fails to work substitutively because this child was sacriced to
his or her mothers jouissance.
There is no ratio for a rapport of harmony or Oneness between the two sexes,
Lacan said, arguing that, indeed, the two sexes are structured as different races. At the
level of structural logic, Lacan further contributed to understanding feminine sexuality:
The Other jouissance, the feminine one, is a correlate to the phallic jouissance of the
symbolic. Lacan does not say Woman is the same as or equal to man, or potentially
his equal, or vice versa. He says that the logic of feminine sexuality is a correlate to that
of masculine sexuality, albeit asymmetrical, indeed supplemental. The difference is
constituted in and by the symbolic order, although it is today incorrectly interpreted by
biological or sociological reductionisms that are, then, treated within the imaginary
order of totalizing judgments, where black and white moralizing platitudes (such as
better than/worse than) hold sway. Totalizing reeducation programs win out over

Feminine Sexuality

87

truth. Moreover, the means the sexes have of reaching one another have already been
blocked by all the cuts into jouissance, all the taboos forbidding oneness. Repression is,
if nothing else, a testimonial to the fact that jouissance does not automatically facilitate
a psychic rapport between the sexes, or in sex.

Implications of Lacans Theory for Feminist Debates:

The Logic of the Pas Tout
At this juncture, it may be well to emphasize something not immediately obvious when
one speaks of Lacans return to Freud: Lacan found the only hope for radical change
(i.e., cure) within the logic of feminine sexuation that he named the pas toute of radical
castration. If one goes no further than Lacans saying that women suffer from phallic
lack and men from the threat of castration, it will seem that Lacan has not advanced one
step beyond Freuds biological reductionisms. But Lacan always takes the literalism of
Freuds terms to the level of structure before he threads them back into the sexual
drama of organ functions. Indeed, this move allowed Lacan to see the epistemological
positions constituted by the different ways of being sexual of the masculine and
feminine.
When referring to the phallocentrism of the unconscious, Lacan means quite
simply that genital sexuality per se is not the referent, but the phallus taken as a symbol of
differencethat is, the visible sign of desire rendered imaginable. Such an inscription
has many vicissitudes: The hysteric retains the phallus unconsciously, denying that she
lacks anything, while her normative sister seeks the phallus in her partner and then
envies it, envy meaning both desire for and jealousy of. The obsessional male is
not sure whether he has the phallus or not, while psychotic males experience the male
organ as alive, as real (i.e., not symbolized in the unconscious). The foreclosure of this
symbol sends psychotic women in quest of a Oneness with The Man for whom she is
The Woman. Perverse subjects use the organ to teach others that the law of life is the
law of jouissance.
Whereas Freud rst thought little girls constituted their sexuality around the
love of the father for whom their subsequent loves were substitutes, Lacan took these
xations of love to be the basis of female suffering. Carmen Gallano describes the
Freudian normative woman thus: She does not love her mother since her castration
anxiety makes her choose her father. But since her husband has married her as a
substitute mother for himself, his highest Good being the harmonious oedipal rapport
between a son and his mother, his value to her lies in his being the father of her children.
The Freudian woman is above all a mother, then, one whose children compensate her
for the phallus she lacks. And her husband is just one more child. This is quite different
from the Lacanian woman for whom jouissance is not compensatory, but supplemental,
and for whom volupte is not guilt, but a desideratum (Gallano, p. 92).
One must know, Carmen Gallano writes, that the Freudian woman does not

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love men, but that she is nothing without the love of men and that when she loves, she
loves as a mother (p. 93). Gallanos conclusion here holds stunning implications:
Freuds woman is on the masculine side of the sexuation graph, identied with the
phallic signier (). Any woman who loves a man in the masquerade, by making herself
the object he lacks, by trying to be what she thinks he wants, has given up on her desire.
And loving as the passive object she supposes will correspond to her lovers fantasy of
Woman, she partakes of the logic of narcissism. In Lacans teaching, narcissism will
always open onto the death place of xated jouissance. Freuds woman does not love as
a desiring woman, then, but as a pastiche or semblant in the sexual masquerade, wherein the
masquerade is always designed to compensate for the confusion that reigns regarding
having the penis, being the phallus, or acting on ones own desire.
In trying to deduce the true nature of woman from the oedipal model of the
little girl desiring her father, Freud found something hidden behind this: The mother.
And in looking for the true nature of woman within the mother, he found, instead,
maternal lack. Lacan symbolizes this reality by the question mark regarding the
mothers desire: If she wants something, then, what does she lack? The implication of
this formula is that neither the husband nor the children are sufcient to fulll a woman
at the level of desire. The being of the woman is not correspondent with her desire. Nor
is desire reducible to sexuality. In Lacans teaching desire is a structure as well as a
content.
It is this second point that suggests a new orientation for contemporary feminist
debates. Lacan solved a problem Freud never could. Not only is the nature of feminine
desire different from that of masculine desire, its structure lies on the side of psychoanalytic cure. Freuds cured woman would be one who loves like a man. By identifying
with a masculine ideal (j), she nds the self outside herself, sacricing her desire
to being-for-another. Such totalizing lovetrying to be the phallus the partner
lackscan only stie the particularity of desire and keep a woman from loving from
the place of feminine sexuality.34 One runs into this paradox: Seless imposes a love
limit and, as such, is masculine. I would add to Carmen Gallanos thesis that the
Freudian woman loves from the position of the male who loves a woman qua Woman,
since The Woman does not exist as such at the level of the essence imputed to her: The
male or female who seeks her will suffer from trying to make a woman into The
Woman, sacricing the truth of his or her particularity to a narcissistic universal. The
lie between such partners can only produce conict, the domestic quarrel.
But how can normative feminine (passive, seless) love be masculine? In The
Dream of Being the Most Beautiful, Sylvia Tendlarz argues that the particular conditions that cause a woman to love a man require that he have a fantasy of her as unique.35
From this angle one can say that a woman loves the picture a man gives her of herself,
not him qua man in the singular. Such love can only be imaginary, then, based, as it is,
on an idealized fantasy picture of the one she hopes he thinks she is, aiming at
closureCinderella bedecked!not desire. And this poses problems for feminine

Feminine Sexuality

89

sexuality. Insofar as a woman already does not love a man qua man, qua father, nor qua
possessor of the penis, but loves in him, rather, the fantasy he gives her of herself, what
about her desire?
Lacan found this to be a pressing question concerning feminine sexuality. Because love as such is empty, is poetry, or a meaning whose words function as a ller to
lackas an object (a)love quickly brings a woman face to face with the void in
being, which bears on the object of the nothing. Love denes woman outside sex
(horsexe), functioning as a supplement to the inexistence of the sexual rapport. Unlike
Freud, Lacan did not think that women need a man as a husband or as a father,
foremost; but, he argued, women need to love because only the semblant of a beloved
partner can ll the empty place where the womans being is inadequately covered by the
veil of the phallic signier; that is, there where the confusion between having and being
is at stake.
Moreover, because life, the vital feeling, is signied by the phallus as the
signier of desire, love which does not converge with desire sends the subject to the
meaning of his emptiness as equivalent to death (Gallano, p. 95). Desire divorced
from love opens onto the emptiness of the void () where pure angst and desolation
reside as the inverse face of the real. A lot is at stake in Lacans ethics of psychoanalysis,
argued on the side of the truth of desire. Instead of masquerading as the narcissistically
beloved objectpretending she is the phallus lacking to menthe Lacanian woman is
a desiring woman, taking her strength from the relationship she has to something like a
sense of innity that comes from having accepted castration. And here desire must be
taken literally.36 In refusing imaginary, sacricial love, the woman in analysis may pass
from a masculine way of loving (a/) to a feminine way, where an identication with
the Other jouissance (S[]) beyond the phallus infuses her body with desire. In this
pass to a supplemental jouissance she loses the phallus (the hysteric), or her desire for
it (the feminine masquerade), and gains access to the real of a lost jouissance which a
woman can only (re-)nd by dropping her phallic semblance.
More precisely, I would say, that which woman can experience but man cannot is
an acceptance of a knowledge that already circumscribes her body. The question is
whether she will inscribe this energy within the economy of Thanatos or that of Eros.
In this context, what is generally called affect is only a series of relations to the real
and jouissance whose referent is the object (a) and the hole in the Other (S[]) from
which the real emanates, marked by the shadings of inhibition, symptom, and anxiety in
sexual desire. And this real may travel in womans body as the globus hystericus of the
imaginary loss of an imaginary phallus, or its substitute in the guise of a person.
The Lacanian woman does not have the penis. She does not want to be the
phallus. She acts from her desire, for herself, not for any Other. And, as such, she
incarnates desire up to the crescendo of a jouissance of being that is itself subversive of
the ordering of the symbolic. But this jouissance of the not all is not circumscribed only
by the limits of the supplemental jouissance, for sexual experience is inseparable from

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ones position in knowledge insofar as one works from a master discourse of the all, or
from a feminine discourse of the not all. Lacan discovered that psychoanalysis can cure
masculine and feminine beings of their suffering insofar as they realize their castration/
lack and inscribe themselves in the not-all of the group. Totalizations throughout
history, such as monotheism, monogamy, or motherhood, are not solutions to desire.
When taken as such, blind suffering ensues.

4
A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay
Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction
between the Sexes through Lacans Theory of Sexuation

Lacan pointed out, as we have said, that the furor surrounding Freud in the 1930s
(Karen Horney, Ernest Jones, and others) focused particularly on the question of
womans nature.1 In this period, debates raged around Freuds theories of the castration
complex, the Oedipus complex, and the meaning of the phallus.2 Those who disagreed
with Freud argued in various ways that the sexual development of males was equal and
symmetrical to that of females. Freud never let go of the idea that there is only one
libidothe phallic or masculine one, which might be treated as genital and active
for both men and women. He also knew that castration fears played a role in male
acceptance of a subjective masculine sexual position. Although Freud considered the
penis as causative of sexual anxiety in males because of castration threats and anxieties
regarding who did or did not have one, or concerning its size, or its potential loss (cf.
Little Hans), Lacans focus was not on biological gender. He depicted castration as the
mental effect on being of perceiving a gap of difference between the sexes.
Lacan gave to psychoanalysis what Freud could not: an understanding of how
masculinity and femininity constitute sexuation as an unconscious knowledge about
desire. Sexuation is the outcome of a subjects interpretation of sexual difference by
imaginary identications with symbolic-order others who have or do not have (phallic) power there. Freuds Little Hans case is paradigmatic of the theory. Hanss
obsession with whether or not his mother possessed a penis and, if so, how large it must
be led Freud to think the organ was the thing itself.3 Lacan argues, rather, that the
presence or absence of the penis makes the rst level of castration a logical operation
that links being to body by negation of an image; that is a visible representation of
something is perceived as potentially there or not there by both sexes. Lacan denotes
this by the matheme for the negativized phallus: . An imaginary interpretation of the
susceptibility of loss of a body part (partial object) becomes a symbolic order reality
written by the matheme for the positivized phallus: .
By working with the psychic difference Lacan ascribed to the sexes, we shall see
how Lacan got out of the impasse where Freud left off, writing at the end of his life in

91

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Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1936) that even the best analysis was defeated on the rock of the castration complex in men and penis envy in women (vol.
23).4 This offers an entree into an understanding of Lacans theory of sexuation
wherein sexuality is a matter of how jouissance conditions are logically written in the
unconscious as positivized interpretations of the lost phallus. These interpretations
create a lack around the sexual divide that Lacan called castration.

The Phallus and Castration Reconsidered

As we know, three of Freuds essays were crucial to Lacans rereading of the meaning of
sexual difference: Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Differences between the Sexes (1925) (SE, 19: 24358]5 lays the groundwork for his reconsideration of Freuds two famous essays on feminine sexuality: Female Sexuality (1931)
and Femininity (1932). Where Freud evolved myths of women derived from imaginary male reductionisms to anatomical organs (SE, 22: 11235),6 Lacan deduced a logic
of the unconscious based on loss and lack.
Unlike other post-Freudian analysts who started their study of Freud at the
point where his theories on feminine sexuality ended in a series of impasses, Lacan
argued, that the sexes are not fundamentally equal and symmetrical. Nor can they be
made so by clinical treatment, or reeducation. Nor can one truly claim that the
difference does not matter, whether it is said to be created by words and language games
or by genes and biology.
Lacan advanced a logic that explained Freuds conclusion that the sexual difference is constituted as an asymmetry between the sexes. In other words, the phallus and
castration are symbolic-order myths that link organ differences to being and having in
terms of having, not having, or potentially losing the representations of a separable
part object. Insofar as identication as masculine or feminine grounds gender
identity (or sexuation) in four potential postures of unconscious desire that concern how one identies with lack and/or with the object (a) that lls the lack-inbeing (/S'
| a), radically repressed sex and imaginary narcissism lie at the base of all
thought. To develop such a logic, Lacan turned, not to Freud, however, but to
Aristotles efforts to delineate the universal from the particular by modal or qualitative
logic. Whereas Aristotle was concerned to explain the cause of an act as necessary,
efcient, material, or instrumental (that is, as representable or quantitative), Lacans
interest lay, rather, in uncovering the causes of different libidinal (thus, qualitative)
modes of response to the sexual difference.7
Arguing that the static prime mover of desire is no substance, but loss itself,
Lacan says loss rst catalyzes desire as the movement that becomes an act, its inverse
face being lack or want. He thereby postulated a reason for progressing beyond the
Aristotelian unmoved mover as a theory of cause to a theory of lack and losses as
themselves causative of acts of speech, being, and body, acts for which Aristotle could

A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay

93

deduce no motive. Having posited desire as the cause and jouissance as its goal, Lacan
isolated the jouissance modalities he then attributed the masculine and the feminine. He
depicts the feminine as divided between the contingent and the impossible. The masculine
adheres to the possible and the necessary. Divided by the third-term effect of difference
itself an abstractionLacan placed a bar down the center of the sexuation graph that
functions as the phallic signier which denotes difference as the lack of being whole, or
as the loss of ones other half. The phallic signier functions both imaginarily in the cut
that separates one from a desired object and symbolically through the power of the
name to simultaneously create a reality and to alienate one behind that reality.
Sexuation is never a binary in Lacans teaching. Starting with the visible perception of a
(potential) loss and the naming of that effect whose cause evaporates into lost memory,
Lacans closed-set masculine ensembles and open-set feminine ones both rely on a
concept of the innite. But this is postulated in reference to a point of nitudeas is
repetition for Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principlewhich disqualies them from being
deconstructed as opposing binaries.8
Lacans theory here concerns the logic of limits placed on any innity of intervals
between [0,1]. We remember that unlike whole numbers, the real numbers are rational
numbers (fractions) whose limit is 1.114, the numerical limit of a set or series. Indeed,
any real irrational number functions as a stopper on a series, or on the rationals (the
Cauchy series). We pointed out in chapter 1 that in Lacans theory, innityin math
and in lifeis based on Zenos paradox: Neither Achilles or the tortoise can arrive at
the limit. It is on that basis that a number . . . can be dened, if it is real. A number has
a limit and it is to that extent that it is innite. . . . Achilles can only pass the tortoise
he cannot catch . . .up with it [except] at innity (S. XX, p. 8; Morel, p. 71). That is,
the tortoise and Achilles will always be in different places vis-`a-vis one another, as will
the two sexes.
Moreover, Lacans sexuation graph is not susceptible of deconstructive opposition because neither the masculine nor the feminine is whole. Thus neither identication acts in accordance with an ideal, or a totalized masculine or feminine self.9 The
bottom part of the sexuation graph seeks to demonstrate that insofar as the lack-inbeing is contingent, characterized by a logic of the possible that ceases to write itself,
it is on the masculine side of potential fulllment of sexuation. When the castrated
subject reaches across the sexual divide by an arrow joining it to the object (a) it reaches
the feminine, across a chasm of alienation and separation. The void in the Other on the
feminine side (S[]) is connected to the positivized masculine phallus () and
simultaneously to the lack of an essential woman (The Woman). This lack of an
inmate feminine essence makes the void a place of potential angst and paradoxically,
requires women to have one foot in the symbolic. Thus, the subject of lack is not only
not an essence, it is also a fading evaporating presence.10 The subject is, thus, suffering
and pathetic when anxiety reveals internalized loss in a temporary separation of the
absent primordial objectthe breast, the feces, the gaze, the voicefrom its substitute object (a) in reality. Then the real overtakes the symbolic.11

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Lacans modal logic writes the particular conditions of jouissance he had elaborated to explain, in part, the impasse between man and woman. This impasse gives rise
to three subjective identications in jouissance, identications often at odds with
biological realities. One identies with the reality of power (), or with the gap
between the image and the word (), while a third is with the hole in the Other ()
that unveils the empty center of any set, an encounter with pure angst. These positionings vis-`a-vis the sexual difference mark it by placing limits on the sexual asymmetry at
the interfaces of the real, symbolic, and imaginary. Lacan described these as symbolic
castration, imaginary frustration and real privation. Between the imaginary and the real,
the Other jouissance is encountered: . Between the imaginary and symbolic the local
(universal) social reality appears: . Between the imaginary and symbolic one nds the
separability of image and wordof the word that the thing has already created as
unconscious meaning. Lacan postulated three solutions to lling the gap. It can be lled
with the Other, the phallus, or the jouis-sens of meaning. Each of these temporarily
sutures lack or loss:

-
a

The early Lacan spoke of the lack of an innate object of satisfaction in the
1960s. A decade later, his descriptions of the lack or loss of the object took on
topological afnities with different subject positions in the drives. But prior to this he
had correlated lack and loss with demand, desire, and need. Lacan added his modal
logic of the 1970s to his 1960s theories of the signier, and the logic of the cut. One
remembers that the cut begins with infancy when the baby tries to annul anxiety by
recuperating an identicatory trait of an Ur-objects loss; loss, that is, of a semblance of
fullness or presence. When an object of fulllment is extracted from ones symbolic
universe by certain demands or desires made by the Other, a void and a unary trait are
left over. If the Other fails to answer ones demand, the void is encountered. Lacans

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topology oscillates between the void in the Other and the object (a). For example, an
oral object is demanded from the Other, while an anal object is taken as a demand made
by the Other. A scopic object is experienced as the Other imposing its desire, while an
invocatory object is felt as a desire for the Other.
In all phases of his teaching, Lacan insisted on the centrality of the phallus in the
symbolic taken inversely as the males susceptibility to being castrated. This is of a piece
with his theory that the unconscious is structured like a language. That is, the unconscious is marked by lacks between differential references of one term to another. Thus,
even though a little girl will represent her body by many images in the unconscious
made up of the traces, memories, and identifying signiers of her worldshe will not
represent herself as having the penis, except in reference to its lack. The real knowledge
a girl has of her body, such as infantile explorations of her vagina, cannot be symbolized
in the unconscious because no image opposes the vagina in the imaginary world of
symbols and images.12 Thus, in 1958 and 1959 Lacan accepted Fenichels formula of
girl = phallus, still thinking imaginarily in terms of a girls being the phallus in
sexuation and in modal logic, or a boys having it (Morel, La difference des sexes,
p. 27).

Sexuation and Modal Logic

To truly grasp Lacans move in the 1970s to interpret the sexual difference via a
modication of Aristotles modal logic, one must look to Aristotles Rhetoric II, 25,
1402a and Topics VIII, 2 157 ab and II, 115b (S. XX, p. 70).
But rst, let us remember Lacans thesis that a subjects psychic sexuation is
constructed as a dialectic between the real of repressed fantasy,which, by denition,
resists interpretationand a void place in ones own being, body, and knowledge ().
This dialectic occurs between the primordial objects-cause-of-desire and the unconscious (Other) signiers of ones own subjectivity. Lacan argued that at the very least we
must confront the question of what or who the agent of psychic reality is if it is no
longer exterior versus interior monologue, or a dialogue of bodily complaints, or
history, or a malfunction of the father as function-of-the-law, the Lacanian father
being, nally, a legal ction. The answer Lacan gave had multiple components, such as
his notion of the subject which runs counter to a presence of identity, self, or ego. It is
dened rather, as the inheritor of an initial foreclosure of a hole or gap that marks the
return of repressedunconscioussigniers whose only traces are composed of the
circuit determined by symbolic words that mark imaginary symbols.13
In Seminar III, Lacan wrote:
There is a subjective topology here that rests entirely on this which is given us by
analysis, that there can be an unconscious signier [whose effects can be measured by the unbridgeable difference between the signier and signied]. Here we
must conceive of space talking as such.14

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He offered two modes of the femininethe contingent and the impossibleand

two modes of the masculinethe necessary and the possibleas epistemological ways of
interpreting desire. And desires limit lies in masculine phallic jouissancethe necessary and the possibleor in feminine supplemental jouissance. Insofar as jouissance
forms each persons limits in thought, one encounters the limit of ones knowledge in
sexuation in the writing of ones own Other. Here writing is dened as what language
leaves by way of a trace (S. 20, p. 123). Elsewhere, Lacan calls this la lalangue (language
as its own object). The traces may seem unrelated to ones conscious thought, Lacan
says, more like a cloud of language linked to something beyond the effect of rain (S.
20, p. 120). But they are presumed in certain words . . . and substance [libido].
Being as form is notbut is the basis ofthe subject that speaks without
knowing ones being as body makes an I, or the subject of a verb (S. XX, pp. 118
19).
In Aristotle and Freud: The Other Satisfaction, Lacan says things do not
succeed harmoniously between the sexes because the object (a) fails to translate the
jouissance that would be necessary to create a civilization of contents. And it fails
in four different modes of logical negation (S. XX, p. 59). Aristotles logic of the
necessary becomes, for Lacan, that which does not stop being written (ce qui ne cesse pas de
secrire). But, instead of being linked to the contingent (except in love), as it is for Aristotle,
Lacan joins it to a logic of the impossible: That which does not stop not being written
(ce qui ne cesse pas de ne pas secrire) (S. XX, p. 59). On the top left corner of the sexuation
graph, Lacan places the necessary as the logical whole or all: xx. To perceive things as
whole, even universal, is a required condition for a society to exist, then subsist. It is
necessary, then, that most people believe in a superior being or principlea symbolicorder Fathers Name signierthat transcends the law, in order to establish the law as
a basis from which to write itself in reference to something. This creates a masculine
or master discourse logic of the at least one who says no to castrationthe Urfatherand provides the model of an exception to the rule that gives rise to the
concept of a social convention or norm of reality. It does not matter to those who
believe in such a supreme being that his or her existence is impossible. Thus, the impossible is
made out of the necessity of the impossible, taken as the basis of belief in the One-whoknows.
The mode of the possible is situated under the logic of the necessary, which Lacan
writes as: x. The possible is that which ceases writing itself (ce qui cesse de secrire). It
depends on Lacans view of the universal as that which contains itself by an existence
that denies it, or repression.15 In Le Sinthome (S. XXIII),16 Lacan makes explicit the link
of the possible to castration, as he does also in Dun discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (S.
XVIII).17 Here he proposes that any discourse is a discourse of the semblant. In Joyce le
symptome II, he refers to Le sinthome as giving the only denition of the possible, that
it cannot take place.18 In sexuation, for example, it cannot happen that all the
brothers defer to the father for at least one will try to best him. Joining this category
of the possible with Seminar XX, Lacan says no possible jouissance can cancel the

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unconscious by arriving at a point of innity, an impossible universal doxa, which

would hopefully close the surface of a fantasmatic sphere (cf. ch. 1)
In Seminar XVIII (Dun discours qui ne serait pas du semblant [19701971]) and
Seminar XIX (. . .ou pire [19711972]),19 Lacan argues that the possible is the accepted
near universal reality of castration and that only in psychosis, where no law has been
introjected, does the possible not write itself. Indeed, in masculine logic, the possible
need not even be explained. What keeps writing itself are the conditions of law that
make language, exchange, identity, and so on, possible. Thus, xx exists only in
reference to the postulation of a law in the rst placexxwhose terms place a
barrier between the mother and infant Oneness and eventually build the possibility of a
society. In Le Sinthome (19751976) Lacan equated the possible with death and castration,
veering toward the feminine logic of not [being] all under the sway of phallic interdictions. In Jack Stones words: Castration is the death that marks all that can be
legitimately called progress, and may be the only true universal recognized in Lacans
teaching. Paradoxically, it is a universal that renders any truth claiming to universality
not all. 20
The impossible logic says there does not exist one, as subject, who says no to
castration. Placing this on the feminine side of sexuationxxLacan says all
women negate (imaginary) castration because not one of them is susceptible to it (some
men negate it as well). In Knowledge and Truth, Lacan elaborates these four modes
as a limit point of libido or jouissance that responds to the potential meanings of desire
(normative, hysteric, obsessional, perverse, and psychotic) in interpreting the phallic
signier. In other words, desire joins thought to jouissance. Adding the feminine
contingent to the impossible, and the masculine possible to the necessary, he says the contingent
stops not being written (ce qui cesse de ne pas secrire) (S. XX, p. 94; cf also Gilson, p. 68):
xx. The possible may stop being written (ce qui cesse de secrirethe all-men-are-right
of patriarchal thoughtmaking it a closed place in knowledge. Lacans point is that
the necessary and possible masculine logics depend on an illusion of the whole (or all) as the
beginning and end of knowledge, while the impossible and contingent are not all based on the
fear of castration, a fear that elicits closure. At the least, the feminine logics allow for an
undecidable: The impossible pushes a subject to ee the unbearable, while the contingent lets
in enough love to allow deadly repetitions to be rewritten. Thus, Lacan places psychoanalytic and cultural hopes for change in feminine logic.
Lacan read Freuds Totem and Taboo (1913) as having isolated structural realities of unconscious logic that Freud himself did not understand. Extrapolating his
sexuation logic from Freuds 1913 text, as well as from Aristotles Rhetoric and Topics,
Lacan recast Freudian psychoanalysis, giving new explanations for seemingly disparate
theories, such as Freuds principles of reality (the all) and pleasure (the not all). Arguing that interpretations of sexual difference cause the unconscious to desire particular traits of jouissance, he portrayed oedipal structure as a paternal metaphor:
FN/MD MD/? j FN (Other/phallus). The phallic signier that rst delineates
difference serves as a symbolic-order referent for the limit of law or the reality principle

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() of the Fathers Name. One adheres to a group in reference to what a particular

Fathers Name signies. And it substitutes for the mothers unconscious desire vis-`a-vis
the phallus. Standing in conjunction with the maternal real S() of the pleasure
principleas Eros or Thanatosthe mothers desire determines whether the infants
void is lled by desirable objects or poisonous ones.
The Fathers Name signier can be understood here as symbolic-order language
that tries to negotiate the enigmatic real of (the mothers) desire, which structures the
drives via jouissance conditions. Another signier for the Fathers Name is the symbolic
order itself. It functions to defer or cover over the real void of the partial sexual body
created by cuts and losses of the object (a)s comings and goings. In this sense, the
Fathers Name denotes the commensurability of the law of language with the particular equation of reality adhered to by a local universal set of ideas and beliefs while the
sexual body uses the language of the symbolic to ll the gaps at its surface. Moreover,
Lacan showed how language can substitute for a direct rapport with the objects of
the outside world by the dialectical dependence of metaphorical substitution on
metonymys transformations of primordial desire into cultural meanings. Thus, Lacan
(re)dened metonymy as the fading displacements of the real (lost) objects that mark
other objects by the particularity of contingent desire. This dynamic brings into language
nostalgia, or strange, and uncanny effects, all experienced within a ight of apparent
sense: 2/1 or S1 /S (metaphor) / S ... S1 (metonymy). Indeed, elsewhere, Lacan denes
the object (a) as the metaphor of the subject of jouissance (Gilson, p. 101).
In Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1936), Freud wrote sorrowfully of
his failure to nd a balance between the pleasure and reality principles, pleasure losing
out. Lacan argued that Freud could not understand either the tension or connection
between the pleasure and reality principles because he had not grasped that the unconscious can think only by an interplay of metaphor and desire (metonymy), that links
language to objects, and the absolute to the dialectical. Neither could Freud decipher
the enigma of conscious energetics: What causes (or drives) humans to act. It is not an
accordance with an innate internal strife between the sexual id and social superego.
Indeed, language aims to recuperate the loss of objects.
Lacan recast the Freudian cause of human behavior and motivation away from
anatomy and biology to the subjective sexual identications he called differential
structures of desire. Each structure of desire establishes a pattern connecting it to
jouissance depending on the way lack (/S) is lled in reference to the Fathers Name ()
and the object (a) that marks the primordial subject as real. This real Ur-lining is
subsequently reected in the imaginary lure objects that attract a subject, or as a
semblance of being, located between the symbolic and the real. Thus, one thinks/
desires as a neurotic who denies the lack-in-being; as a psychotic who forecloses the
lack; as a perverse subject who repudiates it; or as a normative subject who represses and
masquerades around it.
These four possible interpretations of the sexual difference arise as categories of
logical negation, thereby bringing negation (or lack) into sexuation as the enmeshing of

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these parts. Each makes a precise linkage of the reality principle () to the pleasure
principle (S[]) We know that Lacans pleasure principle is not Freuds. And Lacan
redened the reality principle as the symbolic phallic signier () that constitutes a
social form of law by a concrete identication with the rules and conventions of a given
symbolic. The rst referent of the symbolic is the abstraction of the effect of the sexual
difference in sexuation, phallic reality joining the S() or barred Other:

The pleasure principle seeks real jouissance as a Freudian homeostasis, then, by lling
its own lack(s) with incorporated objects and object traits that resemble ones already
constituted Ideal ego formation.
Insofar as the mothers unconscious desire is inseparable from her being in the
Other, her primordial la lalangue and her body catalyze the partial drives (oral, anal,
invocatory, and scopic) to which an infant rst responds. The mother is the rst Other.
She carries the objects that cause desire, and the demand to satisfy desire is directed
toward her. Lacan portrayed the breast and feces as a rst version of the subjects
identication with the object (a), and the voice and gaze as a second one (Gilson, p.
137), even though the voice and gaze are primordial. These objects are organized in
reference to the symbolic phallus, which is a complement of the real Other in sexuation.
Thus, the phallic signier, or the Fathers Name that represents it, function to differentiate the outside world of language away from pure bodily jouissance of objects. In this
sense, the phallic signier will always refer to that in experience which is both oppositional to and related to the mother qua Woman.
In Lacans logic, it is impossible for there to be an opposition not based on a
prior relation. Morever, the traces of identicatory bonds remain as mental associations, however vague or opaque they may be. Indeed, that the Fathers Name becomes
the phallic or signifying equivalent of each subjects reality principle occurs only insofar
as the law of the social prevails over the maternal real. Since the pleasure principle is
concomitant with a primary feminine experience of the drives for both sexes, it later
manifests itself in a subjects (contingent) efforts to attain pleasure through recuperating
aspects of primary maternal jouissance: |a j S().
Not only is the reality (pleasure) relation attached to the lacks in a particular
mothers signifying chain of unconscious desire (vis-`a-vis her own experience of the
phallus and castration), any infants sexual or libidinal enjoyment is also delimited by
the myriad nos that language itself imposes on the incestuous oneness of mother and
child, alienating an infant from the silence of the drives. The blockages between
reality and pleasure also come from repetitions, as Freud discovered in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1921). The pathos for humans unveils their paradoxical efforts to attain
pleasure via repetitions that yield archaic, xed signiers, not the livingness of jouissance born ever anew. This is how Lacan explains Freuds theory that Eros turns around

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the Thanatos of knotted signiers that unveil the unconscious signications from
which subjects unaware take their conscious knowledge of how to lead their lives.
Borromean signifying units are ossied at the crux of the symbolic and imaginary axes,
where they form the Ideal ego construct that gives the grounding from which one lives
as if his or her being were whole and reliable.21

Returning to Freud
In rereading Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Differences between the
Sexes, Lacan linked language and the drives to Freuds view of psychoanalysis as a
clinical approach to sexuality in human beings as subjects of the unconscious (Brousse,
NFF, p. 119). More particularly, he aligned sexuality with a category of his own
invention; the real. Indeed, a study of Lacans and Freuds writings about sexuality
culminates in Lacans declaration in Seminar XI that the unconscious is sexuality and the
real is the sexualwhose logic is that of psychoanalysis. Freuds ground-breaking essay
of 1925 returned to some of the problems he had addressed in Three Essays on the
Theory of Sexuality (1905) where he rst wrote that the sexual life of men alone has
become accessible to research. That of women . . . is still veiled in an impenetrable
obscurity (SE, 7, p. 151).22 He added in his pamphlet on lay analysis that the sexual
life of adult women is a dark continent (SE, 20, p. 212).23 Yet, his work on the
Oedipus complex is more germane to contemporary gender studies than these essays
insofar as his theories of identication gave Lacan a basis for rethinking not only
analytic structures, but also how they are constructed.
Early on in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud gave his rst full account of
the Oedipus complex.24 Assuming a heterosexual norm, Freud presented both sexes as
later becoming libidinally attracted to the opposite-sex through rst having loved the
opposite sex parent: the girl her father and the boy, his mother (SE, 4, p. 257). This
theme is repeated in his study of Dora (Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria), where
he sought to demonstrate that the problems of hysteria, feminine sexuality, and female
psychology are different, although interlinked. Yet, he did not publish any decisive
statement on women until fteen years after he published the Dora study in 1905, a
study he continually emended in added footnotes (SE, 7: 3122).25 Nontheless, in
19161917 during the period of his rst topic, he wrote in the Introductory Lectures:
As you see, I have only described the relation of a boy to his father and mother.
Things happen in just the same way with little girls, with the necessary changes:
An affectionate attachment to her father, a need to get rid of her mother as superuous (SE, 16, p. 333).26 He has thereby made an obsessional male of the little
girl.
In his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905) Freud had tried to explain the
development of infantile sexualitya revolutionary concept at the timeby arguing a

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theory Melanie Klein later developed to its highest point in object-relations analysis:
That the rst sexual object of any child is the mothers breast, which serves as the
prototype of every later love relation (SE, 7, p. 222). In this essay, Freud stated clearly
for the rst time that a little girl could not arrive at a normal resolution of the
Oedipus complexthat is, to love a manwithout changing her interest in her
leading sexual organ (the clitoris) and her principal sexual object (the mother). He
proposed nothing less than a reformulation of biology and ego.
Arguing that a twofold change had to occur for little girls to become psychically
mature, little boys, on the other hand, did not have to change their interest in their
principal sexual organ or in the principal sexual object. Thus, the boys sexual resolution of the oedipal conict would, at least, be easier than the little girls. We know that
Lacan does not follow Freuds view of male sexuality, anymore than he does Freuds
work on feminine sexuality. Still, Freuds essay written in 1925 opened the way for his
later development of what he described as the pre-oedipal phase: This emphasized
the mother as basic to the development of both sexes.
Although Lacan dispensed with the pre-oedipal phase in all of his teaching, given
his stress on the shaping power of language, one could argue that he rethinks it in his
various theories of the object and the object (a), and later in his topological theories.
Not only does the infant experience the primordial mothers real body through imaginary frustrations occasioned by the Others incursions that disrupt the pleasure of
imaginary unity, the real organs themselvesthe breast, the voice, the gaze, the feces
are rst received as gifts of the symbolic order, according to Lacan in Le seminaire IV
(19561957). Lacan developed his triadic interpretation of the mother as symbolic
agent in relation to the real object and its imaginary lack as early as 1956.27 Yet, it is the
real father who introduces the signier (no) of symbolic castration that divides the
childs dependence on the mothers desire and jouissance between the symbolic () and
the real part of the (a). The infant experiences his or her mother as a semblant, dwelling
between the symbolic and the real (S. XX, p. 90). However, in Seminar IV, Lacan
presents the symbolic and the real mother as obscured by the omnipresence of imaginary confusions, illusions, and frustrations.
In Seminar V, Lacan is still far from developing the topological science of the real
that marks Seminar XX. He speaks of elementary signiers that make the word tremble
before an encounter with lack in the drives (S. V, 1958 p. 478). Nor is this the Lacan of
Le seminaire, XXII R.S.I. (1974 1975) who presents the Borromean knot as supporting
both body and mind as the real sinthome which is poked full of holes by the symbolic
which, in turn, incorporates the real part in the signier that one must nally dene as a
hole in a word, or that which makes a hole (April 15, 1975).28 The latter theory goes
along with Lacans idea that to name is an act: The dire (the saying)not the dit (the
said)is an act that makes its own frame out of words and gaps punched in to seeming
imaginary consistencies. The real is just beyond the imaginary/symbolic. It ex-sists by
wedging individual Borromean knots,

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into corners of the three orders (March 18, 1975).

In Some Psychical Consequences . . . , prior to his proposal of a pre-oedipal
phase, Freud too was preoccupied with asymmetries and even fragmentations, although
they were not triadic or quattrocentric as are Lacans. They are the familiar binary ones
of simple oppositions. In his detailed development of the different relations of boys
and girls to the castration and oedipal complexes, he proposed a further difference in
the construction of their superegos. Revisiting Freuds major ideas, including Freuds
view that males are more subject to superego guilt than females, Lacan gave a different
explanation. Lacans obsessional male for example, is preponderantly guilty because his
mother preferred him to his father.
Even though Freud referred to feminine sexuality off and on after 1905, he was
always dissatised with what he could say about this topic in the studies he published
between 1915 and 1925, including the study of a female paranoiac in 1915, a female
homosexual in 1920, and theories on feminine masochism and the infantile sexual
development of girls that he advanced in his work on the fantasies of a child is being
beaten in 1919 (SE, 17).29
Freuds increasing distinctions between the psychic development of the sexes
appear rst in A Child Is Being Beaten where he declared himself dissatised with his
earlier precise analogy between the sexes, stating that the expectation of there being a
complete parallel was mistaken (SE, 17, p. 196). Yet in a paper published in 1923 on
the phallic phase of infantile genital organization, he still felt that unfortunately we
can describe this state of things only as it affects the male child; the corresponding
processes in the little girl are not known to us (SE, 19, p. 142).30 Since Freud had
begun to correct his view of how infantile genital organization is constructed in 1915,
he redescribed a theory he put forth in 1935 as initially based erroneously on the

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paradigm of male children (SE, 20, p. 36).31 He simultaneously began to advance new
ideas on feminine sexuality in The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego Ideal) (1923), in
The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924) (SE, 19).32 In The Ego and the
Super-Ego (Ego Ideal), he compared the outcome of the little boys Oedipus complex
with that of the little girls, making them symmetrical: In a precisely analogous way,
the outcome of the oedipal attitude in a little girl may be an intensication of her
identication with her mother (or the setting up of such an identication for the rst
time)a result which will x the childs feminine character (p. 32). By 1925, he had
abandoned this idea.
In The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924), Freud argued that the
female child does not discover her genital organ when boys do, a theory Lacan and
others before him have long since proved false. What does interest Lacan is Freuds
theory that a female does not perceive herself as physically castrated, but assumes
simply that she, like her mother and other females, has already lost an organ of equal
size to the boys at some earlier date. But not until the 1925 essay (Some Psychical
Consequences . . .) does Freud state clearly and for the rst time what he later
develops in his 1931 essay (Female Sexuality), in lecture 33 of The New Introductory
Lectures (1932), and in his posthumous Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1938/1940]:33 Not
only are male and female sexual development asymmetrical, the Oedipus complex raises
one more problem for girls than for boys (SE, 23, 141207). Indeed, this 1938 essay
contains a complete reevaluation of all Freuds previous views on the psychological
development of women.
But the theories of infant sexuality Freud advanced here in 1938 as a paradigm
for adult sexuality still did not offer a clue as to how women became women, sexually
and psychically different from men. In 1915, Freud had added the libido theory to
his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, where he had rst suggested that
because the principle female sexual organ is the clitoris, the sexuality of little girls is of
a wholly masculine character and a wave of repression at puberty is required before
the clitoris can give way to the vagina, thus ushering the little girl away from a sexual
masculinity to the femininity of womanhood (SE, 7, 21921). One might suggest that
Freuds imaginary interpretations of feminine sexuality are equations of the vagina with
the uterus, both romanticized in a masculine, essentialist logic of the whole or all. Here
Woman is birth-giving and life-giving.
Lacan attributed such male myths regarding The Woman to a confusion between female sexuality and some presupposed innate essence of motherhood. But why
would males mystify motherhood, or confuse the mother with an Essential Woman
who is alternately goddess, savior, mother earth, or, in turn, whore, harridan, and a
curse? Lacans theory of a mirror-stage illusion of Oneness would suggest that the
symbiotic paradigm of the mother/child dyad is the structural grounding of such
myths. Moreover, this theory can be veried at the level of lived experience in terms of
Lacans later topological theories wherein a demand made to the Other for an oral
object is a demand made to a supposedly essential mother capable of making

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her child or her partner whole and safe by love, advice, sex, and so on. We might
turn this around and say that any demand made for love is an oral demand, asking
for the jouissance of immediate gratication, rather than accepting the deferrals of
desire.
Indeed, Lacans topological science of the real proposes that the ditsthe
sense of jouis-sens as meaning () beyond the direis the link to his four modal
places in the discourse structures: The S1 (or master signier) emanates from the real
traits of identication that ek-sist as somewhat open and consistent (Stone, p. 52;
Gilson, p. 214). These traits inhabit language and insert unary strokes from the real
into assumed consistencies of the imaginary body and into symbolic narratives. Lacans
porous scaffolding of the psychic gestalt can only lead him to dispute Freuds myths of
an Essential Woman. His axiom The Woman does not exist means that woman
cannot be equated with an essence of wholeness, oneness, goodness, and so on. Mans
belief that she does is his symptom (S. XX, pp. 8081). In his Seminar of 21 January
1975,34 Lacan argued that not only is woman mans symptom, she is his (fetishized)
sexual symptom, thereby enabling him to ward off a direct contact with his unconscious
(/S <> a).
In the relation of feminine sexuality to the foundations of logic and language in
males, Lacan proposed that something strange is at stake: The male fantasy of woman
Freud unveils is woman equals mother.35 In 1915 Freud saw the passage from girl to
woman as a matter of preparing to receive males by experiencing vaginal sexual pleasure,
believing that organ complementarity equaled sexual complimentarity and the psychological preparedness of women to be harmonious companions to men.
One could suggest that sexual and psychic oneness describe, rather, the dyadic
structure of the mirror-stage infants illusion that two are one. (Even in mathematics
two is a fuzzy, irrational number.) Indeed, Freuds theory of sexual oneness was not so
much a proof of oneness, as the construction of a developmental theory of psychic and
sexual maturity. In this evolutionary paradigm, genital maturity was equated with
vaginal orgasm for women and reciprocity and generosity of character for both sexes
a genital stage beyond oral greed and anal acquisitiveness. But beyond his everchanging ideas regarding women, Freuds outrageous claim that the libido was phallic
fueled the quarrels of the 1930s. Not until Lacan took up this thesis was Freuds claim
taken seriously as having a logicalbeit a nonbiological oneat the level of the
unconscious.
If we read Freuds two well-known essays on feminine sexuality in terms of
Lacans qualitative logic of three kinds of jouissance established via negations, we have
the basis for recasting Freuds theory of the phallus. It is reinterpretable as an effect
whose cause is the difference between the sexes. The way is then opened for a theory of
identicationnot with an organ or a standard of behavior, butwith the signier of
ideals (S1 ) that build into an Ideal ego at the base of Lacans graph of desire (Subversion . . . , p. 315).
In Lacans sexuation graph,

A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay

Man
S
(the possible)

105

Woman
S()
(the contingent)
a
The Woman

the phallic signier () is concomitant with alienation (or castration) by language.

(Earlier on, we linked this to the possible via the necessary). As one of two symbols or
mathemes that joins the masculine, or symbolic side of the tables to the feminine side, it
supports Lacans logic(s) of the possible dream as masculine, and the contingent encounter
in love as feminine. From the feminine side, an arrow points in two directions, to the
positivized and to the signier for a radical incompleteness in the set of meanings
that constitutes any ensemble of the Other (S[]) (S. XX, Encore, p. 78). While, on the
one hand, the is the symbol for Freuds theory that there is only one libido for both
sexes, a masculine one, Lacan claries the meaning of the masculine libido, beyond the
males genital orgasm. The phallus signies the point of identication a person has with
a place in the symbolic order; not only identication with the male sexual organ or male
sexual pleasure. That it is necessary that at least one personxxnot be castrated,
that such a person exist, if only in myth, means simply that each subject may aspire to
order in their lives by identication with othersover the chaos of the real created
by the Ur-fatherthereby gaining a place in the symbolic. The necessary element of
castration gives rise to the social order via a masculine logic that leads to the possible
insofar as itxxrequires turning away from the feminine as Other by accepting
castration, that is, the rules of the group.
Lacan made the innovative point that sexuationthe subjective sexual identication a person takes onis constructed not only in regards to sex, but rst in reference
to the signier for sexual difference itself, taken as a signier without a signied: .
Producing itself as a set of unary traits (S1s [S2 S3 S4 S5 S6]), a swarm of identications
with particular social IdealsI (O)the phallus takes on a symbolic value in the
Ideal ego unconscious formation. It is equal to the knot or sinthome that sustains thought
and body in three different psychic experiences of castration: The reality , the
structure of lack (), and the , or the cut. And each castration produces a different
relationship of the (Ideal) ego to meaning: (1) The phallic signier () is foreclosed in
psychosis, which subject requires that castration (or the experience of a lack-in-being)
not cut into his or her Ideal ego; (2) The phallic signierindex of sexual difference
is fetishized in the perversion typical of fantasy, wherein sexual jouissance sets the
standard for social law; (3) The phallic difference is denied in neurosis, such that the
neurotic tries to impose his or her Ideal (ego) narcissism on social law, thereby giving
prevalence to the imaginary. The normative represses the difference and acts out
whatever characterizes the sexual masquerade in his or her social order.
Lacan reads Freuds theory of castration, not as the fear of organ loss, but as a
process of unconscious desire wherein identications (S1s j Ideal ego) construct any

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persons subjective sexual position as the outcome of his or her interpretation of sexual
difference. In the feminine logic(s) of the contingent and the impossible, contingency accepts
that the impossibilities of the sexual nonrapport may cease producing impasses long
enough to allow for love. The necessary and possible masculine logics pretend that neither
desire, fantasy, nor jouissance enter language and actions, except in some category of the
already known that is codied in institutions (church, school, war) through polite
formulae of agreed-upon knowledge and rituals of convention. Given that the phallus is
a referent for each formula, repression, denial, repudiation, or foreclosure, of the modal
logic(s)
xx
xx

xx
xx

each of the various meanings is qualied by its relation to the existential quantier ()
and the universal one (). It follows that Lacan viewed the differential phallic signier
() as one of the base elements of human mentality. Along with it, he adds the subject
of desire (/S); the master signier made up of unary traits of identications (S1 ); the
signier for knowledge (S2 ); and the excess of jouissance of the objects (a) that ll the
concrete lack that is desires inverse side:

In bringing together desire and the phallic signier as that which comes to the
place where a signier for self is lacking in the symbolic, Lacan shows the metaphorical
properties of the phallus. It substitutes for the lure objects meant to satiate desire. It is,
thus, in response to the what do you wantthe che vuoithat the lack of a signier
for the subject in the unconscious enters the symbolic order as the desire for a ller to
lack: /S <> a.36
One cannot say, then, as does James Mellard, that desire is just an early
Lacanian concept, superseded by drive, jouissance, and the real (Mellard, p. 395).37
The rst eight objects that cause desire make it the desire of a desire for a return, desire
being constituted only as a response to the loss of an object. What remains as a real
nonspecular Ur-lining of the subject as desiring are the unary traits that glue themselves
to each object-cause-of-desire: the breast, the feces, the voice, the gaze, the imaginary
phallus, the urinary ow, the phoneme, and the nothing. Such traits return in the real,
symbolic, and imaginary as reections of the forms already given in the symbolic and

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107

imaginary orders. These forms appear as details, affect, enigmata, in the gap between
the word and image, revealing castration or lack to be a foundational corner of the
master discourse where the unconscious base lies in fantasy:
(S1 j S2
/S J a)

The idea of the phallus, as a third symbolic effect caused by perceiving the sexual
difference, makes sense of Freuds failures in Some Psychical Consequences to
explain the asymmetrical psychological development of male and female sexuality by
sexual organs. Freud wrote later in Analysis Terminable and Interminable that at no
point in ones analytic work does one suffer more from the oppressive feeling that all
ones efforts have been in vain and from the suspicion that one is talking to the winds
than when one is trying to persuade a female patient to abandon her wish for a penis on
the grounds of it being unrealizable, or to convince a male patient that a passive attitude
towards another man does not always signify castration and that in many relations
in life it is indispensable (Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, 1937,
p. 270).
Lacans return to Freud via a complex logic of the phallus depicts female penis
envy as the desire to be identied with an Ideal in the symbolic, while male castration
anxiety concerns a double defense against the real of loss, anxiety, and trauma. Not only
does the male stop up the void place at the center of being with the reality paradigms
that represent a given phallic (symbolic) order, he also takes a partner (an object of
desire) as a buffer against acknowledging unconscious lack. Male castration anxiety, is
further denied by the closures into symbolic structures of masculine bonding one nds
depicted in the upper left corner of the sexuation graph.
Although ideals are structured by the symbolic order of any given historical
moment, they are realized in the imaginary others who appear as desirable gures
because they embody certain ideal traits. Such phallic identicationsbe they men
or womenmean a positivization of phallic jouissance insofar as it is prescribed by the
social Others approving gaze. Within this context, male castration anxiety manifests
two levels of identication: Identication with the primordial, real (maternal) Other as
The Woman who could existwithin a contingent logicto annihilate the void in the
Other (S[]), and identication with the secondary, symbolic (paternal) Other ()
who is supposed to know. The males fear of being a passive object at the mercy of
other males reveals the symbolic as itself a defense, not only against his own agressivity,
but also against a fear of separation from the mythical Woman who is assumed to
protect males from encountering the void in the Other ().
Freud emphasized the (sexual) competition he called oedipal rivalry, while Lacan
stressed, rather, that male bonding in the symbolic is a structural necessity imposed on
the little boy from having deferred to the person or signier that represented the father
for him as law/reality/no. Adult men make the abstract leap to believing in a
superior father who stands above and outside the law, thereby dictating its terms to
them. Lacans theory of sexuation brings together Freuds essays on the sexual differ-

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ence and his enigmatic theories on male bonding from Totem and Taboo (1913),38 along
with Aristotles efforts to dene being.
Refuting the biological basis of Freuds idea of an active masculinity and a
passive femininity, Lacan says not only did this idea not solve the problem of the sexual
difference, it also failed to stress that neither tendency ever disappears from either sex.
In other words, the active component in feminine sexuality that Freud associated
with masculinity becomes, for Lacan, an imaginary feminine confusion among seeing,
having, and being. Since Freud tried to solve the problem of sexual difference imaginarily, much as Immanuel Kant had tried to separate the beautiful from the sublime by
arguments regarding visibility and magnitude, Freud portrayed the girl who lacks the
penis as one who can be compenstated by a babya bigger and better imaginary
phallus. While Freud worked with geometry, quantifying by empirical, metrical measure, Lacans realm of the visible is topological: The gaze of consciousness means seeing
oneself being seen and, as such, equates dissimilar things in a link of metaphorical,
metonymical substitutions; having a beautiful girl (car, etc.) is merged with ones
desirability. The scopic drive aims to validate, even elevate, ones being via sublimation,
by conating the aim of the drive with its goal.
Although the problem Freud actually wanted to solve was what caused the sexual
difference, his detourssuch as seeing the wish for a baby as a substitute wish to
compensate the girl for sexual or psychic passivityled him to the impasse of making
feminine sexuality equatable with motherhood. Urging his interlocutors to see passive
and active tendencies as characteristic of both sexes, Lacan unveiled male castration
anxiety as in and of itself an implicit admission that having the penis does not make one
the desired objectthe phallusnor does it protect the male from the castrations
implicit in his depending on the Other. Lacan portrayed the Freudian female as ending her analysis by wanting a positive (active) identication in the symbolic, (S1 ),
while the male ends up defending against being separated from the maternal Other,
and at the mercy of the paternal Others desire (i.e., admitting his own passive
lack [/S]).
If, as Freud opined, female castration anxiety were to resolve itself in penis envy,
one can only wonder why any other object would not serve as an adequate substitute for
something supposedly lacking or lost. One could argue that wanting or having a baby may
well be the signal for some women that they have attained a position in the symbolic
order, for example through alliance with a Fathers Name that gives the mother social
status. The feminine drama concerns value (self-worth) and meaning, not organs, organ
size, passive sexuality, or an innate maternal instinct.
Lacan arrived at his conclusions by carefully reading Freud in German. Strachey,
Freuds major translator, indicates in an Editors Note to the Standard Edition that
Freud became strictly occupied with the issue of feminine sexuality, starting with his
rethinking of the Oedipus complex in The Ego and the Id (1923) and The
Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924). Reading Freud in German (a language
of expertise for Lacan), enabled him to stress how careful Freud had been in choosing
his words. His 1925 essay begins: In my own writings and in those of my followers

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109

more and more stress is laid on the necessity that the analyses of neurotics shall deal
thoroughly with the remotest period of their childhood, the time of the early eforescence of sexual life (p. 248) (Die zeit der Frublute des Sexuallebens).
Although a Frublute or eforescence of a beginning moment cannot be recuperated as such in memory, having been transformed by condensation (metaphor) and
displacement (metonymy)and, thus, being unanalyzable as conscious memory
nontheless, a beginning moment gave rise to an endpoint which Freud named as
analyzablean analysands sexual life. The route to understanding neurosis is to be
found in these very earliest moments of sexual development. Lacan stressed that the
language of the unconscious dwells in the marginality of the language and images of
fantasy, desire, jouissance, and in the unary traits inscribed in the real. Thus, nothing
can be known of primordial sexual experience except insofar as it is recounted in
language, but not the conventional language of grammar or the familiarity of repeated
narratives. Rather, the signieds of jouis-sens run counter to the signiers of narrative (cf.
ch. 1, S. V ).
Lacan listened to the language of primordial murmurings (la lalangue), to the
ights of meaning into wispy evaporations of sense surrounding the objects that
cause desire, projecting traits of the real at the rims of holes poked into language.
Although no person ever has words to describe those rst experiences, one can subsequently reconnect individual threads of the drive to the desire emanating from nonspecular objects that rst created a dialectic between drive and desire, a dialectic out of
which fantasy is built.
Freud left his readers in the impasses that have given rise to contemporary
psychology and classical psychoanalysis which, in his wake, have focused increasingly
on behavior, whose causes are easily attributable to the biological organism as
causative of its own effects. Yet, if one reads Freud in German, one immediately sees
that Stracheys translation introduces distortions. He writes the rst manifestations of
the patients innate instinctual constitution, where Freud had written the early
eforence of sexual life (1925 essay, p. 248), eforence meaning to bloom or to
leave behind a chemical deposit from a process. Freud said one must look to this early
material that has been remodeled and overlaid, leaving his followers with this contradiction: If neurosis is caused by early sexual experiences, how can these be instinctually
innate? And insofar as associational memory is radically individual, how would one
neurotic subject differ from any other? Moreover, if innate instinctssupposedly
common to allconstitute the early owering of a sexual life, why would feminine
sexuality differ from masculine sexuality?
Long before Lacan gave Seminar IX: Lidentication (19611962) where he began
to develop the logic of the topological overlaps of forms that allowed him to elaborate a
truth-functional category of paradoxes and impossibilitiesthe realwhich registers
certain effects of the world as contradictory, he had already begun to translate
Freuds idea of complexes into primordial matrices of concrete images in Family Complexes.39 And in the 1930s before he had conceptualized the object (a) in Seminar VIII: Le
Transfert as a matheme representing an effect whose cause is invisible or absent, but

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whose effect is still present, Lacan had begun to reach for this conclusion. By arguing
that complexes are not innate or biologically constituted, but are composed of images
and words taken in from the outside world, he can say by Seminar XX: I have never
looked at a baby and had the sense that there was no outside world for him. It is plain
to see that a baby looks at nothing else but that, that it excites him, and that is the case
precisely to the extent that he does not yet speak. From the moment he begins to speak
. . . I can understand that there is some repression. The process of the Lust-Ich [pleasure
principle] which Lacan denes [as that which is satised by blah-blah] may be primary
. . . but it is certainly not rst (p. 56). Alienation (behind language and images) is rst,
for without it pleasure cannot be imagined, conceptualized, or sought as a freedom
from it.
Lacan explains where Freud took the wrong paths, the ones followed since by
classical post-Freudians. But Lacans post-Freudianism gives value to the structure of
Freuds arguments by an inverse logic. Before the pleasure principle appears, for
example, one encounters the reality principle of traumatic losses, which catalyzes the
quest for pleasure via the search for repetitions of lost experiences. Lacans theory is
that the unconscious subject can only follow the predictable paths of its own structurations because they have already constituted a series of limits in nite ensembles of
signifying material that surround the various objects (a) that cause desire. Given that the
structure of limits is Borromean,

made up of intersecting parallels that give the topological dimensions of a surface, one
sees Lacan moving from rst symbolizing structure, then topologizing it.40 Passing
beyond imaginary schema that stratify the planes of the image, the surface prevailing
there, he moves on to the graphs that inscribe symbolic space, and the picture that

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111

presents sites as real places.41 One can see the difference between the real Lacan aims
at with topology, and the imaginary nature, for example, of the Schema L.42
Lacans point is that the content specic to the real, imaginary, and symbolic
orders is secondary to the structures that are formative of a mind-body interlinking.
Although Lacan adhered to Freuds idea that there are two orientations in neurosis
obsession and hysteriahe stressed that every neurosis is a case in the particular of a
given set of associations of master signiers that constitute the unconscious networks of
language (S1 ) and the jouissance(s)(a)that compose any persons fundamental
fantasies around an ideal construct of self. Thus, no theory of neurosis can be based
on a universal model of biological or sociological development. Rather, the neuroses are
constituted as modes of sexuation that deny that the sexual difference matters or
produces an effect of trauma, while awaiting release from the impossible paradoxes
denial creates. For Lacan, obsession, for example, is a male identication with knowledge that tries to diminish the power of the feminine in it by replacing the openness
(xx) in desire with closures of knowledge. Hysteria is a (generally) female identication with her fathers lack-in-being that leads her to sacrice her jouissance in an
attempt to take on the burden of his castration, thus inverting her own Ideal ego with
the ego ideals of others.
Stracheys translation of the instinctual constitution of the earliest experiences
of a persons sexual life is Freuds use of Triebkonstitution. It is only by analyzing what
constitutes the Triebe, or drives, that one can accurately gauge the motive forces that have
led to his neurosis, Freud writes. In Freud and Mans Soul, Bruno Bettleheim argued
convincingly that Stracheys translation of Trieb as instinct has destroyed the meaning
of a major concept in Freuds work: Freud rarely used the word instinct, and even then
only in reference to animals, using the word Instinkten to mean species-specic instinct.43 When he used Trieb, on the other hand, there was always an implicit or
explicit reference to a join between the human biological body and psychic forces. In
other words, a native speaker of German will understand Trieb in a psychological
sense.44
In Freuds German, the motive forces that lead to the neurosesone of his
concerns in this essayare Triebkrafte. The English translation of The Standard Edition
leaves out the word Trieb in motive forces, which ought to mean the motive force of
drives. In both wordsTriebkonstitution and TriebkrafteFreud sought to explain the
cause of neurosis in terms of some fate of the drive: Not as innate instincts or
biological motive forces propelled on their own energy. Freuds German shows his
attempts to understand the neuroses in relation to the earliest experiences of a persons
sexual life as hinging on a question regarding the enigmatic nature of the drives. This
requirement, to examine the rst manifestations and earliest experiences, is not only
of theoretical but also of practical importance, Freud stressed, for it distinguishes our
efforts from the work of those physicians whose interests are focused exclusively on therapeutic
results. Having referred to the patients innate drives (mitgebrachten; i.e., what one
brings with one), Freud immediately, and paradoxically, sought to distance his work

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from that of physicians who look to behavioral changes as therapeutic results in

proof of cure; not to causal factors (Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes, p. 248). Furthermore, even the word mitgebrachten does not mean biologically innate. The correct German word is, rather,
eingebornen.
Apologizing for having had neither the time nor experience to give the proof of
universal applicability, Freud says he still feels justied in publishing the ndings he had
evolved at this stage of his work in 1925. He recapitulates his ideas on the Oedipus
complex in boys: In the rst stage the little boy cathects the object of nursinghis
motherwith his libido. Lacan will critique Freuds idea that a libido can act as an
agent, while Bettleheim also criticizes this theory by questioning Stracheys translation
of besetzungwhich means to occupy a place, or to place something somewhere, or
invest in somethingas cathect. The investment of jouissance creates the libido,
Lacan argues, by the boys attributing to his mother the identifying unary traits of
jouissance Lacan called master signiers of enjoyment (S1 ). Freud names the agent that
cathects (or invests in) the mother, the libido.
Once one uses besetzung, rather than cathect, the problematic of how matter
constitutes mind presents itself. Object-relations theorists have spoken of projection,
introjection, and incorporation as operations or laws that wield an active unconscious
fantasy system, sometimes supposing such a system to be innate or a priori, rather than
constructed from the outside.
To counteract Freuds biological theory of instinct as causative of behavior,
Lacan developed the imaginary order, derived from the premirror- and mirror-stage
relations between mother and child, to explain how one becomes informed by the
societal conventions of the symbolic order. Infants take in the data of the Other/other
by incorporating traces of the rst objects they desire, but come to know only in losing
them. The hole punched into their perception by loss(es),

might be equated with the torus, of the null or empty set [ ] (S. IX, Identication, 1961
1962, March 14, 1962, unpublished seminar); Torus is reason, since it is what allows
for knots Lacan says in Seminar XX (p. 123). That an infant desiresand actsin
order to replace a lost object answers the question of how the libido is linked to
meaning by desire.
This is not disconnected from the problem posed by Freud in his 1925 essay on
the anatomical distinction between the sexes: What constitutes the drives and what

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113

motivates them? The question he could not answer was how the libido can equal itself
as both agent and object. His multiple answers were nally resolved in The Ego and
the Id (1927),45 where he depicted the erotic libido as transforming itself into ego by
desexualizing the id and sublimating its libido in order to master sexual tensions
(p. 46). But he still has not answered how the derivatives of Eros become the libido
that Lacan parceled into three forms;;all surrounding the object (a) that
causes desire and that one, in turn, seeks to recuperate in all lifes acts, rituals, and
repetitions.
Lacan asked, what is the libido and what has it to do with the drives? In Seminar
XI he described the libido as a lamellea thin at scale or part as one of the thin plates
composing the gills of a bivalve mollusk or of a mushroomand the drive as a
montage made of signiers and partial objects in the three orders (p. 169). This is
closer to the amalgam of identications that allows one to think via being . . .
presumed in certain words . . . that constitute form [as] the knowledge of being (S.
XX, pp. 11819), than to Freuds unied (genital) sex drive, taken as the momentary
triumph of id over ego and superego. Freuds notion simply does not explain how drive
becomes desublimated or unrepressed, despite his spurious references to love, survival
of the species, inverted sex acts, and so on. And although Freud talks about rending
the object, it is as a substitute person, not an elaborated, albeit a refracted form, of the
primordial Ur-lining of the subject, the lining rst laid down as the infants corporal/
mental relation to eight essential objects that link his or her body to forms in the
world.
Because language covers over the real, it automatically defers the signier of
sexual difference away from presence into an alienation or distance from these primordial libidinal objects (a)rst linked to the motherplacing difference on the masculine side of the symbolic and proximity or distance to or from sexuality in the real of
the feminine side. Thus, the autoeroticism of the sexual real would be found on the
feminine side of sexuation, there where there is greater proximity to the primordial
object (a), as well as to the open, void place of trauma, anxiety, and sexual excitement:
(). The void or null set comes into being along with alienation into language. We
remember that it is created by the initial losses of the primordial object(s)-cause-ofdesire in the moments of the cut, desire giving rise to the drive to reinstate the causal
object. In the second period of his teaching, Lacan described the drive as a montage,
equating it with a demand made in language (/S <> Demand) to fulll desire, thereby
attenuating effects of the voidj/S <> aj/S <> Dwith the stabilizations
offered by the symbolic order and the possibilities of fullling fantasy, sexual or
otherwise.
Increasingly, between Seminar XI (1964) and those following, until Seminar XXVII (1981), Lacans gradual development of the topology of the three jouissance(s)
; ; poses the question of whether or not libido is a drive. The drives produce
sublimated libido, which is known as such only once it has been lost. But, it is not
desexualized. Thus, libido is neither agent nor subject, but rather, an affective sub-

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stance, which is a veiled reminiscence of the effects of meaning one seeks to recreate by
(re)nding itthe object ain the constellations of the world. In this sense jouissance is an oscillation between the alienating language () and images () with which
one identies to ll the void (), itself experienced as a beyond (in) meaning. Miller
writes the drive as the conjunction between primary identicatory unary traits (S1 ) and
the being of the (a) that coalesce into the Ideal ego formation that demands the driveobject(s) that will ll the gap in the other of the che vuoi? of desire.46 Thus, one can say
that the three jouissance(s) structure the three orders (R.S.I.) around the (a) as three
topological knots one may call,

-
a

conventions (), gaps between image and word (), and the pressure of the cut (),
circling around the (a) at the center of each unit of meaning.
From these perspectives, one cannot accurately describe Freuds libido as an
autonomous volitional agent of drive, mysteriously animated to move toward something or someone one unknowingly wants to possess, or vice versa. Rather, one might
say that the drive aims to mime the conditions of fantasy by making a rapport between
what the subject lacks and the jouissance that will hopefully reify the ideal ller for that
lack. 47 Thus, the drive concerns representational and libidinal meaning, not instinct. It
is drawn by an unconscious recognition of the traits to be recuperated in the quest for
something lost that seems to reside in the object desired.
Lacans concept of the Freudian libido is claried by Millers First Course (1981
22) where castration is described as the separation of jouissance and the body by the
alienating effect of the symbolic (p. 4). In all psychoanalysis, Miller continues, when
Lacan found a discontinuity, a structural cut, or an erogenous zone attached to a
partial object (breast, feces, and so on), he found a separation of the body from
jouissance (p. 7). One might suggest that the relation of an hysteric to the ego ideal

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115

other she makes into her Ideal ego (or master signier) is experienced by her in the real.
Answering a question whose fence she straddles in fantasyAm I a woman or a
man?its symbolic forms reect her to herself in the social gaze as desirable (or not).
In the rst stage of the Freudian Oedipus complex, the little boy wants to possess
his mother to repeat the experiences of a corporal jouissance of imaginary oneness. Not
surprisingly, he regards his father as a disturbing rival and would like to get rid of him
and take his place (Freud, Some Psychic Consequences . . . , p. 249). Referring to
other essays where he had explained the Oedipus complex as belonging to the phallic
phasethat is, to the male fear of literal castration, inseparable from his narcissistic
interest in his genitalsFreud, in 1925, portrays the male Oedipus complex as more
complicated than the fear of organ loss, one proof being its bisexual constitution, which
he calls a double orientation, active and passive. Boys not only identify with the fathers
desire for the mother, but also want to take the mothers place as the love object of the
father (the feminine attitude) (p. 250).
In the Ego and the Id (1923), the triangular character of the Oedipus
situation and the constitutional bisexuality of each individual took on a completely
different meaning than in Freuds later work (SE, 9, p. 31). When discussing the
prehistory of the Oedipus complex in boys in 1925, Freud admits to his own lack of
clarity. But in 1923, he spoke of the affectionate identication of the boy with his
father prior to any rivalry in regards to his mother: However, as his sexual wishes
toward his mother become more intense, his father ever more perceived as a rival, the
Oedipus complex originates (The Ego and the Id, p. 32). Still, Freud questions
whether the masturbatory activity of this period is caused by the Oedipus complex,
thereby discharging the excitation attached to the complex, or whether it emanates
spontaneously from the organ qua organ and only becomes attached to the complex at a
later date. In any case, Freud supposed in 1923 that the suppression (Unterdruckung) of
masturbation by social threats caused the onset of the castration complex. Although
Strachey translated Unterdruckung, meaning that something is pressed back or pressed
under, as suppression, it is not masturbation that is suppressed but, rather, the
concrete details of the prohibition that are pressed under as unconscious memories.
Lacans solution to Freuds perplexity regarding the active and passive orientation found in male castration anxiety and in female penis envy, is addressed in his
sexuation graph. On the top line, he situates the asymmetrical consequences of male and
female identication with castration or no. In one sense, castration means submission
to the Others law. While the male identies with the law of the group, attributing
supreme law to an uncastrated Ur-father (x x), the female need not bow to an Urfather. She already bears the mark of difference from men (or sameness with the mother
that) Lacan calls castration: (x x). This suggests that men submit to a leader, while
women simply submit. But in a paradoxical, double negative, Lacan says on the bottom
right line that all women are not all castrated (x x); each one nds a place beyond
phallic law(s), as well as being anchored by it.
Given that these different positions toward the phallic law of sexual difference are
epistemological interpretations of castration, not biological or anatomical ones, they

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produce different solutions in love. Lacan placed the lack-in-being (/S) on the masculine
side of the graph, under the sexuation tables. First created in the reference to the
potential lack of an organ, imaginary castration () is bolstered by a positive identication with the master signiers (S1 ; ) of prestigious ideals located in the Other. Later, a
man may love a woman sexually insofar as she incarnates the sexual desiderata of his
Ideal, thereby fullling his fantasies, although he may seek a marital alliance at the point
where the womans Fathers Name signier elevates him in the social group.
Reciprocally, a woman will make herself a mans object of desire insofar as his
name (or knowledge) elevates her phallic position in the symbolic. But womans
experience of castrationbeing identied with the unquantiability of a logic of the
same (xx)places the demand for love prior to her demand for sex. Insofar as love
is a mirror-stage construct, it gives a grounding in the reallls the lackprior to
(the oedipal third-term) symbolic-order recognition of place. This puts woman at a
loss in the universal where she encounters the void in the Other (S[]), rather than the
male group gaze of a simulated oneness: xx. Whereas the mans demand for a
worthy Fathers Name is linked to symbolic-order social prestige, the womans primary
demand is for protection from encounters with the real void of loss: S(). Both males
and females inscribe themselves in the phallic function of the symbolic, identifying with
particular master signiers (S1 ) by which they endure the lack of one signier for a
sexual rapport that would unite the sexes in a Oneness of jouissance pregiven in the
Other. Both suffer from this lack, represented by the bar dividing man from woman, the
masculine from the feminine.
In 1925, Freud attributed the castration complex only to boys: A literal fear of
organ loss made them passive. But since such a fear was not strong enough to stop them
from masturbating, Freud sought to understand what would cause an excitation greater
than fear. Bed-wetting was one response to the suppression of masturbation. Such
inventions, Lacan says, are mythical interpretations of child sexual excitement. But
myth, in Lacans terms, does not mean untrue: Myth gives epic form to that which
arises from structure,48 structure nally being for him, in Seminar XX, an equivalent of
the Borromean knot. In Lacans reading of Freud, the Oedipus myth is not a tragedy,
then, but an outcome of the varying fates of desire. The son can enjoy his mother if he
murders his father. Laios must be disposed of in order for Oedipus to enjoy (S. XVII,
p. 139). The Lacanian logic is this: Myth aims at the real, at a point beyond imaginary
oedipal identications. While any symbolic signier can function to represent a real
father who serves as the agent of castration; as the one who introduces the signier no
that causes desire, the result is not obedience to this real father. Rather, fantasy
dominates the entire reality of desire as a desire to exceed law (S. XVII, p. 149). In this
sense, myth articulates something of an impossible enunciation beyond the law (S. XVII,
pp. 143 45). One goes from the impossiblethat which does not stop not writing
itselfof myth, Lacan argues, to the multileveled interactions of structure he denes in
Seminar XX as a strict equivalence of topology with the Borromean knot (p. 2).
Sexual excitement is caused by the primal scene, Freud wrote. At an early age a
child hears its parents copulating and this causes the rst sexual excitation. Freud thus

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stressed an event, not a structural function: Analysis shows us in a shadowy way . . .

how that event may, owing to its after-effects, act as a starting point for the childs
whole sexual development. Masturbation, as well as the two attitudes in the Oedipus
complex [castration anxiety and penis envy] later on become attached to this early
experience, the child having subsequently interpreted its meaning (Some Psychic
Consequences, p. 250).
From a Lacanian perspective, the primal scene could be any memory the child
attaches to the excitement aroused in him or her. It could be a thunder storm or a wild
wind. The point is that it will not correspond to actual knowledge of a sexual scene.
Lacan nds it striking what Freud leaves out here. The real fatherinterdictor of
incestis the castrator, and, as such, is attached to myths in the guise of gods, spirits,
totems, demons, and so on (S. XVII, p. 145). Lacan recasts Freud to say that we dream
of libidinal objects because the particular ones we have lost have already been sexualized
as objects we desire and are, thus, under the mark of interdiction. What we obtain in
desire is pleasurable because it has been forbidden to us (S. XI, pp. 154 55). Likewise,
we desire it because we have been deprived of it.
Subsequently the child interprets its meaning (the meaning of the primal scene),
which Freud describes with the German Eindruck an, meaning to press upon. If one
contextualizes Freuds biological scenario by considering the German word in a Lacanian topological sense, something is placed upon something else to create a third thing
in the interval of an overlapping space. One might wonder what is pressed upon what in
the interstices of the childs interpretation. In the Borromean chain of real, symbolic
and imaginary categories, one might answer that real master signiers or unary traits
point to lost objects that rst linked desire to libido, which is pressed under symbolic
and imaginary associations into the radically repressed real. Desirous rememorations
begin to structure fantasy in reference to the real of excitement that anticipates potential recuperation of lost jouissance.
These three orders intersect and interact in an endless signifying chain of the
associational dits of unconscious memory,

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that most Western thought collapses into the whole agency one calls mind. The idea
of a static mind agency, or even the image of mind as brain hardwiring that obeys
certain rules of language belie its dynamic, interactional, after-the-fact qualities. The
minds various modes follow the libidinal logic(s) of transformation whose structures are those of desire, fantasy, drive, and symptom, not those of generative grammar.
Freud was too careful a thinker to make a universal out of his concept of the
primal scene; thus, it acquires the force of a myth in his work. Since this literal
copulatory scene cannot be said to produce universal trauma, he evoked, instead,
primal phantasies. But Freud could not say in 1923 what caused primal phantasies,
any more than he could determine whether the Oedipus complex invariably follows the
same course, or whether a variety of preliminary stages converge upon the same terminal
situation in the case of the male (The Ego . . . , 1923, p. 22). In 1925, when Freud
turned to the Oedipus complex in girls, having implied that things are not as simple for
males as he had claimed in earlier declarations, he wrote: In little girls the Oedipus
complex raises one problem more than in boys. In both cases the mother is the original
object; and there is no cause for surprise that boys retain that object in the Oedipus
complex. But how does it happen that girls abandon it and instead take their father as
an object? In pursuing this question I have been able to reach some conclusions which
may throw light precisely on the prehistory of the Oedipus relation in girls (Some
Psychic Consequences, p. 251).
But instead of throwing further light on the prehistory of the maternal oedipal
relation in girls, he turns to a discussion of the girls relationship to her father. His
comments do not center on all girls, moreover, but only on certain kinds of women that
psychoanalysts see: The ones who identify primarily with their fathers. This is in
precise contradiction to Freuds discussion of male oedipal issues where he starts with a
generalized concept of males and ends up referring to a great variety of different
preliminary stages.
Little girls want to have a child with their father, Freud says describing this
wishful fantasy as the probable motive force or power (Triebkraft) behind female
infantile masturbation. But beyond this ctionthis biological mythFreud nds
that the Oedipus complex has a long prehistory in girls prior to being recorded in the
language of fantasy. He implies a structure that is described in Lacanian terms as the
two-and-one-half-year developmental period in which a response to the object (a)
establishes a basic grammar of the drives. This occurs in terms of the jouissance(s)
desire seeks via sublimation of the (a) that produces the fantasy (/S <> a) of its own
return.
If one reads the references Freud makes to the theories of sucking, excretion, and
so on, given by an old pediatrician, Lindner, as having the logic of the drives, then,
Freud saw the phantasy as a secondary formation, the primary one being the language
(Lacans la lalangue) of jouissance, if one reads the references he make to the theories of
sucking, excretion, and so on, given by an old pediatrician, Lindner, as having the logic
of the drives. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud linked

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119

masturbation to a discovery of the genital zones as sources of pleasure, a discovery that

arises concomitantly with thumb sucking, said to displace the sensual pleasure of
nursing. Suggesting that later fantasies of fellatio support this notion, Freud, nonetheless, leaves the cause of fantasy an open question. Since he found no scientic support
for attributing any particular psychical content to the rst genital activities, Freud
focused, rather, on the rst step in the phallic phase as causative of fantasy.
Lacan retained Freuds use of the phallischen phase to describe the relation of genital
sexuality to oedipal identications, thus keeping the notion of the phallic (genital) in
connection with the libido; one libido for both sexes. But once he transformed the
meaning of the phallic symbol to a positivized phallic signier (), not referring to a
biological organ, several realities arose: the real of jouissance, a symbolic no to
totalized jouissance, an imaginary separability of body parts. Equating Freuds concept
of the phallic phase with a structurea series that makes order, however minimal
not with a period of time, or a biological developmental reality, Lacan argued that an
infant identies step by step with the imaginary world of images, the symbolic order of
differential distinctions, and the real effects of images and words on the esh we call
the body, which Lacan describes as the remainder of the object (a) (S. XX, p. 6):49

-
a

Lacan argued, then, that Freud did not locate ideal reality only in the sensuality
of organ pleasure (i.e., nursing), but also in identication with a father signier who
could confer on ones being a guarantee of knowledge and worth. Freuds readers who
reduce his theories on neurosis to biological dysfunctions miss what Lacan stressed;
Freuds clinical discovery that certain kinds of women have an idealized attachment to
their fathers, not their mothers, while certain boys do not want to relinquish identication with their mothers. Such attachments suggest that one cause of the dual nature of

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the pleasure principles oscillation between joy and suffering (reality) is a real split in
gender identications (which is not a binary oscillation).
Since, in Lacans context, an unconscious subject of desire is constituted by
identications whose principle referent for both sexes is the phallic signier, one can
say that this signier gives rise to the symbolic-order reality principle, dened as the
distance an infant takes from the corporal real of its mother. The Fathers Name
signier need not be the imaginary daddy of contemporary conceptualization, then.
It can also be a signier such as the outsider, or a river god, rather than the actual
progenitor, or even the mothers brother. The point is that this signier represents the
symbolic order as the effect of difference. Both sexual difference () and distance from
the drives (/S) make the social order possible.
Lacans sexuation graph symbolizes the effect of gender differentiation by the
bar drawn between the symbolic and the real. Among its other meanings, the phallic
symbol () denotes the jouissance derived from real unary identicatory traits (S1 ).
These determine that the reality principle for a person or a group be what they
already think. This justies Lacans description of the reality principle as the corporied signier of language or thought. When the symbolic signier is opposed to the
matheme for the realS ()it governs perception of reality as a semblance. That is,
the symbolic covers over the real, rewriting the oedipal terms of the Fathers Name over
the mothers body.50
From another angle, the governs perception because it reveals that the symbolic order is not complete within itself, that a void place in the reality of language
perforates oneness(es) and unities. Thus, Lacans interpretation of Freuds phallic
phase places the symbolic signications of difference from the mother over the
imaginary collusions of oneness that infants of both sex experience. Yet, the real of the
mothers body is separable from the imaginary or symbolic. Her body is experienced as
a set of partial objects that give rise to the desire for jouissance. Her body is, thus,
received paradoxically. This dual encounter with union and disjunction creates the
infants desire for (re)union with the One that will defer the fragmented realities
introduced into the imaginary by the real. We might read the one here as the phallus
that unites the subject in language ctions. Indeed, this is the formulaFN/MD
MD/? j FN(Other)/(phallus)by which Lacan rst recongured the oedipal complex as a paternal metaphor (cf. Ragland, EPD, ch. 6).51
In a later phase of his teaching, Lacan transformed the identication with a
particular phallic signier in infancy to a broadening of identication with others (ego
ideals) and nally with the sinthome, which he dened as the sublimation of an elaborate
system of thought and beliefs built up around the Fathers Name(s) one takes as a
guarantee of knowledge. The sinthome knots the orders together in a kind of complete
writing where imaginary fantasy and symbolic (desire) are both articulated with the
real. Insofar as the knot gives the truth of the sinthome, the social symptom can be
isolated in what Freud identied as the ideal leader in Group Psychology, and the
Analysis of the Ego (1921).52 Freuds hierarchy of identication goes from the base

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121

primitive disorganization of the ego by lack(/S) that produces the real of fragmentation
(hysteria), to a group collectivity of shared beliefs and idealsego<>ego<>
egoto identication of the group with a leader thought to embody their ideals: /.
Lacan called any leader a symptom of the groups desire to nd closure and certainty in
substituting an imaginary ideal father as an oedipal gure, a concrete image of the
abstract Ur-father who is the, exception to the law of castration (Group Psychology,
p. 105).
At this point, let us summarize several steps in Lacans rereading of Freuds 1925
essay. In trying to ascertain what causes the pleasure principle (/S '
| a), and how it differs
from a reality principle:

S()

Lacan redened the fantasy as that which is not reducible to its imaginary version. This
is so because the Other is castrated and does not want to know anything about it. In the
fundamental fantasy, the subject externalizes him or herself as a real object of the Other;
not of the other. Thus, Lacan did not equate fantasy with subjective thought, but
showed how fantasylike dreamsenters the subjectivity of conscious thought as a
veil over the real of castration. It is not just that fantasy subsumes the partial drives
an object-relations theorybut that the form and material of fantasy show desire as
parental desire that precedes and libidinalizes the infants desire as the Others desire:
S()

The part-object quality of fantasy also veils the creation of an aggressive fragmented
body in the time of mirror-stage identications. Later, the child places imaginary
maskssemblancesover the inadequacy of parental desire to ll the holes.
To say that an object is lost and leaves behind residual traits of its pleasurable (or
traumatic) effects as the basis of thought and behavior does not solve the problem of
how this happens. Miller implies that jouissance itself is strong enough to bind an S to
other S1s in the real of primary identications. We remember, then, Lacans three kinds
of jouissance: the phallic symbolic one (), the imaginary one (), and the real ().
The symbolic word is itself an act, Lacan claimed. The dire (saying) produces traces of
what was said (the dits)that make up ones unconscious knowledge of what one will later
be driven to desire. Yet neither language nor objects-of-desire can become unconscious
thought until alienation and separation have transformed them into a language of
desire spoken in reference to primary partial objects that cause desire and, secondarily,
to oedipal identications.
Lacan claimed that the libido is a substance of constructed meanings, a
montage of the primary and secondary effects of identication with concrete things,

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mixing meaning, sense data, affects, and so on. Libido is a montage of itself, in other
words. The question of how matter becomes mind concerns desire as it engages
jouissance. As linguist Charles Pyle has pointed out, Lacans theory differs from
conventional theories of language that cannot explain markedness (or inscription)
phenomenahow the real is mademuch less their transformation into dreams or
poetry. Theories of historical sameness (language evolution) or historical contact
(borrowing) have tried, but failed. Even though markedness phenomena, as explained
by Charles S. Peirce, according to Pyle, are relations between opposites, they are, nonetheless, related asymmetrically. The Buddhist theory of language-effects also tries to solve
the problem of markedness, built up by their triadic structures similar to Peirces icon,
index, and symbol. Pyle says Peirce argues that the present is rst and the second, past.
While the rst is not marked, a mark would be a sign of the second.53 That the rst
must be marked to count is a paradox not explained by Peirce or Buddhist theories of
language. Lacan explains the mark as a residual remnant of the real of the lost object, the loss causing the desire for its return. And he wrote this effect alternately
as S1S2S3S4 (dires)/S1S2S3S4 (dits), or in an equivalence of being (a) and thinking
(S1jS2 ) as a1 a2 a3 a4 .
If one reads this problem backward, from the Borromean structure, wherein the
nal ordering of structure is real, symbolic, and imaginary, one can say that the rst
union with the object produces a shedding of unary traits that inscribe a marked realorder effect that resurfaces in the symbolic as reminiscence that responds to desire or
drive. The loss binds a trace (S1 )of the object to empty space, thus beginning to form
the holed rims described in Lacans topology of the surface of body and thought.
Lacans trait is inscribed in a paradox, unlike Peirces pat index of secondness. Rather,
the mark denotes an affective trauma or cut whose components reect the real of
(dis)continuity Freud called conict. Lacans early distinction between identifying with
having the phallus or being it turns into identications with the knot that supports one as
being what one thinks one is.
Such identications demonstrate the asymmetrical character of desire as a dialectic between separation loss
loss

S1S2

/S

S1

S2

and alienation

logical operations whose negotiable terms are the real of the object (a) and the S1
(Miller, Le sinthome . . .). When the real returns to the same place, its material content
in language is either that of unary trait(s), or the semblant of a lost object. At the base of
this series, one nds desire as a paradoxical primary and secondary cause precisely
because the object-cause-of-desire is lost, such that inside and outside are contiguous in a
torus of doubleness without edges:

A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay

Drive
H
Fantasy
H
Symptom
H
a

(/S <> D)

(Drive)

(/S <> a)

(Fantasy)

()

(S1j: knot)

123

ja

Desire is a primary and secondary cause because the torus is formed by the simultaneous interplay of having and losing (Fort! Da!) that Jeanne Lafont denes as a rst knot or
twist in the Moebius structure (8) whose hole is surrounded by the edge of a surface.
But the (a) is not identical to itself, thus, it is known only in terms of its effects.
Alienated effects (S1 ) are left over as sublimated drive residue after a lost object sheds
its binding traits. In turn, the effects are inscribed by real in-corp-oration and made
functional via imaginary projection (transference) and symbolic introjection (or the
associative linkages we call memory or thought).
In Lacan, when there is a question of structure, the Borromean knot or unit
serves as a referent, a knot being a torus ( ); that is, a form without an edge is
plunged into a torus of superior dimensions, such as:

Thus, an infants pre-oedipal identication with a primordial maternal real will

include the three Lacanian orders: the eshly real is in-corp-orated in a proximity of
enjoyment and trauma that include the unary traits of the sinthome as a kind of egoenvelope around a fantasmatic body. This body is, in turn, projected or anticipated
both in the imaginary visual eld and in reference to the symbolic signier, which is
introjected as a diacritical or differential element linked to another signier. Insofar as
the fathers no is the referent for the dialectical development of the signier, the
incest taboo is the reality principle of differentiation. One identies away from the
object (a). The residual traits place a libidinal substance (marks of primary jouissance) in the unconscious as fattened knots of combined imaginary and real sense.
This leads Lacan to say, There is no other denition of the signier than the
hole (R.S.I., S XXII, p. 127). That is, sense effects are the constructed signieds or
chimera of the imaginary and symbolic which create, while the holes in the real are
impasses of the unrepresentable. With this theory, the signier/signied binary is

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denitively undone (R.S.I., p. 127). The real enters thought on the slope of the
imaginary body, which is held in place by knots of images, later named by language. In
R. [real] S. [symbolic] I. [imaginary], such an imaginary consistency comes third in
mental development (p. 128), its mathematical structure being that of Freges 0(1+n).
The paternal law of noxxlinks the maternal objects to castration via the
object (a) that translates the real and ek-sists in the symbolic. This transgression at
the heart of any signication places a paradox in the center of prerational being: Law
will always contain its own opposite. The truth it hides is that jouissanceas an
absolutewill always subvert it. Thus, Lacan departs from Freuds view of feminine
sexuality as a secondary formation, placing the feminine real as an a priori shadow or
myth on which the masculine depends: /S '
| a.
In trying to gure out how the mind and body can be mutually supporting or
intertwined logical structures, Freud never got beyond a reduction of complexes to
organ realities. From Freuds many interpretations, Lacan deduced several levels of
castration negation(s) that make asymmetrical logic(s) of male and female thought
(xx;xx) whose epistemologies place the masculine or feminine in different relations to the Other. The masculine identies with a complete Other, while the feminine
identies with an incomplete ther. An hysterica girl who identies chiey with her
fathermay take a masculine or feminine position in sexuality (lover [/S] or beloved
[a]), but she will identify her being largely with the two feminine logics of the impossible
and the contingent. Split in identication between mother and father, she holds the
contingent knowledge that The Woman does not exist, while hanging on to the impossibility of her fathers castration.
These identications distinguish the hysteric from the normative woman who
believes the Other is wholethat is, that The Woman exists. Such belief, paradoxically, means that most women accept the reality views of their local community, based
as it is on the masculine sexual logic: There is a superior knower who gives the laws that
others follow (via castration): xx/xx. She has accepted the sexual difference
Lacan called castration. She chooses phallic postures, deployed in deference to the
Other, whether a male or female is in authority. Unlike her normative sister, the
hysteric sees the fathers lack and hides his castration in an effort to save, at least, the
appearance of his masculine potency. While the hysterics desire (/S) seems to be the
wish to make the Other complete, she sees the Other as incomplete (). Thus, she
places the gap or lack in the place of the agent of discourse: /SjS1 . We remember that
the discourse places are: agent other/truth production (cf. S. XX, pp. 1617 and S.
XVII, p. 106). The hysteric knows what the Other lacks. The (normative) woman in
the masquerade identies with the Other from the S1 in the place of the agent of
speech, who equates knowledge (S2 ) with what the other knows. Thus, she speaks a
master discourse of the all whose adherence to the necessary merely allows for the possible
as a margin of potential divergence from the rules.
While critics of the 1930s and 1940s responded moralistically to Freuds
observations about the psychology of masculine and feminine sexuality, reducing

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125

Freuds deductions to imaginary views of good or bad, right or wrong, Lacans interpretation of Freuds varying theories of the masculine and feminine marked a turning point
described by Miller as ushering in Lacans third period of teaching. In the chapters
God and the Jouissance of The Woman and A Love Letter in Seminar XX, Lacan
retained Freuds radical insight: Sexual difference is not innate, but a symbolic-order
response to the injunction to break the bonds of mirror-stage symbiosis. By rening the
structure of Freuds argument, Lacans sexuation graph crystallizes his own thinking of
over four decades on the implications of the sexual difference. While Lacan is clearly
not the rst to see that the difference is not simply anatomically or biologically
determined, he is the rst to argue that it is symbolized (or not) in an infants
recognition of the lack imposed by the perception of the separability of body parts.
This refers sexual difference to a primordially corporal image (1) on which ones
fantasies of the imaginary phallus will be built.
Sexual difference is determinative, not of sexuality in children, as Freud thought,
but of the structuration of desire in relation to a cut or loss of an image whose rst form
is an experientially, perceptually fragmented body. Subsequent interpretations of the
sexual difference establish the root cause of a subjects position within desire as the
normative concern to please the Other; the neurotics demand that the Other ll the
void by proving love; and the psychotics immutable certainty of being one with the
Other, despite the unbearable anxiety the Other causes for him or her.
Secondly, whatever the orientation of a persons libidinal object choice
homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexualLacans point is that masculinity and femininity are positions within knowledge wherein one (who is not psychotic) thinks he or
she knows it all or does not [know it] all. As such, these categories are irreducible to
gender, although the all is a masculine logic and the not all a feminine one.
Given that masculine or feminine identications arise rst as a symbolic interpretation of a real lack, not as an organ reality per se, organ reality plays its role, rather, in
the real of sexuality and trauma and in the imaginary conception one has of ones body.
Freud wondered why we need to invent fantasmes and Lacan replied that the
fundamental one concerns the place where the subject consists as an object of the Other
(Morel, La difference des sexes, p. 102). Moreover, insofar as the lack-in-being is not
innate, but an interpretation of an abstract third term concerning sexual difference,
it is logical that Lacan remind us that the facts of human psychology cannot be conceived unless one denes the function of the subject as the effect of the signier
(cf. S. XI).
But, how does the subject become the effect of the signier? How do unary
traits (S1 ) bind with jouissance (a)? Lacan answers that the subject is constituted by
two lacks that overlap within the logical vels (vel meaning the place of ) of alienation
and separation (cf. S. XI, p. 43). While alienation is correlated with representations of
the subject, separation names the experience of the cut between the object of satisfaction and its loss. Within the space of the overlap, master signiers (i.e., unary traits)
that are left over from the loss of the object (a) coexist with traces of the object. The

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/S

S1

S1S2

of alienation is complimented by the

Other

of separation. That is, loss of the object from the Other not only does not exist as such,
but cannot even be supposed to exist until traits of the object fall away, thereby,
decompleting the seemingly whole subject and giving birth to basic fantasies: /SJ|a
(S. XX, p. 16).
In symbolic logic, the vel of either/or is called the exclusive vel. One chooses one
thing or the other. Or, one can go to one side or the other, but one always loses one
element by choosing the other. The consequence of this kind of choicenot characteristic of classical logicis the creation of a neither/nor category. When one chooses
the lack (/S), one has neither the pleasure of S1 /unary traits of identication, nor
identication with the Others knowledge S1S2 . That is, in a place where sets of
elements are joined together certain elements seem to have disappeared, although they
continue to ex-sist in the overlapping part. The primordial S1s are what Lacan called
the lost elements of the unconscious (S XI, p. 211). The logic is paradoxical: Priority is
given to consciousness or the second. One can only know rstness (the real) once
secondness (the symbolic) has disappeared. Thus, the operation of alienation or joining
creates the rst apparent lack of evaporatingthe lack of a presence of self while
it also produces language as a covering over of lost knowledge.
Intersection, or product, produces separation that alternates between the Other
and the void (). Indeed, one experiences the effects of the cut that causes this
operation only when the object falls from the Other, showing the face of angst that
decompletion produces as . Thus, Lacans decompleted Other () has a special
relation to proof insofar as only the sudden revelation of the Others not being whole or
complete triggers anxiety. Lacan calls anxiety the pure real that he considers the only
true affect, the only one that does not lie. If one identies with ones jouissance being
(a) in the fantasy, one makes a false choice because a part of being has already been
subtracted or lost (for most people) from the Other by its very constitution. But if one
chooses the Other as the basis of subjecthood, one also makes a false choice insofar as a
part of meaning (S1 ) has already been subtracted as well.
That some part is always already taken away from the object of libidinal being or
the subject of representational meaning, determines that neither one nor the other will ever be
fully denable in its own terms. This double lack marks the subject as divided; never
whole within itself. For Lacan, such a view of the subject places a great importance on
the categories of the masculine or feminine, for not only are they structured according
to the logic of alienation (masculine) and separation (feminine), they also bear the

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weight of linking meaning (S1S2 ) to sexuality (a) via the lost elements of each category,
loss leaving an empty place to be lled.
Although the losses are not symmetrical or correspondent, the object (a) holds
the central place in Lacans Borromean unit, representing alternately the real cause of
desire, the aim of the drive in the symbolic, and the imaginary fantasmatic forms that
ll the lack-in-being. Separation, the second logical operation of the two vels joined by
the object (a),

Thinking

Being

explains the rst operation of alienation concomitant with secondary-process thoughts,

in terms of traits that constitute the particular conditions of jouissance for any person
as a kind of primary process. In this context, Lacan speaks of the incomplete Other ()
on the feminine side of sexuation as the reality principle and the phallic signier of
symbolic anchor () in masculine sexuation as the pleasure principle.
Thus, although the elements of being and meaning belong rst to the Other, they
cannot make their presence known to consciousness directly, but only through the
transformations effected by alienation and separation. The metonymy of desire works
by evocative displacements of the real object (a) to which substitutive metaphor gives
the solid form of meaning (S. XI, p. 213). Insofar as Lacan connects desire to the
metonymy that anchors metaphordisplacement leading to condensationthe objects one seeks for enjoyment belie what one can translate of metonymys form(s).
Ones jouissance of objects makes of fantasy that which covers over the void place in
being (La difference des sexes, p. 100). If desire has the structure of the subject of the
unconscious, taken as a repressed knowledge about jouissance, this suggests that the
phallic law not only prohibits transgression, it also occasions guilt and constitutes a
superego. But, more enigmatically, the incest taboo is causal of phallic prohibitions.
The symbolic Fathers Law makes of castration the paradoxical Ur-paradigm of society, forcing the brothers to invent the myth of an Ur-father in repressed explanation
of the trauma caused by losing the mother to someone else.
Lacans is a radically different theory from those which reduce the masculine and
feminine to oppositional gendered positions. Not only do oedipal interpretations of
the phallic signier show sexual difference as an enigmathereby, traumaticand
castration as its interpretation, these interpretations result in different structurations of
desire, each being the outcome of negotiating two lacksthe symbolic lack of being
whole (castration or alienation) and the real castration of the cut that makes the hole
concrete and, thus, necessary to ll. Marc Darmon writes in Essais sur la Topologie lacanienne
that the necessity of inscriptionreal effects that become causes in the Other
introduces the topological dimension in Lacan in the rst place. That is, the Lacanian

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cut is not a geometrical space separated by a union of circles that do not intersect one
with another.
Rather, Lacan starts with the hole made by the cut of loss to deduce the surface
of the body, and not the inverse.54 In arguing that the hole can be reduced to point zero
dimension, or to the englobing of a sphere, Lacan concludes that the interval between
the hole in the symbolic and the surface of the body is a subject function. It is not the
visible universe that directly causes desire, that is, but the time of desire that animates the
relation between cause and effect. This relation is also animated by the logical time it
takes to understand the hole as an intersubjective space among persons, whose desire
each one tries to fathom or anticipate. Insofar as desire is the desire to have the object
(a), the desire of fulllment, the masculine and feminine nd a way to join within the
particular conditions of jouissance for each, even though the relation of every subject is
rst and foremost to his or her unconscious Other and not to his or her partner.
Lacan dened neurosis as a denial of castration, which means responding to the
Other by demand, not by desire. Unfortunately this places the neurotic within a
repetition of impossible demands made to an Other who knows nothing of the
unconscious denials in play. In perverse fantasy, the sexual difference, while negated in
the unconscious, is nonetheless played out through the paradox of fetishistic replacements for the lost object(s) fantasy seeks. In consequence, the feminine is often clearly
marked by the fetishby stiletto high heels, bound feet, lacy garters, blue velvet, and so
on. And insofar as the signier for difference is foreclosed in psychosis, this subject
retains the illusion that all objects and words are real, not substitute representations of a
veiled object (a) one must continually replace to restore the illusion that nothing has
been lost by the rst cuts of real loss, or later, by the sexual divide.
While Freud nds the sexual difference necessary as a basis for nding harmony
in love and pleasurable sex between the two sexes, Lacan rereads Freuds Totem and Taboo
(1913) as a structural reinterpretation of sexual difference as disharmonious. The
myth of a primal hoarde of sons who murder the father explains sexuation, in part.
Freuds myth sought to nd in the sons jealousy of the father the basis of the
beginnings of cooperative society. Although the myth of the murder of the father is
rendered necessary by the constituent presence of the Oedipus complex in every
personal history,55 the armature of the Freudian edice, Lacan says,and its law, as
wellare, namely, the equivalence . . . of the imaginary function of the phallus in
both sexes . . . the castration complex found as a normative phase of the assumption by
the subject of his own sex. Using the existential quantiers for function (the x), along
with the philosophical symbols for existence () and the universal (), the top portion
of Lacans graph of sexual desire formalizes them so they can be transmitted by the
logic we have examined from the beginning of this chapter. Indeed, this graph marked
an end-point to Lacans second period of teaching.
In the third and fourth periods of his teaching, Lacan used the Borromean knot
as the base unit of meaning in a topological demonstration of the ways mind and body
are joined. The cosimultaneous functioning of all the orders, knotted by the symptom,

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produces three different kinds of jouissance at each point of overlap, different elements
being primary according to the desiring structure (hysteric, obsessional, and so on) a
person has evolved in resolving the oedipal conundrum. Again, Lacan depicts the
masculine and feminine as orientations toward the phallus and castration and not
biological categories. In the certainty of psychosis, for example, the sinthome nds its
equivalent in the necessity that the phallus () function as the law of reality: . In
perverse fantasy, the object (a) eroticizes all knowledge. The conation of mother with
a myth of The Woman who exists knots the orders (R.S.I.) together in the obsessionals
myth. For the hysteric, the Fathers Name signier is equated with the possibility of a

-
a

phallic signier that will make the orders cohere, the identication with the father or
brothers pointing to an imaginary confusion about her own sexuation in the Ideal ego
formation (On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, p.
191).
Lacan argues that the masculine/feminine distinction does not obtain in psychosis, referring to Ida Macalpines study of Schreber and her substitution of the word
unmanning for Freuds use of emasculation (Entmannung) in volume 3 of his Collected Papers, as
well as in the authorized version of his texts, The Standard Edition, he suggests that perhaps
Macalpine had guessed that the real organnot its imaginary representationwas in
question in the castration complex of this subject. Lacan praised her for noticing the
ambiguity in Freuds effort to make equivalents of Verweiblichung, meaning the transformation of becoming a woman that marks Judge Daniel Paul Schrebers delusion, and
what Freud called Schrebers Entmannung (unmanning). But, since Macalpine takes the
confusion to be a terminological one, Lacans says that Macalpine does not really see

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that the ambiguity in question is that of subjective structure itself (On a Question, p.
206).
As is often the case, Lacan looks to the psychotic impasse in sexuation to better
understand how the other structurations of desire function. Insofar as the psychotic
subject encounters a hole in the signifying chain at the point where the symbolic law of
the father appears for others, the sexual difference is not marked for this subject. He or
she may decline from any heritage from which it may legitimately expect the attribution of a penis to his person. This because if being and having are mutually exclusive in
principle, they are confounded, at least as far as the result is concerned, when it is a
question of a lack . . . [a]s one realizes in observing that it is not by being foreclosed to
the penis, but by having to be the phallus [the symbolic parity Madchen = Phallus] that the
patient [Schreber] is doomed to become a woman ( On a Question . . . , pp. 206
207).
Freuds 1925 equation of female manliness with psychosis comes from this
error: By having already established equivalency relations between male identication
with a visible organ and reality, he eschewed philosophical and aesthetic concerns
with representation. In Lacans teaching, most men identify their masculine being (their
machismo) with some semblance of having the imaginary phallus at the unconscious
level where the real of fantasy is the measure of reality. Not only did Freud oppose
fantasy to reality in his 1925 discussion of castration anxiety, he widely missed the
mark of evolving any viable theory of differential distinctions between the masculine or
feminine, taken as different responses to the question of what reality is.
Lacan claried Freuds confusions between neurosis and psychosis by proposing
that if the signier that gives meaning to the sexual difference is foreclosednot
negated or deniedit is not actually the organ qua organ that is at issue. It is, rather, a
failure to evolve a mental idea of what constitutes the reality of ones being for the
Other. Images and language appear as enigmatic to the infant long before they are
interpreted as organs. And so powerful are the effects of language that it creates
imaginary organs by naming them. It then assigns mythic attributes with properties
and values of meaning to their biological functions. As Genevi`eve Morel puts it,
language provoked the phallic symbolwhich cannot exist for [other/nonhuman] animals and which, at its base, polarizes jouissance in such a way as to interdict
the sexual rapport. There is, then, this equation: Sexual nonrapport [is] equivalent to
the phallus.56
On page 235 of his 1925 essay, Freud again concretizes a literal link between
organ reality and mental reality by analogy, not by logic: A girl may refuse to accept
the fact of being castrated, may harden herself in the conviction that she does possess a
penis, and may subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man (p.
253). Lacan argues, rather, that the phallus masks the sexual asymmetry, or nonrapport, even to the point of seemingin the imaginaryto be a sign of reunion
between the sexes (Morel, p. 21).
The psychical consequences of the anatomical distinction have far-reaching

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consequences, Freud writes. If female narcissism is wounded, the girl has an inferiority
complex. Thus, a rst consequence of penis envy is that once the little girl gets over
believing that the lack of a penis is a personal punishment and realizes that it is a
universal occurrence, she, like men, comes to share their contempt for women and in that
respect, if no other, insists on being like a man (p. 253). Despite his attempts to
understand the relation of similarities and differences between the sexes, Freud has been
read as prejudiced against womenand thus dismissed. One can only be surprised by
Lacans view of Freud as having discovered that the representation of difference qua
difference from the same is what accrues high desirability in the social realm. It is not a
separate point from Lacans argument that the privilege of the symbolic lies in its
covering over the traumatic real.
If societythat is, exchange among people, recognition of one anothermight
be dened as the gradual distance one takes from the corporal jouissance of proximity
to the maternal real, such distance would be seen as necessary to an order(ing) of
symbolic material. From this perspective, contempt would be an unconscious phenomenon, an attraction/repulsion that emanates from the pull of the familiar, the tug of the
intimate, the nostalgia for, and fear of, the same. For the tug of the primordial real
the bedrock of us allis the confusion between woman as sexual and woman as
mother. Moreover, the mother is taken as a guarantee of being and celebrated as such, is
essentialized as The Woman in the symbolic by myriad myths and gures. This view of
distance implies a paradox of the real: Eros and Thanatos have a contiguous base. We
want to repeat the familiar, which has the odor of Thanatos, but only the familiar gives
us the comfort of the known, which dovetails with Eros.
In his discussion of the phallic phase, Freud discussed only autoerotic pleasure.
When he returned to the Oedipus complex with its subtle twists and turns, he suggested that the little girls libido takes a new position in the oedipal phase. Masturbation takes on less importance once she unconsciously equates the penis with a child:
With that purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object. Her mother becomes the
object of her jealousy. The girl has turned into a little woman. If I am to credit a single
analytic instance, this new situation can give rise to physical sensations which would
have to be regarded as a premature awakening of the female genital apparatus (p. 256).
Although he errs in considering the source of genital awakening to be the father, at
least, he associates genital awakening with the real father of jouissance, a man who
conveys both sexual desire for the mother and prohibition for the infant.
Genevi`eve Morel points out in her course La difference des sexes (19961997) that
Freuds expression to have the phallus takes on a logical meaning only if one
understands that his references are to the libido (or jouissance) that typies what he
calls the phallic phase. Borrowing Gottlieb Freges propositional function, Lacan
wrote phallic sexual jouissance as (x), x representing the subject as a function of
being sexuated by the signier. Yet, even though it is the signier that sexuates, a
sexuated being is one whose object is the (a), or whatever remains to him or her of the
positive jouissance left over from a maternal (a) [a1a2a3a4a5a6], jouissance that is never

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negated; but is always a plus (pp. 21 and 33). The new element Lacan advanced in
the (x) is the positive function of libido, elevated over all the prior negative functions
of castration. Indeed, which can only be dropped one by one in traversing the fundamental unconscious fantasy (Morel, p. 33).
In one sense, the awakening of the libido is an interpretation of lack made by
both sexes. Thus, Freud might be read as trying to coordinate the phallic signier to
masturbatory jouissance. Lacans rereading of this Freudian approach is to be found in
For a Congress on Feminine Sexuality (1960).57 There, Lacan maintained that postFreudians failed to see that the phallus was, for Freud, a signier, one which permitted
him to order things; especially psychic development (Guiding Remarks . . . , p.
48).
Lacan encouraged his interlocutors to read Freuds Inhibitions, Symptoms and
Anxiety (1926),58 taking account of his order of the symptom. This is the fourth
order of the knot where the fate of the paternal metaphorLacans restructuration of
the Oedipus complexplays itself out in the destiny of a life (Joyce avec Lacan, p. 45):

In Painting, Gerard Wacjman writes: As for real space, its representation supposes
that one will promote, along with the graphs and the schemas, the notion of a picture
which presents sites . . . one could dene as pure real places . . . (The graphic representation of the Borromean knot would, then, be a picture) . . . a picture [being] that which
shows . . . [and] always supposing a knotting of the three [orders] . . . Topology, then,
is not a metaphor. . . . It does not represent the subject. Neither signied or gured. It
presents the structure, the site where the subject emerges as effect (Painting, 143
44).
In 1925, Freud adds that when a little girl gives up her attachment to her
fatherthat is, accepts that he cannot be her husband or the father of her childshe
may return to her masculinity complex and remain xated there. Choosing to identify
with her mother means, in one sense, nding a substitute for Daddy quickly. The sexual
masquerade is a logical dance around the ramications of castration interpreting the
phallic difference. Its history would be that of the stereotypes common to any histor-

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ical, sociological moment. That is, at the level of sexual jouissance, one nds endless
variations of response to a minimal drama: Compulsory heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, wife-swapping parties, menage-`a-trois relations, and so on, rather than
the supposed sexless Victorians of Freuds day. That is, sexual mores are appended to
history as a sequence of events, not to sexual types versus asexual types. The picture
Lacan paints of the normative masquerade concerns, rst and foremost, an avoidance of
the lack-in-being (i.e., castration) in order to please the social Other and win love by
tting in with a given standard of its ideals. This concerns public behavior, not libidinal
pleasure. But it also concerns libidinal pleasure insofar as the normative desire is to
do what pleases the Other.
Both Freud and Lacan imply that most women are not hysterics. But neither does
the norm mean normal. Lacan called it nor-male. Nor can one reduce the feminine to
the performative, sociological power referred to by Foucauldian historical constructivism. Rather, the desire cum power Lacan invoked, is a matter of wantingnot truth,
butlove; wanting to be desired by the Other, thus, wanting to conform.
The later Lacan developed the father signier to distinguish the masculine
from the feminine, thereby equating sexuation with his proposal of 1971 that the
feminine is not all castratednot all under the phallic function. From this he deduced
that one of the consequences of the not all is a feminine doubling of the libido (Morel, p.
171):
j S()
x

The S() means, not only a lack in the Other, but also a jouissance without inscription
or reference (Morel, p. 33). This supplemental enjoyment of the entire body is susceptible of applying to all women (and to some men, such as mystics) precisely because the
phallic identication with law is not all under the law of phallic jouissance.
The pas toute (S []) (not all) placed over the pas tout (xx) in the phallic
function (S. XX, p. 81), means that in feminine sexuation the phallic function is already
not all (pas toute). It is contingent (What ceases not not writing itself ): xx. If a male is
on the feminine side of sexuation, his relation to the phallic function is also contingent,
unbarred by the prohibitive symbolic phallus. But, if he is to be located on the
masculine side, the father must (have) serve(d) as a symbolic castrator, causing subject
division (/S), not acting as the real jouissance phallus (), which eschews castration or
lack. Paradoxically, this paternal interdiction is required to confer a phallic identication on a male (Morel, pp. 17273).
As far as the feminine contingent (xx) relation to the phallus is concerned,
Lacan says the S()the hole and the Otherevoke the real in such a way as to
cause acute suffering beyond the phallus, or ecstatic pleasure, insofar as the feminine
is also identied with and as the object (a) (Morel, p. 173). If she is further beautied as
the imaginary phallus desired in the scopic eldMarilyn Monroe, Grace Kellyshe
is elevated in sublimation.

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We remember that in his sexuation graph, Lacan explained the logic of the
masculine and the feminine, not only as epistemological positions but also as asymmetrical logics (Morel, p. 73). On his graph, for example, he acknowledges four points
of split: A tension in the formulas on the top linexx | xxleads him to place
a gap between the masculine conditions of existence, the necessary and possible and the
feminine ones of the impossible and the contingent. Gilson points out that Lacans feminine
impossible (xx) is based on Freuds article The Taboo of Virginity, where he argued
that men place this taboo on women out of fear that women are different from them.
The taboo is one signifying effort to make them different or Other (Gilson, pp. 167
68). Since the impossible is, by denition, unfeasible, Gilson suggests that it gives way to
the undecidable, which arises from the oppositions of xx qua/Other to xx qua/
object (a) on the feminine side: | a j S(). Gilson also nds a contradiction between
the masculine necessaryxxand the logic of the possible it produces: xx, the
contradiction coming, partly, from the order Lacan places in the masculine quadrant.
Lacan reverses Aristotelian logic by making the particular (xx) both negative and
that which gives rise to the universal (xx) as positive (p. 168). However, Lacan
explained his logic of the possible in Le Sinthome, Letourdit, and . . . Ou pire as concomitant
with recognizing and accepting rules that allow the social to exist.
Lacan said in Seminar XX in a sentence he repeats in Letourdit in Scilicet: What one
says remains forgotten behind what is heard in what is said; this enonce, assertive by its
form, belongs to the modal [logic] of what it emits concerning existence 59 (cf. S. XX,
p. 111).

Lacan stresses that each person is divided by signiers, images, and objects of drive and
desire. These create sexual identications that constitute particular conditions of jouissance. These identications are not random, moreover, but follow a strict modal logic
depending on how one has been xed in the real at the level of the knot, which
functions as the truth of the subjects sinthome. There the structures of desire keep
repeating an identicatory sexual crisis in a persons life or a trauma assumed by
the subject from a beloved (or hated) parent. At a general level, girls identify with a
logic of the impossible (that which does not stop not being written) insofar as they are

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radically in the symbolic order of difference and just as radically out of it, in
the real.
This means that for females there is no exception to the rule of being born a
woman to a woman (the mother) whose own unconscious desire imposes her story of
the trauma caused by the sexual divide. Women are traumatized in one way and men in
another because the split is not natural, but culturally dened. No sexual relation can be
written as a oneness, in this purview; rather, there is a relation of thoughts and feelings
to body parts, fantasies, and images that identify an infant rst with object(s) he or she
desires and, ultimately, with a symbolic posture vis-`a-vis the phallus and castration (S.
XX, p. 59).
To say that boys identify with a logic of difference is equivalent to saying they
identify with the necessary . . . which doesnt stop being written as a reference to the
phallic function (S. XX, p. 59): xx. Morel informs us that Lacan started writing
these sexuation formulas in 1971 in Seminar XX (Morel, p. 45), proposing there that in
sexuation, the phallic function determines how a subject is signied in a culture: //S
(Morel, p. 51). But insofar as femininity means that all are castratedxxnot
one being an exception to this rule, one also confronts two voids: The Woman does not
exist as an essential being for she is not signied in reference to difference, but by
Otherness. Her primary referent is not her place in the symbolic, but the void in the
Other that is imposed by the castrating symbolic order.
The resulting feminine knowledge is that one element is lacking or excluded in
each meaning ensemble each time it is put forth or evoked. Denoting this epistemological turn by the matheme (the barred Other of the not all), Lacan adds that even if one
tried to equate nonidentical elements, a = A, a does not equal A (or 0) because a
heterogeneous elementone which likely differs from itselfhas been introduced by
castration, that is, the sexual difference as cause and effect. A logic of the same would,
thus, be impossible for women since the phallic function gives rise to a logic of not all
(pas toute) under the lawxxbut partly under it. This feminine logic leads to an
identication outside social lawbeyond the phallus. Paradoxically, the logic of the
same characterizesnot women, butthe male group who are universally in thrall to
obeying the rules of the one whose is not castrated and, thus, can make the laws. The
exception is the signier that marks the law of a group as one: xx/xx. Women
can act on the masculine side in the symbolic, or man, on the feminine side, in the real.
The point is simply that the effect of the sexual difference gives rise to the symbolic as a
set of laws (and transgressions) structured by the phallic signier as the referent of
any differential that marks a negation, and so on.
The man loves the object (fetishistically) that elicits his desire: /S|j(a). The
woman loves the evidence(j/the organ fetishized)that the man desires her.
Here, Morel distinguishes the imaginary phallus and the real phallus as the desired
objects (for example, girl, or an organ) from the propositional phallic function (x)
(Morel, p. 47): At the level of knowledge about jouissance, men mistake The Woman

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at the level of sexual essence with their phallus qua organ that desires precisely because
She veils castration for the man. His demands of the veil add up to the particular
conditions of jouissance for himthe ones that will counter the castrating potential in
his desire.
Surprisingly, Freuds conclusions in Some Psychic Consequences are not altogether incompatible with Lacans logic of castration. Responding to Freuds idea that
the Oedipus complex is destroyed in boys by the castration complexthat is, how can
a male compete with other males when he fears their retaliation?Lacan says he bows
to the law of the group, laws, instigated in the name of the leader, exception to the rule
of castration, who is nonetheless a myth. Such acceptance of castration is Lacans
denition of a man. By contrast, Freud says, the fact that girls rival with males in the
Oedipus complex is made possible by, and is led up to by, their undergoing a castration
complex: xx. Freud does not like the castration complex, while Lacan nds it
necessary for becoming a subject and for having a society. In Freuds picture, the
castration complex inhibits and limits masculinity when it leads to the guilt occasioned
by a rigid submission to a tyrannical superego or strong leader. For Freud, this complex
encourages feminine rivalry, or feelings of inferiority. For Lacan, women do not escape
identication with lack and loss, but by not identifying only with the phallus, they are
free both to assume a symbolic identity and to not be all under the thumb of phallic
values: xx. For women, if there is no exception to not being identied with
castration in the realxxthen, paradoxically, there is no universal (i.e., symbolic) castration for womenxxinsofar as the two negatives on the top line
yield a positive on the bottom line.
Put another way, Woman is not signied as such in the unconscious, while man
is signied there by the mark of difference from woman. And although women are not
castrated in reality, they are castrated culturally by masculine signiers that seek to
interpret the sexual difference, and, even more profoundly, by the male confusion
between woman as sexual and mother as asexual. One could also add a third castration
upon which Freud remarked: Woman are also denigrated by their daughters at the
moment of grasping the denigrations surrounding the sexual difference. They want to
identify with a value of difference or symbolic Otherness, rather than the similarities
and samenesses of their mothers. What Lacan stresses in the feminine, as apart from the
masculine, is the asymmetry of the impossibleThere is not one who is noton
the top line leads to different solutions on the bottom line. If for women, there is no
law of exception that gives rise to a leader who valorizes difference, inscribable as
unconscious castration (/S), each woman is, paradoxically, like every other (x) and
discordentiallylike no other (x).
In . . . Ou pire, 66 Lacan concluded that in speech men and women refuse the
sexual distinction based on anatomy, and recognize one another only as speaking
beings by rejecting this [natural anatomical] distinction [replacing it] by identications (Morel, p. 52). The difference plays itself out in the real of jouissance. Freud
nally called the difference between male and female sexual development a psychic

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castration that has been accomplished in the case of the girl and only threatened in the
boys case (p. 257). From the start of his teaching, Lacan rejected Freuds idea of a
female castration complex, arguing that never having had the organ in question, girls
have never had the fear of losing it. One can speak of the castration complex for both
sexes, he argues, only in the sense of a lack of their being One:
z

M
x
W
No rapport also means no androgyny. Not only does no organ signify what constitutes
a relationship between man and woman, the logic of choicealienation and separation
forces one to choose between one or the other, however much one vascillates between
the two. In gender politics this means that one is never both/and of the two sexes.
One is at any given time only ever either/or. Other signiers supplement this
impossible gap in meaning, signiers that belong to the imaginary realm of semblance,
the symbolic realm of narrative, and the real domain of fantasy and unary traits.
In his seminar on Hamlet (195859) Lacan described the phallus as a signier
that could supplement the lack of a signier to mark a relation between the sexes.60
Proposing that the feminine form of love is erotomanic and the masculine form
fetishistic, Lacan depicted the masculine subject as loving his partner insofar as the
signier of the phallus constitutes her [for him] as giving in love what she does not
have (Lacan, The signication . . . , p. 290). In other words, what she lacks is what
she has to give. Her particular lack enables him to take her as the phallic object that
will ll his own lack-in-being (/S|j a). As early as the 1950s, Lacan emphasized
this point: The lack in question is not the lack of a penis, but the particular lack-inbeing that marks the feminine partners demand for love and a particular mans desire
for this demand. In a more general sense, insofar as the male confuses having the penis
(the real organ) with being the phallusthat is, an object of desirethe partners lack
assures him of being the phallus. Insofar as he is loved and desired, such assurance
gives him the gift of having the penis.
Girls encounter a different problem from boys in regard to the phallus. While
both sexes relate indirectly to the phallus through the mother for whom the father (or
his substitute) represents the phallus, the boy is invited to identify with his father by the
symbolic, while the girl is not. In Le desir au feminin, Sol Aparicio stresses the structural
logic of the feminine by looking at the different words Freud used when grappling with
varying nuances of the sexual asymmetry in the constitution of feminine sexuality. At a
level of infantile precocity, some little girls want what little boys havethe penisnot
because it has any innate superiority, but because boys display it manifestly in the
seeming fullness of the imaginary, where a visible image is often mistaken for das Ding.

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Aparicio writes that little girls explain away that seemingly important difference by
substituting other things, a bicycle, a baby sister, a new doll, and so on. In describing
such a phenomenon, Freud used the word Penisneid. In tracking the little girls love as she
becomes increasingly attached to her father, Freud speaks of Peniswunsch and Wunsch nach
dem Penis (Aparicio, 1993).61
Lacan lets us see that the valorization of the male, in any context, marks symbolic
difference over the real of the drives, associated, as they are, with sameness or intimacy.
Difference starts the count of value itself. Lacan points out in . . . Ou pire that the
mathematical operation between zero and one is not demonstrable by a diagonal
method that depends on the decimal (Gilson, pp. 21617). Thus, he focused on the
logic of Freges discovery that O grounds one and implies something more: O(1+n).
When he emphasized in his Hamlet seminar that one is sexuatedas masculine or
femininebut also castrated () insofar as one has or does not have the attributes desired by a given symbolic order, it is the logic of excess or jouissance he is
depicting, not that of organs. The compensations for the installation of a lackin-being are the remainders of jouissance each subject accrues from the object (a),
whose status is real insofar as it is the metaphor of the subject of jouissance.
That is, an object must falllike an averted gaze or a verbal slightin order that it
be subjectivized (Gilson, p. 101). The jouissance(s) an object leaves behind as associations with the breast, gaze, voice, feces, oscillate in fantasy between the body and the
word, translating themselves into a seeming copula of union Lacan called the phallic
mask.
Given the paradox that loss and supplemental jouissance are primary in the
constitution of being, Lacan argued that Aristotle was deceived by envisaging logic as
based on grammar and language (Morel, p. 21). Rather, the sexual masquerade emanates from loss, lack, splits, and divisions, as well as from the comings and goings of
jouissance. And these subtend grammar and language as positive data, evoking disguise,
deception, and comedynot information or communicationwith the effect of irrealizing the relations between subjects and between the sexes. Would-be relations
are linked, rather, to fantasmatic notions of ones body and the phallus (Morel,
p. 22).
Unlike boys, a girl is required to give up her identication with being the phallus,
to give up the father, if she wishes to nd a man to whom she can give herself sexually.
Pierre Naveau capsulates this dilemna in La Querelle du Phallus, as female grief that
mourns the loss of the phallus by stressing that it does not concern an organ. Mourning
the loss of the phallus refers to a little girls feeling that she must nd a man other than
her father because, although he loves her, he has dropped her. He makes love to
someone else.62 Lacan tries to show (monstrates [demonstrates]) what Freud could
not enunciate: The problem in the constitution of male or female sexuality is not the
organ qua organ, but the dialectic of desire.
In Some Psychical Consequences Freud concluded that the Oedipus complex

A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay

139

differs from the castration complex. Decades later, Lacan sought to validate the
importance Freud gave the Oedipus complex by showing how its resolution (or not)
structures the destiny of each human subject in an interplay between desire and lack.
The Oedipus complex and the castration complex are intertwined, Freud argued.
Indeed, the castration threat causes the Oedipus complex to be smashed to bits for
boys, its libidinal cathexes . . . abandoned, desexualized and in part sublimated; its
objects . . . incorporated into the ego, where they form the nucleus of the super-ego
(Some Psychical . . . , p. 257) that replaces the Oedipus complex. Nonetheless, the
penis escapes superego dicta and continues to be cathected narcissistically. Following
the biological explanations of his day, Freud agreed with Sandor Ferenczi (1924) that
the boys investment in his penis has an organic signicance (organischen Bedeutung) for
the propagation of the species.63
Lacans logic of sexuation seeks to demonstrate how archaic are Freuds imaginary biological explanations. Insofar as biology works positivistically to delimit two
precise classes which it then constructs empirically, at the level of logic, Freuds theory
does not differ from Aristotles classicatory logic, be it the Viennese doctors biology
is destiny argument, the more recent right brain/left brain distinction, the hormone/
steroid-causal argument, or evolutionary theory described by Theodore Roszak as a
macho science that leads to bizarre ctions like the selsh gene or cannibal-cell
galaxies.64 All accept the imaginary proposition of reducing sexuality to gender.
Biological organs are presumed to know, a priori, and naturally how to function in
order to propagate the species, be it as organ, gene, hormone, selection of the
ttest, or intuition.
Lacan demonstrates an entirely different kind of knowledge caused by the sexual
difference, one based on narcissistic identicatory investments that have nothing to do
with the reproductive function of organs. While Aristotelian logic relies on the attributes of ten categories (substance, quantity, quality, etc.) to describe classes, not until
the nineteenth century did a major cut in knowledge appear: the introduction of
modern logic on which Lacan depended to formulate his theories.
Postulating an ideal, a resolved Oedipus complex, Freud praised the superego
replacement of the Oedipus complex in males, explaining the male narcissistic investment in his penis as necessary to the survival of the species. But in the same sentence,
Freud changes tone, referring rather, to the catastrophe [done] to the Oedipus complex
(the abandonment of incest and the institution of conscience and morality) [which]
may be regarded as a victory of the race over the individual (p. 257). If the boys
abandonment of sexual desire for his mother and sister(s) is a victory for the
human race, Freud seems to have assessed the incest taboo as the sacrice of libido
required to maintain society via difference and exchange, via exogamy. In the next sentence he implies that neurosis [i.e., hypersensitivity] [arises out of this forced
separation] . . . based [as it is] upon a struggle of the ego against the demands of the
sexual function: The ego bears the burden of mediating between the superego

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and the id. Surprisingly, Freud denes neurosis, here, as the persistence of sexual
desire.
Lacan gives another denition: The mental (the minds language) or psychic
suffering that Freud called neurosis comes from identifying predominantly with the
split in gender in hysteria (/S) and from substituting knowledge (S2 ) for the phallus in
obsession. By denying the castration that gives rise to the sexual masquerade of the
norm, neurosis, paradoxically, obviates the envy of the opposite sex Freud ascribed
to a normative oedipal resolution.
Genevi`eve Morel argues that no one could even think the concept of gender,
except in terms of binary oppositions, until three nineteenth-century logicians developed the basis for modern logic by ungluing grammar from its attributions, even to
the point of showing grammar to be a mask for a more fundamental proposition: The
propositional function. To introduce the phallic function as a proposition, Lacan referred
to the work done by Morgan in 1846, George Boole in 1854, and Gottleib Frege in
1879. Although Lacan hypothesized that the abstract effect of difference is the thirdterm referent of sexual division: /a, his thesis is that the subject as such nonetheless, is
empty (/S) and, thus, must cover him or herself with language and image attributes that
are never completely identical with his or her being in jouissance. Even gender, then,
is simply a conglomerate of attributes or signiers, not a biological fact. Modern logic
is derived from this fact: What is written or inscribed in differential references differs
from what is said (Morel, p. 21).
Freud argued that boys overcome the Oedipus complex by evolving into morally
correct citizens, whereas girls have no motive for overcoming the complex. Castration
fear causes the Oedipus complex in boys at a literal level of organ reality, but since girls,
are, in his view, already castrated, they have no real motive for escaping this complex. It
may be slowly abandoned or dealt with by repression [durch Verdrangung erledigt werden], or
its effects may persist far into womens normal [adult] mental life (p. 237).
Focusing, rather, on a new logical idea of the writing of the concept, Lacan
followed Freges text from 1879, die Begriff Schrift (The Concept of Writing). Lacan refused
both familiar translations of the term as ideograph or writing, in favor of a new
way of thinking about memory or wish displacement. Insisting that the signier, since
Saussure, has been characterized by the fact of always being different from itselfI
am doing thismeans something else two minutes later, even though one uses the
same words. He stressed that in this sense, it is not the same or identical I in question,
or the same this. Saussure discovered that the signier opposes itself to itself: a a.
But while the signier depends on context, the letter is different from it. Aware of this,
Frege opposed his logic to Aristotles, who thought of Language as sufcient to itself
(Morel, p. 30). An immobile, constant, invariable function is something different from
Aristotles static prime mover, said Frege, and wrote it as: (Morel, p. 31).
In borrowing the capital phi from Frege, Lacan proposed sexual phallic enjoyment as the hypothesis of a propositional function, and the consequence as a further
argument (Morel, p. 33):

A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay

()

141

(+) Enjoyment is the signified

of jouissance
() Castration is its
signifier

In this way of thinking, language can never directly describe an organ, as Freud thought.
Language can only ever describe the interpretations of an enjoyment as linked to
thoughts about an organ. These thoughts have xed values in fantasy, only insofar as
there is sexual difference. Otherwise, one is enmeshed in a psychotics chaotic delusional system where there is neither difference, distance, or perspective. While difference
marks the masculine imaginarily, sameness is equated with (feminine) intimacy and
onenesswith being connected. This is because the feminine overlap of motherhood
and sexuality has interpreted The Woman who does not exist as a whole essence.
Paradoxically, Woman can be seen as whole only insofar as she is represented as a
semblant of the object (a) that lls the real hole of the void (), the incomplete Other.
In 1925, Freuds thesis was that since women do not have to resolve the Oedipus
complex, they have a weaker superego than men: Their super-ego is never so inexorable, so impersonal, so independent of its emotional origins as we require it to be in
men. Character-traits which critics of every epoch have brought up against women
that they show less sense of justice than men, that they are less ready to submit to the
great exigencies of life, that they are more often inuenced in their judgments by
feelings of affection or hostilityall these would be amply accounted for by the
modication in the formation of their super-ego which we have inferred above (pp.
25758).
Lacan interprets Freuds ideas here thus: In identifying with the proposition of
difference itself (), males (heterosexual or homosexual) identify predominantly on
the masculine side, equating their thoughts with the reality of a particular symbolic
order set of mores such that their certainties have a superego rectitude. In identifying
with a jouissance point beyond superego or symbolic injunctionsxxwomen
show less rigidity and greater tolerance and exibility than men, precisely because
complete identication with the phallic rule is not required of them: xx/S().
Rather than make of this phenomenon a relational feminine essence, Lacan depicts it
as a subjective logic beyond the phallus, with ramications for feminine jouissance
and epistemology.
We have seen that, in his sexuation graph, Lacan returns to Aristotle not Freud
to construct a new logical picture of existence, considered via universals and exceptions:
masculine and feminine superegos are formed as different kinds of relations to the
phallic signier. Insofar as a man identies with the Ur-father, exception to the law,
who, paradoxically, gives laws their basis, his relationship to the reality of a particular
symbolic is a resolved Oedipus complexthat is, a normative identication with a

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cultural superegowhere every one is under the phallic function (x x) of pleasing

the Other.
Woman, by contrast, does not nd her identication culturally afrmed by the
law of the signier, except insofar as she is interested in the stake she has in the symbolic
camp:
M

S()
The Woman

Given that there is no universal covering of her existence as woman from the position of
mother (Encore, p. 94), women are thrown into this existential dilemma: There is no Urmother exception who gives rise to the existence of women as a clan or group who
identify with an Ur-mother they have overthrown. Insofar as every woman is a mother,
or was born of one, the mother is already a signier in the symbolic. Thus, the problem
of Womans existence relies on a double negative (an impossibility in classical logic).
There is no exceptionno woman qua woman alonein whose name social law is
pronounced as a symbolic-order (local) universal, although there are gures and myths
of such women in literature and in history.
In Lacans logic, one of the names of the Father is Woman insofar as she
signies difference at the level where myth copes with inexpressible facts of the real,
such as birth, eros, death, kinship perpetuity.65 Thus, all women are under the law of
there being no individual womanlike God or Buddha or Mohammedin whose
name a social order can be founded. There is, rather, the generic category of mother.
The reason the signier mother does not solve the problem of womans existence, is
that law itself is established on the basis of the logic of difference, difference not only of
the brother from the (Ur-)father, but of males from females. Thus, a male is, by
denition asymmetrically opposed to the impossibility of oneness or sameness. Sameness cannot give the basis of law anyway, insofar as the one is a grounding base whose
negative referent is O: O(1+n).
Having warned against the feminist view of women as completely equal to
that is, the same asmen, Freud says that most men, nonetheless, are far behind the
ideal. Moreover, sexually speaking, all individuals are bisexual, making of pure masculinity and femininity . . . theoretical constructions of uncertain content (Some
Psychical Consequences . . . p. 258). It is not a great leap from Freuds conclusion
here in 1925 to Lacans statement in Encore (19721973) that men and women are
signiers (p. 34) whose attributes are given them on the bias of language, a bias on
which they must continually identify as either one or the other.

5
The Place of the Mother in Lacanian Analysis
Lacans Theory of the Object, or Castration Rethought

Lacans Theory of Sexuation as It Relates to Gender Identity

In Freuds Little Hans Case (1909), two particular relations of Hans to the object
his fetishization of the object and his phobic experience of itbring his father to
Freud. Lacan interprets Freuds case in Le seminaire, livre IV (19561957): La relation
dobjet,1 arguing that by dismissing the theory of a castration complex, as analysts have
often done since Freuds day, impasses in Freuds work have remained unsolved.
Moreover, the nugget of truth buried precisely at the point of an impasse has, unfortunately, been thrown out as well.
Before taking account of what is new in Lacans rereading of the Little Hans
case, let us look at some of his ideas regarding the end of the pre-oedipal period, the
moment when any small child is rst presented with the challenge of assuming a sense
of being or identity in terms of gender. Although contemporary feminist theories, as
well as the American clinic of psychoanalytic psychology, conate the two terms, saying
gender identity, Lacan used the word sexuation to argue that childhood interpretations
of the sexual difference as lack, in relation to the phallus, structure mind in normative, neurotic, perverse, or psychotic epistemologies of desire. Rather than a binary
either/or, Lacans sexuation means that castration structures mind out of an interpretation of sexual difference, not the reverse.
While the American clinic of gender identity writes of causality as oppositionaleither a biological, psychological, or sociological base to gender identity 2
Lacans theory obviates any binary as explanatory of cause. There is no mind versus
affect, or body versus mind, or society versus a developmental essentialism. Indeed, Lacans
enterprise might be described as his carrying forth Freuds efforts to elaborate an
adequate theory of mind as tied to sexuality. Lacan taught that what we call mind or
thought or reason is, rather, the way an individuals language negotiates the real of his or
her desire which, moreover, is inseparable from the (partial) drives. And both drives
and desire materialize language with a real portion of affectwith jouissancewhich

143

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emanates, in the second period of Lacans teaching, from a fundamentally unconscious

fantasywhich he describes as sexuality in function.3
Lacans notion of a contrapuntal unconscious knowledge, interwoven with conscious knowledge and speech, has little in common with Freuds idea of a hidden,
instinctual combustion chamber, or Jungs notion of the shimmering underside of a
dream world of symbols and shadows. Lacan argues, rather, in the last period of his
teaching, that the unconscious is the impossible to know, which is what one constructs
with language, in other words, it is a swindle. The association of ideas is the delivery to
the little happiness4 which subtends the cognitive components of ones being-forthought. The mental and the affective are cojoined, as in the contiguity of a Moebus
band (8), making identity a totalizing imaginary concept whose multiple components,
enigmatically arranged in a continuous movement of points at the surface of thought,
are much more complex than any binary feedback paradigm would let one think.
This is a new turn in thinking about gender identity and its link to sexuality in
that it obviates the age-old opposition between biological sexualitywhose bases are
found in affect or feelingand identity, which has generally been seen as a mental
construct. Moreover, such a view retains the mind/body split so central to Anglophone
theories. Instead, Lacans theory draws attention to the particularity of desire and
fantasyand, henceforth, of symptomsrather than to object relations wherein
gender identity holistically conates sexuality and sexual object choice. Adding the
symptom as the fourth order constructive of the mind/body jointhe order of the
knot that ties together the real, symbolic, and imaginaryin 1975 and 1976,5 Lacan
argued that each person is a symptom of his or her shaping in the oedipal trajectory.
We remember that the Oedipus complex was recast by Lacan as early as 1938 in
Les complexes familiaux where he presented complexes as concrete constellations of familiar images.6 He recast the notion of a complex again in his rst theory of the paternal
metaphor advanced in the 1950s. There, it meant the unconscious part of the mothers
desire, referring itself to the signier for a Fathers Name, whose signied is the sexual
difference itself taken as a third term.7 Later, in the third period of his teaching, Lacan
stressed the specicity of signiers and identications that make up each persons symptomatology. This path of inquiry led him to borrow the French medieval spelling of
sinthome to focus on the particularity of the unconscious knots of words/images/affects
that constitute each subject as subject of and xated to singular desire whose real
associations are myriad and nonlinear.
In Lacans theory, one sees the dawn of the oedipal unconscious nexus as a secondary
formation, erected in the assumption of sexuation. Thus, rather than focus, as did
Freud, on identication with the same-sex or opposite-sex parent, with attendant
feelings of jealous rivalry, Lacan points out that the encounter with difference, which is
rst experienced as sexual difference, gives rise to a differential, symbolic order axis he
calls a phallic orientation. Identications are ordered in reference to this pivotal
signier for difference in a dialectic that oscillates between law and jouissance. Although reied imaginarily in relations with others, in Lacans reformulations, drive

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145

affects, signiers, and images coalesce in xations (xions/ctions) of being he called an

unconscious Ideal ego formationwhich is, surprisingly, a symbolic structure. Repetitions create such xations as the guarantee of imaginary ego stability. Such stability
serves as a defense against the concrete losses whose effects on being go from slight
worry or doubt to acute anxiety. In Lacans theory, the Ideal ego, although acted out
narcissistically on the imaginary axis of relations with others, is, nonetheless, formed
from symbolic identications with the outside world imposed on the biological organism. But how would Lacans theory constitute an advance over the idea of gender
identity, taken as a selection of masculine and feminine identications and resulting in
the choice of a bisexual or a heterosexual or homosexual partner?
To answer the question just posed, one would need to understand that Lacans is
a clinically based theory of logical, even semiuniversal, structures, not a predetermined
theory wherein persons operate good or bad effects. Rather than focus on a good or bad
(totalized) mother, his insistence is, for example, on the importance of the phallic third
term, or the signier for the Fathers Name that create an obstacle to Oneness. This
imposes the necessity of achieving a distance from the maternal objects that rst caused
desire in order that the infant develop the capacity to defend against the overpowering
force of the real of incestuous drive identications and trauma. He maintains that the
series of pre-oedipal identicatory introjects or unary traits constitutive of being
which always includes something real of the living organismare an intersection of
imaginary transferential material (on the o/o narcissistic axis of the Schema L) with the
symbolic order of language (on the Other/subject axis).8 Lacan showed the interweaving
of mind and body out of the buildup of imaginary and symbolic material that links and
overlaps to form elementary signifying chains. These, in turn, become the particular
knots or sinthomes that join meaning to being and body in the energetic eld of the
partial drives Lacan called oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory (S. XI, The Four Fundamental
Concepts, chapters 13 and 14).
In this topological picture, the Ideal ego formation is built up element by
element, moment by moment, out of pieces of the concrete world. These ever-accreting
signifying units reproduce themselves as Borromean knots that are the links of body to
language. Their referents are the object (a) as lost, or the other of oedipal identication
as absent. The multiple-layered associational memory bank we call mind, self, identity, or
imagination is formed in this way. The real is that part of the mind which ex-sists just
beyond the graspable meaning of precise images, signifying words, or desired objects.
Another way to describe the real is as the particular Other, or unconscious, one equates
with ones true feelings, or with the interior or inside of ones being.
Lacan argued, moreover, in Seminar XX that the assumption of beingor the
coalescence of the symbolic and imaginary in the Ideal ego unconscious formationas
preponderantly masculine or feminine makes of an identicatory position an epistemological one as well.9 And although any persons identication with masculine or
feminine signiers and images necessarily implies an identication with both, Lacan does
not take that to mean that identity or being is bisexual, either inherently or construc-

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tively. Since masculine or feminine concern different positions taken vis-`a-vis lackas
lover or beloved; not sexuality per se, there is approchement as well as non-rapport.
What, then, links jouissance to masculine or feminine knowledge? The answer Lacan
gives refers to the particular jouissance traits that elicit love. Their early foundations lie
in ones resolutions (identications) of the oedipal matrix.
Rather than resort to arbitrary agents such as chemistry or kismet, Lacan
speaks of concrete conditions that evoke identicatory unary traits (S1 ). This distinguishes them from the imaginary love one has for movie-star stereotypes, placing
them, rather, in the lineage of ones own family. Indeed, this is the opposite of the
theory that says opposites attract in love.
In linking the masculine to the feminine with Freuds notions of active and
passive, such that active characterizes the position of the lover found on the masculine
side in sexuation, Lacan depicts a paradoxical active since it depends on the lovers
being lacking, wanting. While passive marks the place of the beloved on the feminine
side of sexuation, again, there is a paradox, for the feminine assumes the garb of a
seductive object, thus manifesting action, activity. As such, active and passive are
sexual and epistemological, as well as interchangeable, stances. They arise out of the fact
that sexuation is taken on in reference to a tertiary oedipal structure wherein active
and passive dene castration as well as desire. Although we know that by oedipal
Lacan did not mean, as did Freud, that the child wants to have sexual relations with its
opposite-sex (oedipal) parent, we also know that both sexes are sexually drawn to the
(pre-oedipal) mother. Since sexual feelings mark any subjects relation to the object
(a)goal of the driveswithin the family, the reality of sexual feelings is not Lacans
point.
At the point where identityand its masculine or feminine forms in sexuationcomes into play, one confronts the particular fantasy that marks subject identity as
necessarily sexualized, not only in terms of the jouissance satised in the drives, but also
in terms of that which cuts into jouissance, forbidding it. Lacan calls this the fourth
order, where the subject is the sinthome of his or her relation to the object (a)cause of
desireat the point where the Fathers Name signier has placed a prohibition. Its
effect is that of knotting a residue of jouissance to language and images. Lacan learned
this, empirically speaking, in his work with psychotic patients who lacked this prohibitory knot.10 Lacans insistence that most infants take on the images and signiers of
fundamental fantasy, not only in reference to the two sexes of their universe, but in an
asymmetrical way, allowed him to advance a new analytic theory of the mothers role in
the construction of her childs drives. In The Seminar IV, he maintains that identifying
with the mother connotes an identication with the drives in the real; with the gifts of
love she prefers in the symbolic; and with the images of Woman she projects in the
imaginary.
One might think Lacans theory here is similar to Nancy Chodorows or Carol
Gilligans.11 Unlike Chodorow or Gilligan, however, Lacans theory posits mother plus

The Place of the Mother in Lacanian Analysis

147

father, a structure of the masculine (and feminine) wherein the masculine means that the
logic (of difference itself ) creates a given symbolic content that takes itself as all there is
to know or be. That is, a wholistic identication with an historical symbolic moments
set of conventions is taken as reality. The feminine, by contrast, is constituted by a logic
of not [being] all enslaved within a symbolic order. A woman is tethered to the real
wherein the same is not identical to itself, while a man is anchored by the symbolic that
exists only to dene differences. Consequently, any woman has the right to emotional
excessthrough tears, laughter, gossip, religious fervoras dened by her symbolic
context.
Lacan, unlike Freud, does not link the logic of the masculine or feminine to the
distinction between the biological sexes. Although Lacan retains the logic Freud was
trying to get at in speaking of the male as the standard or norm, Lacan stresses the
valorization of difference as castration to explain why a masculine identied subject
would speak a master discourse. The answer is for the purpose of closing up gaps or
silencing questions. Having the penis does not mean being the representative of the
largest number of people who are standard, or in some way, superior or preferable,
Lacan reiterated. But knowing the answers does. In separating the master discourse
from the analysts, Lacan showed that Freudian psychological arguments actually
replicate the errors made by the imaginary master insofar as he or she appeals to the
realm of the immediately visible, which seems full and adequate to itself, even seeming
to be itself. Imaginary delinations between the masculine and feminine clearly make up
the multicultural history of how the sexual difference has been variously represented in
a given society.
Lacan, unlike Chodorow or Gilligan, is neither sociological or psychological.
Whereas psychological and sociological refashioning of the terms of the masculine and
the feminine take the sexual differences as created by silly mistakes, susceptible to easy
restructuring by modication of the language and role models given an infant, Lacan
was struck by the persistence of an early xity of the ideas underlying any behavior
once they are the language bedrock from which unconscious associative memories are
drawn, from la lalangue. Lacans theory would not claim that sociological modications
of gender constructs do not occur. The symbolic order continually restructures its
denitions of the masculine and feminine. Rather, Lacan measured the difculty of
changing ones sinthomes given the impasses that make up the order of the real. Meanings
that are unsymbolized in conscious thought ex-sist in the real and contain information
precisely about the trauma of taking on sexuated being in reference to a sexual difference that is neither inherent or natural.
Lacans point does not concern role behavior or sexual object preference, then.
His is, rather, a bare-bones argument about the causes of individual suffering that
transcend the moral prescriptions of cultural or subjective realities of a given historical
moment. Whatever her personal identications or sexual preferences, the girl, as an
anatomical female, will be dened by the symbolic and imaginary as not being all within the

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order of the symbolic that marks the male as male (symbolic/patriarchal) precisely
because he is not female. Being in the symbolic means differing from the rst Other,
the mother. These rst imposed descriptions will become a part of the Ideal ego. Even
if the girl is told from birth on that there is no difference between her and a boy at the
level of aspiration, brains, professional future, and so on, it will be her mothers
unconscious desire regarding the phallusthe difference qua differencethat determines the content of that daughters Ideal ego, not the conscious politically correct
language of the childs symbolic order, or her mothers.12
As one works with Lacans dense teaching, it becomes clear that his is not a
biological essentialist argument, as many feminists have believed.13 One could even say
that Lacans implicit theory that the sexual difference is the basis for all subsequent
differential judgments has been confused with Freuds misogynist view of women that
argues that biology is destiny and, thereby, militates against any equality of the sexes in
the many spheres of human potential. Lacans point is, rather, that the symbolic and
imaginary orders arise as interpretations of a forced awareness of a difference that exists
at the level of the body. He inadvertently, although logically, connects Freuds theory of
psychic trauma to his own mirror-stage moment in which thought rst becomes
coextensive with the body. He argues that taking cognizance of the sexual difference is
experienced by a young child as traumaticparticularly for the malesince both
sexes identify rst with the mother.
Along with the myriad cuts of separation, the oedipal identity cut is the basic
one on which an order of the real is constructed as a knowledge of contradictions and
paradoxes that, nonetheless, remain truth-functional at the level of repressed meaning.14 If the real of esh links imaginary body to symbolic language via extremes of
affect, then the real will be avoided and covered over at all costs. Since the fate of the
anatomical male is to identify as being all within in an order of the symbolic Others
power, he experiences a paradox. This group dynamic denies the castration attendant
upon his recognition that girlsand ultimately his motherare Other to himself.
Lacan calls these structurations of sexuation masculine and feminine to stress that their
causation is not biological. That is, as soon as the biological level is interpreted, it is
mentally represented. But insofar as representations can never completely cover over the
real cuts of separation and the attendant desire for completion, one cannot call Lacan
an idealist thinker.
To emphasize this, Lacan removes the value-laden meanings of virile and active,
versus subtle and passive, that Freud had ascribed to the terms masculine and feminine.
Opting for lover and beloved, Lacan places these terms within a moebian transformational conguration, not a binary oppositional one. That is, such traits are on opposite
sides of a surface, ever moving toward the twist in the center of the band, and all the
while oscillating between two poles. Sexuationthat is, masculine and feminine
traitssubtend all identicatory structurations of desire: In the (oedipal) sexual masquerade Lacan calls normative, the split between the sexes. (Castration) is accepted

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as a regulatory axis for social relations. In the neuroses, the split between the masculine
and feminine is denied, thus causing neurotic suffering. This is not to say the normative
subject does not suffer. One could argue that normative suffering often takes the
shape of somatic symptoms. The point is that such suffering comes from a different
placement of the lacks and splits that characterize obsession and hysteria, (the neuroses) in their denial that the sexual difference makes a difference. While the denial can
be proved true in the symbolic, it remains, nonetheless, as a residual weight in the real
that appears in the imaginary as an inert burden.
Insofar as the psychotic subject identies as being One with the primordial
mother, as such, he or she is not psychically marked by the difference of sexuation, with
its implicit loss or lack of the other gender. Lacan stressed not only the psychotics
fantasy Oneness with the primordial mother, but also the lack of an inscription for loss
of the object in the real. Paradoxically, Lacan nds a whole ego only in psychosis, even
if that ego has reorganized itself into a delusory construct such as Schrebers wife of
God. In his discussion of the Schreber case, Lacan elaborated his Schema I to describe
the psychotics jouissance as transsexualist insofar as this subject experiences himself or
herself as one with the other of address, be it a woman or a man.15 By transsexualist
jouissance, I understand Lacan to mean that the subject experiences himself or herself as
one with woman qua mother (Subversion, Schema I, Ecrits, p. 202).
In the sexuation of nonpsychotic subjects, the mother-object is lost detail by
detailthe breast, the voice, the gaze: That is what Lacan means by The [essential]
Woman does not exist (S. XX, ch. 7). And these losses are interpreted by signiers that
build up a system of dialectical reasoning based on lack (or doubt); /S/S1 j S2 . In his
third theory of psychosis, Lacan implies that the object can be partially lost, but that
this loss is not dialecticized in thought. Thus, James Joyce, for example, uses a reied,
puried form of the voice to ll the void place in being created by object loss (Le
seminaire, livre XXIII (19751976): Le sinthome).
Lacans kind of thinking runs counter to the International Psychoanalytic Associations (IPA) psychoanalytic thought in which ego splitting is said to accompany
fetishism, or psychosis, or borderline conditions. Lacan maintained that IPA adaptive
models prefer a master discourse of duplicity and misrecognition over any encounter
with the real of truth and the ego splits that follow in the wake of an encounter with the
real. Here, Lacan developed a germ of thinking present in the later Freud which made
sense to him in light of the work being done in the 1940s on the phenomenon of
imprinting in animals and the observation of a normal period of transitivism in young
children. Lacan brought all these phenomena together in his theory of a mirror stage
of would-be normative development, characterized by a splitting of the ego between
self and other. Lacan placed this relation on an imaginary axis of narcissistic mergers,
intersected by the symbolic prohibitions and expectations that language and Otherness
bring into the imaginary consistencies individuals develop as a defense against the real
void place that carries anxiety in its wake. Indeed the imaginary conates inside and

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outside much like Descartes handled the body as a res extensa. One can nd a hint at such
a conceptual alignment with Freud on Lacans part in Freuds 1937 piece Splitting of
the Ego in the Process of Defence, where he says: I have at last been struck by the fact
that the ego of a person whom we know as a patient in analysis must, dozens of years
earlier, when it was young, have behaved in a remarkable manner in certain particular
situations of pressure. . . . It occurs under the inuence of psychical trauma.16
The psychical trauma par excellence, in Lacans theory, is the assumption of an
ego via identications with Other (i.e., alien) images, language, and drive affects, all of
which organize themselves around the central lack of being all one sex: /j.
Given that one of Lacans innovations for psychoanalytic theory and practice lies in his
idea that the structurations of desire culminate in four different epistemological orientations toward the sexual differencenormative acceptance of castration or the central
lack-in-being; neurotic denial of the sexual difference; perverse repudiation of it; or its
psychotic foreclosurethese structures recast Freuds concepts of normalcy versus
psychopathologies. No one is whole. We are all subjects of our pathologies, which
one might call our interpretations of castration. By adding a category of the real, Lacan
acknowledges traumatic knowledge as inscribed, but not symbolized in language. He
argued that psychoanalysis can, however, enable one to symbolize bits and pieces of this
real as the truth of repressed suffering that resides at the points of impasse in
knowledge and in inabilities to change.
For purposes of gender theory and psychoanalysis, his argument is that no
matter how role models are given in language and imagesportraying boys and girls as
radically different, as totally equal, as interchangeable, and so ona child takes on its
sense of being gendered or sexuated in response to loss, as well as in response to the
mothers unconscious desire concerning castration vis-`a-vis a signier for the Fathers
Name. The unavoidable and imperfect coordinates that constitute each childs experience in the particularin the sinthomeare, then, a combination of the mothers
unconscious desire and the Fathers Name.17 Analytic practice, in this context, will not be a
matter of the patients (re)telling his or her story to the point of resolution or being
reparented in the countertransference, but rather, will place upon the analysand the
responsibility of changing his or her relation to his or her jouissance.

Lacans Concepts of the Phallus and Castration

Lacan gave the name phallus to the space between the mothers desire and the Fathers
Name where the sexual difference is interpreted. When Lacan says that the phallus or
phallic signier have no readily discernible signied, he means that the interpretation of
the division between the sexes will always constitute the enigma of a subjects desire as
signied responses without any apparent cause, albeit within the normative language of
the masquerade, the neuroses, perversion, or psychosis. That the third-term signifying
sexual difference is the basis of the development of a potential dialectical movement

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(except in psychosis) in thinking means that one rst goes from a question mark (/S)
about the gaps in ones life, to whatever object ller(s) (a) one nds to suture this
lack-in-being. This is the formula for fantasy/S <> athat collapses lack/desire and
the desired object along with alienation and separation ( <> ). This gives greater
precision to a term like subjectivity, making sense of Lacans claim that ones reality is
ones fantas(ies).
In the sexuation graph Lacan set out in Seminar XX, chapter 7, we remember that
he reread Freuds Totem and Taboo (1913) to deduce a logic of the masculine as a denial of castrationthat is, a denial that the sexual difference requires one to lose
anythingbased on the premise that there is one supermale, a kind of Ur-father, who
is not castrated and in whose name the brothers join together as a body committed to
the cooperation based on group law (see also A Love Letter in Feminine Sexuality).
Unlike the logic of masculine sexuation, the logic of feminine sexuation, does
not identify woman with sexual difference such that she need evolve a myth of The
Woman exception-to-the-lawan Essential Woman or Ur-motherwhich would
sustain the same kind of mythical lie touted by men in order to ward off the threat of
phallic castration. Although women generally identify with an exception to the rule, be
it God or some powerful gure in the symbolic, Lacans hypothesis is that at the point
of the feminine in identication, woman has a direct rapport with the lack in the
Other such that she cannot entirely sustain the phallic lie of there being no such lack.
When Lacan terms castration the effect of the phallic signierto create lack
and unveils the oedipal triad where the mother and father dene the baby-phallus in
reference to what each has and each lackscastrationhe designates the child as a dual
interpretation of the sexual difference insofar as lack marks the being of both parents. In
human relations the lack of the female penis in the imaginary register gives rise to a Fort!
Da! perception wherein both sexes have unconscious fantasies regarding having or
losing an organ. The representational interpretation of this imaginary difference creates
a hole in the symbolic of each sex that is experienced as a lack-in-being. As we know,
this secondary lack, which one might call the rst oedipal cut, has a referent in a prior
cut between the objects that rst caused desire and became associated with the promise of
pleasure based on their being refound after having been lost.
In the third period of his teaching, Lacan formalized the gap between the
imaginary object and the symbolic name that interprets it by a matheme denoting
imaginary castration, the negative phi (). Because the image and the name for it do
not correspond inherently, Lacan argues that meaning immediately becomes paradigmatic of deciphering the basic sexual riddles. Language itself takes on the charge of
jouissance (jouis-sens) becausepublic or privateit becomes responsible for closing
up the concrete effects of a difference that, at the very least, produces doubt or worry,
and at the most, anxiety.
Lacan clearly does not mean emasculation by castration, nor masochism, nor an
inferiority complex, or any other such literalist interpretation. Castration refers, rather,
to the particular effects on each person of (potential) loss. One might speak, then, of

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loss in the eld of the partial drives, which arises primarily in response to the loss of the
objects-cause-of-desire and, secondarily, in response to the loss that organizes identication in an oedipal trajectory. Although, Lacan used Freuds terms Verneinung (denial/
neurosis), Verleugnung (repudiation/perversion) and Verwerfung (foreclosure/psychosis)
to describe unconscious stances taken toward the real of sexual difference, more
foundationallyalthough Lacan is not a foudationalist precisely because the phallic
signier is neither innate nor always socially constructed (as in autism or psychosis)
analysis unveils the trauma each child undergoes in interpreting himself or herself as
castrated in reference to the mother. Finding no kind of mental, spiritual, or psychical
superiority in being a male, Lacan was perplexed by any privileging of the sexual
difference until he understood that mental acceptance of this difference could be foreclosed and, indeed, was the hallmark of psychosis.
Put another way, Lacan argued that knowledge is itself a defense against the
trauma of taking on being in reference to an unwelcome (phallic) intrusion into the
experienced oneness of mother and child. One represses, denies, repudiates, or forecloses knowledge of this difference, thus establishing particular differential criteria as
the basis of mentality, as well as of the jouissance desiderata of sexuality. In psychosis,
the Verwerfung is of the real Fathers Name, the real father of jouissance being the one
who normally imposes castration () on his children by introducing a no to the
childs wish to have the mother all to himself or herself. This no begets symbolic
castration as the basis of social law, and creates the foundation for the possibility of
dialectical thought.
While Piaget, for example, took dialectical thought to arise in response to
developmental normality, Lacan allows us to see it as the outcome of the oedipal route
by which one develops as a subject who lacks a fullness of being or a whole ego, since
one mentally accepts losing the primordial object(s) of satisfaction and replacing them
with substitutes. The psychotic subject eschews lack. In consequence, he or she becomes
mentally conated with his or her own ideals. Lacking the distance from images,
objects, or words to represent himself or herself by images or signiers, this subject feels
One with the images and signiers of her world. They are realnot metaphorical
for the psychotic subject. It is in this sense that Lacan says there is no lack-in-being in
psychosis; no /S. There is no subject of fantasy, nor of dreams; only a subject of
delusions and nightmares. Freuds psychopathologies have become Lacans structures
of desire whose referents are the phallus and castration. We remember that of the many
meanings Lacan gave castration, the lack-of-being all one sex, is the concomitant denial
found in any myth or dream of androgyny, harmonious union, or hermaphroditic
oneness.
Rather, Lacan referred to the objector, more precisely, its lackto interpret
Freuds idea that object Rendung can only be imagined via desire in reference to an object
that has already been lost. In Lacans recasting of Freud, the four possible interpretations of castration bear on the overall sense he gives to Freuds notion of object Findung
as a rending. The initial loss of the objectbe it of the mothers breast, the infants

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own feces, a voice, or a gaze from the Otherplaces loss at the beginning of the
constitution of being or identity or self. Thus, loss causes the inscription of jouissance
effects Lacan names drive affects or unary traits.18 Losses are not forgotten, are not just
nothing, are not altogether lost, but leave behind indivisible traces of the real that
Miller has described as divine details. And these unary traits both create and bind the
holes that ex-sist in the imaginary and symbolic to void space, bringing unconscious
material into conscious life as the hole and its mark or unary trait.
While the cuts of primordial castrationthat is, the loss of the primary objects
that rst caused desireunderlie the jouissance ups and downs of affect, in secondary
castration a child is confronted with the necessity of interpreting the sexual difference.
Thus, Lacan recasts Freuds content-specic narrative as the triadic structure of the
oedipal experience, a topological structure. Lacan focused on the fact that neither the
boy nor the girl has the phallus. Its thirdness is powerfully registered as its potential
separability, its signied being the lack-of-being all one sex. Here we are confronted
with a symbol that is neither an image or a dual meaning. It is more like a metaphor.
That is, something is rst substituted for an invisible effect that Lacan localized on the
axis of gender identity. The substitution in question is the structural outcome of the
oedipal identication where what is signied is the loss of ones other half. Thus, here
phallic symbol does not indicate a duality of meaning whose referent is explicable by
Greek philosophy, theology, biology, Chomskyan linguistics, or any other supposedly
primary meaning system, or any other metalanguage.
Rather, Lacan uses symbol to mean the base unit of experience that is transformed
into images of identication, signiers of nomination, and inscriptions traced on the
body that become Eros or Thanatos.19 The symbols signied, in other words, is not
some deeper or truer meaning, but the epistemological nexus of image/word/affect
that composes knowledge itself. And speaking enacts this knowledge in the real. It seems
almost incomprehensible that much of a persons knowledge is an elaboration of his or
her rst interpretations of the phallic signiers producing the effect of castration. But
Lacan argues nothing less.
In Le seminaire, livre IV, written in the 1950s, Lacan reconceptualized the object
away from then popular psychoanalytic concepts of it, elaborating a theory whose
relevance lies not only in a new way of conceptualizing the subject/object distinction
that has worried theologians and philosophers for centuries, but also in a logical
explanation of what causes disorder. These revisions of knowledge are based on a new
understanding of the differential signier (the phallic one) in reference to which order is
constituted. That is, oedipal identication becomes the pivotal constructgender
difference is learned (or not) as a third term between two othersout of which a
dialectic constitutes the law of the symbolic order as an interplay between Freuds
reality principle and the jouissance of the real (Freuds pleasure principle).
Prior to his rst formal period of teaching in the 1950s, Lacan argued in The
Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic
Experience (1949) that a childs sense of being a being is taken on imaginarilythat is,

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in reference to images, imagos, or gestalts that merely reduplicate his or her body in a
virtual way (The Mirror Stage . . . , pp. 28191). Even though such a theory is
rooted in Husserls phenomenological idea of the body as the source of knowledge in
its immediate, intuitive, subjective experience of the world, Lacan argued that the body
can only be experienced as existingbeyond the realinsofar as it is rst named or
represented to itself. Lacans rst theory of identication shows what the Freudian
concept of the complex owes to the imagos that anchor ones rst sense of self in a
matrix of signiers. This new theory of identication gave rise to his subsequent
topological theory of the imaginary body as the doubled representations by which one
makes realities mentally consistent.
In the 1970s, Lacan argued that the image is more than mere appearance, semblance, or lure object. Indeed, the image-object functions with all the force of thething-itself.20 Just prior to this period, Lacan had located anxiety in the imaginary
order. When an image is perforated or subvertedeither a simple image or an elaborate picture of ones lifethe real of anxiety appears as a hole in being that an image
cannot completely cover over. This hole rips into the comforting consistency the
imaginary generally offers as a buffer against encountering lack or loss from the
unconscious.

Lacans Theory of the Real and the Object (a)

Insofar as an infants rst awareness of a concrete lack- in-being refers to the cut
between the object that offers satisfaction and the void created by the loss of that object,
the cut itself is invested with positive traits of the objects, as well as negative traits of the
loss. Lacan explained this dialectic in Le seminaire X (19621963), where he claimed
that anxiety has an object. That object is an encounter with the void place in being. This is
an entirely new picture of anxiety from Freuds notion of it as a response to fears in face
of which one is helpless, or as a reaction against sexual excitement.21 At stake in anxiety,
Lacan argues, is the imaginary illusion that typically marks the mirror-stage logical
identication with the belief that one is a whole body appended to a whole self. This
misconception imagines a total, unperturbed self as representative of a complete body.
Lacan placed consciousness in the imaginary, which is anchored in jealously, agressivity,
fantasy, narcissistic exchanges, and subjectivity.
Working by a logic of the whole, the imaginary projects the ideal traits with
which an individual, in turn, seeks to identify. In the last phase of his teaching, Lacan
called the imaginary the order of the body as projected onto the real of the esh, wordpictures simultaneously taming and exciting the real at limits and impasses. Although
the real is the order of the disruptions of trauma, Lacan taught in this nal period that it
appears within logical thought as enigmata, as intrusions, or as absolute densities of
affect, unlike imaginary repetitions that seek to keep reality consistent by avoiding
any encounter with the void place located between the imaginary and the real:

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By the third period of his teaching,22 Lacan had formalized many of his ideas,
which he simplied by reference to a basic topological unitthe triadic form of the
Borromean knot that arises from simpler toplogical forms such as the Moebius strip or
the cross-capwhose loops he called the real, symbolic, and imaginary. These orders,
each discrete within itself, are knotted together (or not, as in psychosis) by overlapping
one with another. In a larger sense, the overlappings themselves constitute what Lacan
called the order of the knot, a fourth order whose referent is the signier for the Nameof-the-Father, or the order of the Symptom, which knots the other three together
around belief in a guarantor of a knowledges correctness. Lacan explained how the
excluded middlethe place of the three jouissancesin the space of the overlaps are
constituted out of elements of any two interlinked orders and, thus, also form their own
logic, even if it seems nonsensical or irrational.
Jacques-Alain Miller has developed Lacans use of the term extimacy to describe
the outside meaning (horsens) nature of the concrete details of the real that enter
conscious thought as enigmata or impasses: The traits of the real are symptoms which
have the property of agalmaan outsideness and insideness coalesceas more than
you. They are like a distant interior that seems to be both outside and inside at once
(Extimite). In the development of the exigencies of the real, symbolic, imaginary,
and the symptomwhich constitute mind/body as a vast interlinked network of
signifying unitsmyriad associational chains x premirror-stage fragmentary identications with the real of partial objects that caused desire prior to the mirror-stage
illusion of unity. These, in turn, subtend the oedipal experience of disunity where an
effect of thirdness divides a pleasurable, albeit illusory, symbiosis. This concrete account of how the mind/body intrication is disassociated and interwoven by accretions
of Borromean units

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gives quite a different picture from Freuds conception of mind as an a priori unied
agency, perturbed in certain cases by uncontainable conicts. Where Freud places
conict, Lacan placed the real as traumatic. One might say the oedipal encounter with
sexual difference is traumatic precisely because the child must interpret it in terms of
castrationthat is, in terms of his or her primordial experiences of the object as lacking, the
cut already serving as an initial encounter with loss.
Jacques-Alain Miller has stressed Lacans concept of extimacy in describing
the organization Lacan gave to the void place whose positive existence is proved not
only by the fact that all life is structured so as to avoid experiences of isolation or
aloneness, but also by the very negativity of the affects that life activity avoids. What
object lls a void place in being, then, giving its structure to the hole: J a? In 1960
Lacan listed eight objects that cause desire. Characterizing Freuds mamilla, faeces, the
phallus (imaginary object), the urinary ow as an unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do,
the phoneme, the gaze, the voicethe nothing23 Lacan made it clear that insofar as
desire is causal, by phallus he does not mean penis, except as an imaginary form. As early
as 1958 he had used the term phallus to describe this image or representation of a
difference between the sexes as that on whose basis each sex forms a relation to the
symbolic order as himself or herself lacking (or not lacking) this semblant.24
Since the image is real for the psychotic subject, it is not a representation. For all
other subjects, it marks gender imaginarily. So strong is the psychotic subjects conation of organ with being that the mere confusion of his or her name with the opposite
sex name can shake the fragile link between the real and symbolic, held rigidly together
by an absolute belief that the word equals the thing.25 Mistakes in language risk
exposing the psychotics lack of an imaginary, which one might describe here as an
order of distance from the jouissance of the real, something the psychotic subject
lacks.26 Where Freud found conict, Lacan implied that the cause of conict is the real
of loss. In the Names-of-the-Father seminar, Lacan wrote that anxiety comes from

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not knowing what you are for the Other. One might say the encounter with sexual
difference is traumatic precisely because the child must interpret this difference in
reference to the loss Freud called castration()that is, in terms of his or her
experience of an imaginary organ as potentially lacking in the eyes of the Other. Since the
image is real for the psychotic subject, it not a representation. For all other subjects it
marks gender imaginarily, as we have already noted.
We remember that Freud rst used the word phallus when seeking to show the
relations and distinctions that mark reality by a split between biological reality and
psychic reality, while Lacan took this to mean that the interpretation of sexual difference is the rst abstract conceptthe axis of dialectical thoughtwhich children
normally grasp around age ve. The rst oedipal moment, in Lacans teaching, occurs
commensurately with the acquisition of language as a viable grammar base for thinking.
The signicance of this for cognitive studies lies in Lacans discovery that language
functions differently in psychosis, neurosis, perversion, and the normative masquerade.
If sexuation is an epistemological affair which determines that individuals deploy
language in reference to the phallus and castration, the referent is the real father of
jouissance. One could say that the psychotic, over-burdened by the real father, nds the
ideal imaginary father outside his Ideal ego which is maternal, mythologizing some
ideal father gure or institution. Normative subjectsthose who accept to embody an
equation of gender identity with biological sexual differencereify the internalized
father signier by repeating cultural rituals organized around an idealized leader.
Neurotics deny that they need any fatheror leaderaround whom to organize their
questions, while the imaginary father must exist for the pervert to subvert insofar as the
law of jouissance is, for him, the antithesis of the inherently vacuous representations
that normally stand in for law, giving a false and duplicitious basis to the Wizard of
Oz social masquerade.
Empirically speaking, then, the control variable in terms of which Lacan came
to understand the oedipal axis as the standard referent against which to measure a
differential relation to the object(s) one desires was the relation of the psychotic subject
to the foreclosure of the phallic signier that usually marks sexual difference by
symbolic castration for other subjects. Lacking the lack on which dialectical reasoning is
based, the psychotic, perforce, uses language rigidly and rigorously because the representational distance that continually interprets differences as imaginary distances between
desire and the objects meant to fulll it, is lacking. Having never lost the object(s) of
desire, having never registered the cut of lossthe psychotic is not individuated
or separated from the primordial mother, to use object-relations theorist Margaret
Mahlers terms. But unlike Mahler, Lacan elaborates the rationality of the logic that
ensues from this rejection of castration, not the fact of inadequate separation.
Based on Freuds description of the object as present only insofar as it is absent
in his Three Essays on Sexuality, Lacan put forth a theory of the objectwhich he,
at rst, called the quod, the thingthat differed radically, not only from psychoanalytic
concepts of the object current in his time, but from todays theories as well. At that

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moment, in the mid 1950s, Lacan was not concerned with the properties of the object
qua object-cause-of-desire, objects he named in 1960. Nor was he concerned in 1957
with the object (a) as a denotation for the present/absent structure of objects one
pursues in fantasy/S <> awith the aim of lling a structural lack-in-being. However, in Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1964), Lacan described the object (a) as an algebraic variable, denoting that which responds to lack and
can be called into presence as a function of lack.
The earlier theory of the object developed in Seminar IV argues that its dialectical
nature is not a matter of whether the mother is present or absent, or whether she offers
her infant a good or bad breast. Rather, castrationdened by Lacan, at that moment,
as the object as lackinggives rise to a different subject function in each of the three
registers, the imaginary, the symbolic and the real (except in psychosis where there is no
lack). The lack operates cosimultaneously, but differently, in each of the three registers
that constitutes the subject. Given that there is no personality in Lacans teaching, there
is, rather, a double-sided subject/object relationship of desire and lack that necessitates
the quest for satisfaction outside oneself. In Seminar IV Lacan argued that the dialectical
nature of the object does not come from a transitional space, as proposed by objectrelations analyst Donald Winnicott, where the mother is present or absent, nor from
the transitional object between mother and infant. Rather, insofar as castration creates a
lack between the object and the desire for it, one can pinpoint three different functions of
lack in each of the three registers, functions where the lack of the object concerns the
subject.
Lacans point is that objects are present in fantasy only because they have already
been lost within the outside world from which they rst came. Thus, fantasy objects are
constituted of multiple, concrete detailsunary traits (S1 ) as master signiersthat
make any fantasy partial and particular to each subject.27 Nancy Chodorow does not
say, as does Lacan, how traits constitute objects as qualitative aspects of place (topos)
wherein the traits are inscribed as the basis of a differential between continuous and
discontinuous processes. The traits appear as the minimal resemblance(s) of difference
between an object and an image, for a word and a sound. Chodorow does say, however,
that biology cannot explain the content either of cultural fantasy or private erotism.28
By contrast with other subjects, because the psychotic has never symbolized the
object-cause-of-desire as lacking, this subject experiences the objects of the world
through a grid of chaotic delusion, not as integrated fantasy.29 Rather, a retention of
the jouissance connected with the rst experience of objects organizes psychotic language, not the desire that responds to the lack or loss of those objects.30 The psychotics refusal of object loss (Freuds Verwerfung) shows up imaginarily as an afrmation
(Bejahung) of particular traits for most subjects.31
In Seminar IV, in his concern to say what creates lack in the rst place, Lacan
listed three objects that correspond to three lacks that constitute the subject, in
reference to three different agents. In chapter 16 (How Does Myth Analyze Itself?),
he put forth the fully developed form of this table (Le seminaire IV, p. 269):

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AGENT
real father

LACK
symbolic castration

OBJECT
imaginary phallus ()

symbolic mother

imaginary frustration

real breast

imaginary father

real privation

symbolic phallus ()

()

Having lost the actual objectboth a real organ and an image of it, the breast,
for examplethe infants desire for a return of the real organ-object turns on a
pleasure that is paradoxical, overlapping as it does with the imaginary frustration
experienced at its loss. Lacan describes the frustration as imaginary, not because it is
not real and true, but because it is the step of jouissance. At the same time, it is what
gives its [pseudo]consistency to the symbolic, it is precisely that there is no Other of the
Other (R.S.I., March 18, 1975). Unlike Freud, who thought conict arose at the site
of psychic disturbance, Lacan posited conict as the real that makes imaginary frustration a discontinuity. An infants rst task of symbolizing the world starts in disharmony, Lacan argued, not in union or harmony.
Given that the forces that structure being for subjectivity are not stages or
developmental sequences, they are, rather, topological logical passages that organize the real of the partial drives in reference to the symbolic mother. This is the mother
who gives signifying responses from the OtherLacan often calls the symbolic order.32 The other two lacks of the object are organized in reference to a real father, agent
of symbolic castration insofar as he forbids incest, that is, a totality of jouissance
between the infant and mother. The real father of enjoyment deprives the infant of the
imaginary phallusYou dont have it, he implies to the girl; You are not it, to the
boywhich creates the symbolic castration Lacan equated with a lack-in-being. In the
second case, when an infant loses the real objectthe breast, for examplehis or her
desire to have the organ-object back gives rise to a pleasure that is paradoxical. Since
loss begets desire in a dialectic of imaginary frustration between the real loss and the
agent, the symbolic mother, Lacan describes the cause as frustration, as imaginary,
creating confusions of corporal responses with symbolic identications.
The material that structures fantasy (subjectivity) from the start of life is not
stages or developmental sequences, then, but the confusion between the real of (organ)
satisfaction and the symbolic mother whose signifying responses are the rst gifts or
givens taken from the Other. The third agent of lack, the imaginary father, is seen as the
cause of real privation in the guise of images that lead a child to congure him in
representations of authority. The imaginary father does not really have the symbolic
phallus of authority, Lacan argues, but insofar as the child believes he does, he can
occasion responses of despair, such as the Young Homosexual womans throwing
herself over a bridge when her father deprives her of his approval in a scalding gaze of
derogation.33
Insofar as lack is organized in reference to actual parents who simultaneously serve
different functions in different orders, the range of responses to lack can not be

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uniform. One response to early experience in the drives is autismthe extreme pole of
psychosis in which an infant identies entirely with a negativity of the partial objects. In
autism, there is no object loss, which is another way of saying that there is no pleasure
of the object, merely a negative, oppressive presence of it. In Lacans teaching, autism is
structured prior to the mirror stage and prevents the mirror stage from occuring (cf.
Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death, Ch. 6). Normally objects cause desire because they
are repeatedly lost and, hence, traces of them must be refound outside. In this sense,
transference onto others constitutes the hope of recouping object satisfaction. It is set
up from the beginning of life as a dialectical relation between the infant and the world,
an exchange the autistic infant never has.
In the psychoses, schizophrenia and paranoia, an infant remains identied with
the illusionary (dyadic) Oneness of mirror-stage moments. These are governed by the
voice, most particularly, in schizophrenia, while the gaze is paramount in paranoia.
These objects attempt to substitute for the missing dialectical or tertiary nature of the
oedipal structure. While the teleology behind object relations in psychosis is that of a
literally identical mirroring, most people who are not psychotic seek others and things
to close up the structural lack-in-being. Lacan argued as early as Seminar IV that no
object, person, thing, or activity, can ever nally or permanently ll up a structural gap,
or close a set. This is a logical (and tragic) fact he symbolized in the third period of his
teaching by placing a bar over the Other itself ().

Lacans Interpretation of Freuds Little Hans Case

In Seminar IV Lacan developed his theory of the object as lacking by referring to Freuds
Little Hans Case, as well as to Freuds 1924 essay on The Dissolution of the
Oedipus Complex, written a year before Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes (1925).34 These two essays in which Freud
developed his theories of the castration complex and the phallic mother were crucial to
a reconceptualization of the object, Lacan argued. Individuals seek objects to ll the
emptiness whose constitution places a concrete place of suffering in being. The point
many readers of Lacan miss is that the void is so unbearable that one rarely encounters
it. Indeed, we structure our lives so as to avoid it. For most people, the void shows up
anyway in various permutations of affect, all focused on the details of the lost objects
that are supposed to ll the void. Although this is a reversal of Platos theory of ideal
forms in which all forms imitate a perfect invisible and indivisible form, Lacan gives a
concrete explanation of what forms form, trait by trait. Given that the unary traits of
concrete details are transformed in all four ordersreal, symbolic, imaginary, and
the symptomprimordial experiences are the bedrock of all signifying chains of mind
and memory, the bedrock even of the most abstract endeavors.
Lacans concept of the object in Seminar IV does not harken back to the 1920
Freudian object of pare-excitations, then, or to Freuds 1933 concept of the pre-oedipal

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mother who produces in her infant a sense of conict between herself as seductive and
herself as offering a protective barrier from id excitement. Insofar as a subjects relation
to the other, be it mother, love partner, or analyst, is only ever mediated in reference to
lack, this is the aspect of the object relation Lacan takes up in Seminar IV. Although,
Lacan nds Freuds 1924 comment on the resolution of the oedipal experience helpful,
he emphasizes that it is not a literal fear of castration that denes the castration
complex, but the mystery regarding why the self suffers.
If an infants intelligence and emotionality are not predetermined to develop
in biological stages, nor in reference to the mothers mothering skills, but primarily as
jouissance responses to the partial objects that cause desireand only secondarily as an
interpretation of gender via oedipal identicationsone can understand Lacans claim
that frustration by the real results in an imaginary attempt to control it. Freuds conict
model would be an imaginary effort to represent the forces at play in the real of the
drives. Thus, the dialectic of anticipation and retroaction of meaning, desire, and enjoyment places diachronic temporality in language as a kind of logical time, referring to
associations surrounding the loss and rending of traces of the mothers breast, her
gaze, her voice, and so on, all harkening back to disruptions of the imaginary infantmother dyad. At those originary moments, the mother acts as agent of the symbolic
order, the giver of real giftsthe breast, the gaze, the voiceobjects-cause-of-desire,
whose dialectic concerns presence and absence, having and lacking/wanting, love and
hate, all of which elicit frustrations.
Within Lacans topological framework, the identications of imaginary frustration are situtated in the turn of the curve where desire begets lack and lack begets desire.
The object at issue is occulted in the twist. Such a logic is best represented by the
continuous structure of the Moebius strip: 8. Lacans view of conict as a temporal
tension in the present that makes contradiction logically truth-functional, clearly
differs from Freuds who saw it as a behavioral regression to the past and not as a
structural dialectic of contradiction between categories; that is, in the spaces of overlap
between orders. For Lacan, conict is the insistence of a real component in the
signifying chain, one that oscillates between narcissistic identication and aggressive
rage or anger at being thwarted in an experience of primary jouissance. That is, conict
comes from the real of the drives. Later, conict will blame the Woman-supposed-toexist. The very rst experience of frustration arises when the desire for the real
breast (or bottle) is disrupted, for example, by a telephone call that breaks the infants
perceived unity of a moment. Perception is dened by Lacan here as a gap between what
is and what is not (Groome, p. 84). Lacans point is that the infants relation to the
object is not to the mother as a person, nor even to the breast qua object-thing,
but to the sudden lack of an object he or she thought was his or hers, one with him
or her.
Although the organ-object appears to give rise to imaginary frustration, seeming to
belong to the mother or to exist on its own as a piece of esh, the agent of the rst
frustration(s) is the symbolic mother/Other (S. IV, p. 199) whose symbolic gifts are

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the primordial material of love. The breast symbolizes nurture just as the voice
symbolizes calm or joy, and so on. Lacan writes in Seminar IV:
The mother exists as a symbolic object and as object of love. . . . The mother is
rst a symbolic mother and it is only in the crisis of frustrations that she begins
to become real [for the infant] because of a certain number of shocks and
particularities that are produced in the relation between the mother and the
child. The mother, object of love, can be at each instant the real mother insofar
as she frustrates this love. The relation of the child with the mother, which is a
relation of love, opens the door to what one generally calls, for lack of knowing
how to articulate it, the rst undifferentiated relation. (p. 223)
But even though frustration surrounds the aim of the drive for a primordial object
for the breast (or bottle), the gaze, and so onthe aim is not the goal. The goal seeks a
oneness of continuity with these objects. Frustration is readily expressed as a cry. In this
sense, frustration is quickly caught up in the law of the signier, which tries to translate
it into verbal meaning. The naming of the frustrationbe it hunger, a wet diaper, a
wind pain, or any other true or false causeplaces symbolic alienation over the real of
the experience.
Lacan advanced his theory of the object after decades of work with psychotic
patients who mentally foreclose the dialectic created by loss. By foreclosing symbolic
castrationlawpsychotics try to incorporate the mother as the sole object of
satisfaction. For other subjects the lack that ordinarily ensues from a loss of primordial
objects becomes the differential in reference to which a libidinal order of the drives is
created and determines, as well, what causes disorder. The effect of an objects prevailing
modebe it hunger, an earache, a wet diaper, a sore throat, or any other true or false
cause of discomfortannihilates the phallic signier as the agent of organization which
means rejecting the signier for the symbolic Fathers Name, be the signier of a
mothers brother, a river spirit, or a Woman representing the symbolic. The signicance
of this key signierthe Fathers Namein psychic development lies in its calming
the lack-in-being by the imposition of a no which places the real of jouissance under the
law. In this sense, the father is not a person, but a function of language.
The paternal function, by which Lacan redenes the Oedipus complex as the
interdiction of a psychic oneness between infant and mother, gives the child an
injunction to individuation. The Fathers Name signier acts as a fourth terma form
of the knotwhich, paradoxically, denotes the pleasure of a Oneness in jouissance that
is simultaneously forbidden. Another name Lacan gives this signier is the sinthome. One
sinthome of repressing the unconscious shows that most people use language casually,
accepting its lacks and gaps and haltings as normal and natural. Psychotic language is,
on the contrary, used rigidly. But no matter how astute, accurate, or poetic its use may
be, its referent is always la lalangue circling around a drive object, not the sexual
difference taken as the dialectical base of a lack-in-being35 that opens onto the social
domain of exchange and reciprocity.

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163

To summarize, in the logic of the object Lacan set forth in the rst period of his
teaching, he described three different experiences of the object as lacking, which he
called symbolic castration, imaginary frustration, and real privation. Each relation to
the object, linked to a corresponding agent and lack, led him to speak of a symbolic debt,
an imaginary displeasure, and the hole, or real of absence (S. IV, p. 37). Symbolic
castrationthe lack of being (or having) the phallus in the symbolic that affects both
sexesrefers to an imaginary object. Lacan symbolized the inscription of this castration,
this negation, by the (), which marks a cut between language and the images to which
language assigns a value, thereby creating a subjects narrative of identity. The image at
issue in symbolic castration would be the little boys penis. For a little girl, it would be
any visible image in which her narcissism is investeda doll, a bottle, a part of her
body, a teddy bear, or whatever. Some clearly visible image will be taken as the phallus,
dened here by Lacan as that which has positivizable value insofar as it is visible and
stands in as a semblance for ones sense of being. Certain clearly visible imagesa
toy, an article of the mothers clothing, even the imaginary phalluswill become
problematic when the reality of a sexual difference, not perceived before, intersects
with the demand (drive) to interpret it, or act upon it.
In 1960 Lacan had called the imaginary phallus a nonspecularizable object-causeof-desire (Subversion . . ., p. 315). By non-specularizable, he did not mean that
which lacks an image, but that whose ex-istence is absolute, basic, and indivisible in
its effect(s). In Seminar XX (197273), he equated the imaginary phallus with appearance, taken as the thing itself (Encore, Knowledge and Truth, ch. 8). In the seminar (livre
IV) on the object relation he still took the image as a representative of the thing and
argued that the agent held responsible for the lack of this imaginary object in the
symbolic is the real father of jouissance as carrier of the incest taboo. Lacan stresssed
that it makes no difference whether the imaginary incarnation of the real father is the
Daddy in a contemporary monogamous family, or the signifying function of the
outsider or stranger in certain tribal cultures described by Freud in Totem and Taboo.36 It
is the divisive effect that is at stake in Lacans teaching.
In [symbolic] castration there is a fundamental lack which situates itself as a
debt in the symbolic chain, Lacan says early on in Seminar IV (p. 55). Something
sanctions the prohibition of incest and gives it its support, and its inverse, which is
punishment. The debt is owed, in other words, to society. This makes a certain sense of
the myriad forms of sacrice rituals practiced throughout societies in history. Castration, he says, has been introduced by Freud in a way [that is] absolutely coordinated
with the notion of the primordial law, what there is of the fundamental law in the
interdiction of incest and in the structure of the Oedipus (S. IV, p. 37). Thus,
[symbolic] castrationwhose object is imaginarycan only be classed in the
category of symbolic debt (p. 37).
But what is owed to whom? The answer can only be love insofar as the other
interdicted by the real father is the primordial Other, the mother.37 While Lacan made
sense of the notion of an intersection between the visible, a lost object, and the drives,
starting in Le seminaire X on Anxiety, he links the anal (partial) drive to imaginary

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castration and to the scopic eld of the gaze. But he never developed the logic of the
relation between love and the primordial mother of the drives. Miller takes up this
challenge in Silet. His reading of Seminar IV gives a logic to the place of the pre-oedipal
mother in psychoanalysis that differs from the place she has been given by objectrelations theories.
In Seminar IV Lacan emphasized the ctional guises given the real father by the
imaginary father as gures of the superego that represent the symbolic phallus. He
stresses that these are functions and not individuals. Moreover, the functions concern
the object and its lack. In Seminar XX he set forth the theory that there can be no law
except in reference to a supermana real father, exception to the law of castration or
lackabove the law who is, at the same time, excluded from the law and thus,
paradoxically, gives it its foundation.38 But in Seminar IV, Lacan was still somewhat
Freudian. He portrayed symbolic castration as the experience of the object as lacking,
and the agent of this lack as the real father of jouissance. Yet he is clearly not Freudian
when he describes the object in question here as the imaginary phallus (), one of whose
names might be Woman. Indeed, Fenichel made the equation Madchen = phallus. Another way to understand the imaginary phallus is as a semblance, an object sign of the
visible world, residing between the real and the symbolic. It could be the mothers
breast, the little boys penis, or a new baby. The special privilege accorded the penis
above other objects or organs is simply that it visibly symbolizes difference for both
sexes as sexual difference. Its transformational formsbaby or baseball batare
interpretations of this symbol.
After symbolic castration (the incest taboo) and imaginary frustration (loss of
the breast), Lacan named real privation, as the third relation to the object. Identifying
the agent of real privation as the imaginary father who appears in myriad gures of the
superego, he taught that the object to be valorized here is the symbolic phallus (). In
Seminar XX Lacan developed his theory of the symbolic phallus, arguing that the reality
a given subject experiences comes from that subjects master signiers (S1 ). Another
name Lacan gave the master signier was the symbolic phallus: . That is, a subject
accepts his or her lack-in-being, which he or she then supplements or replenishes with
master signiers already inscribed in his or her Other. They give a precise meaning to
his or her life. But what has all this to do with analytic practice?
When the threatened object is the imaginary phallus, as in the case of Little
Hans, the person held responsible for the threat is the real father of jouissance, a
function of the mother or father or anyone else who says no to phallic enjoyment.
Lacans point is a structural one. The basic no is that of the real father whose feelings of
desire for the mother automatically forbid a oneness of jouissance between the mother
and child. Hanss father brings him to Freud. Lacan attributes his symptoms of phobia
and anxiety to his refusal of symbolic castration. At age ve Hans is still under the
inuence of a phallic mother. But by phallic mother, Lacan does not mean
maternal virility. He means that Hans has not yet substituted the fathers law for the
desire to be the object of his mothers jouissance. In interpreting Hanss desire to be all

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to her as her desire for him to be all to her, Hans makes of his mother a phallic
mother.
Having repudiated the castration that installs a psychic lack-in-being during the
typical oedipal experience at around age ve, Hans is burdened by the imaginary
phallus. Lacan says he is encumbered by it, obsessed with it. Lacan retains Freuds term
Verleugnung (repudiation) herethe mechanism proper to the structure of perversion
arguing that Hans repudiates maternal castration. At age ve, Hans is caught in a
moment of perversion. The cause of Hanss suffering, Lacan argues, is his inability to
renounce having the imaginary phallus in order to drop it, lack it, and, thus, assume a
repressed part that opens up a position within the group structure of his social world.
Lacans point is that Hanss imaginary father is not adequate to separate Hans
from the symbolic mother whose gifts are of the real. Such a division can only be
accomplished at the level of the real father, at the point when the child understands that
his or her mother is the jouissance object of someone elses desire, and someone else is
the object of her desire. In his interpretation of the Little Hans Case, Lacan argues
that the true problematic of the oedipal experience is in full view here. Even though Freud
saw the oedipal experience as a normativizing development, ending in a heterosexual
object choice, Lacan points out as early as Seminar IV that the most heterosexual of
choices can, upon analytic investigation, appear in a truer light as a homosexual desire
(S. IV, p. 201).
The psychoanalytic problematic does not concern the outcome of object choice,
in Lacans opinion, but how a boy or girl is situated in reference to the function of the
father; that is, one can change libinal position only if the signier for difference is
inscribed such that a lack-in-being makes it possible to exchange out of the family
romance and make substitutions. Since the function of the father does not mean the
actual father, but the structural necessitylest one be psychoticthat there be a
strong enough mechanism to deect a child from the compelling power of the drives
that bind the child of either sex to the pre-oedipal mother, accepting the sexual
difference is, perforce, the basis of law itself (cf. the sexuation graph).
Freud reports what Little Hanss father recounted and had written down in
meticulous details. Hans is obsessed with his Wiwimacher, his faire pipi, his penis that he
describes by its organic function of going pee-pee. He asks everyone whether they
have this organ too, including his mother. When his father takes him to the zoo, Hanss
interest in the lion centers only on whether his father has seen the organ with which the
lion makes pee-pee. Lacan viewed Hanss comparisons as efforts to form the image of
an absolute objectthe imaginary phallusthat he can understand in reference to a
real bodily functionthe urinary function. At age ve, Hans confronts the ordinary
oedipal task of trying to link his anatomical sex to a formula for being. In To
Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan, Miller argues that the oedipal challenge of
taking on an identity in terms of ones sexuality is complicated by the childs efforts to
picture his or her being as male or female in reference to a parental couple (M <> F),
which is not the same as the sexual couple (M <> W) (p. 36). But Hans has an extra

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problem at this moment, an excessive concern with who actually has this particular
organ. And the psychoanalytic question is why such a question can be so pressing.
At this same period, a little sister is born to Hans. Shortly after his sisters birth,
his phobic fear of horses appeared. One could say that Hanss symptoms are, quite
literally, a response to his losing his usual place within the eld of the familial gaze, a
place that had given him an imaginary sense of a consistency of being in terms of the
honored position conferred on him there. In response to his sisters birth, he adopts a
bunch of imaginary babiesdollsand plays with them in every way imaginable.
Around the same time, he informs his mother that if she has an organ like his, she
should show him. In any case, he deduces, her imaginary organ must be as big as the faire
pipi of a horse. Competing with his sister and father for all his mothers gaze, he tries to
make his mother aware of himself as having the organ, Lacan argues.
In 1959 in Le seminaire VI: Le desir et son interpretation, Lacan argued that males
confuse having the penisthat is, the visible image that rst marks difference as a
sexual differencewith being the mothers phallus, with being that which she
desires.39 Lacans theory is that Hanss ve-year-old concern with the imaginary phallus
shows the point of anxiety between an image that seems stable in itself, that seems to
anchor being in a consistency of the body at the level of a wholeness of sexual reality,
and the actual failure of the imaginary to provide a grounding precisely because it is
made of illusions. That is, the imaginary is perforated by the , the a, and the .40

-
a

Because the imaginary phallus () is a perceptually separable organa partial object,

if you willbecause the Other sex does not have it, Little Hans must anchor his sense
of being in reference to a visible image that troubles him. He tries to do this by equating
being with his penis. He is, thus, a sexuated subject who is not calm since he has not
been able to place his imaginary phallus under the law of castration. That is, he must

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rst have seen the Other as lacking the difference that allows sexuated individuation if
emotional calm is to occur, according him a place within that social sphere.
Not only is a foreclosure of the sexual difference the cause of psychosis in Lacans
teaching, the typical acceptance of castration as a lack-of-being-all actually pushes one
to nd or create a place in the symbolic order. In Hanss case, at age ve he is implicitly
asked by his social order to accept the position or place of son or brother. His (psychic)
symptoms come from the conictthat is, the real of what is known, but not symbolized
as conscious knowledgeof his inability to identify himself with these gures. He
identies, rather, as his mothers baby, as well as her potential husband. His identicatory confusions show up as attempts to solve the oedipal riddle (M <> W M <> F) by
threading together an associational series where a bodily function in the realthe penis
with which he urinates and masturbatesand an imaginary phallic organ, which he
attributes to one and all, give a formula for identity. Rather, he is overwhelmed with the
anxiety attendant upon a too-great proximity to the object-cause-of-desire (quod matrem).
If he had remained psychically locked in this moment of the oedipal interrogation,
Lacan says, he would have been xed at the level of the Ideal ego unconscious formation
in the forced choice of realizing his object relations with a double of himself, a
larger double (S. IV, p. 206).
Lacans position is that, in the oedipal development of the little boy, no mother
can answer her sons question about the sexual difference, his Do you have this
imaginary organ? Only a father can solve the little boys perplexity. It must be the real
father of jouissance who castrates the little boy by a symbolic interdication against
having (being) the imaginary phallus. In other words, the real father makes symbolic
castration possible by placing a signication on the imaginary phallus. In Hanss case,
such an act would be tantamount to giving him a signier at the point where he is
troubled by a lure image: You do not have the imaginary phallus, would mean you are
not the one who has the means of lling your mothers desire, of giving her jouissance.
Although Lacan seems to imply that the penis is the agent of such fulllment, a careful
reading shows that he means by phallus the one who desires. When the real father desires
the childs mother, his is the place of the lover/S waiting to be lled by her. In this
case, being takes sexuation as its base, in a particular stance vis-`a-vis the other, not of
organs.
The real fathers no to the infants desire to own the mother at the level of
jouissance introduces a lack into his or her image of self. This lack-in-the-image
(1) is, in turn, interpreted as a castration in the symbolic. And, paradoxically, in turn,
symbolic castration gives both sexes a position in the order of the social exchange where
he or she is dened by the family mythsthe career girl, a perfect motherLacan
called the xions established in the oedipal drama. At age ve, Litte Hans has not yet
found his place in the social world of exchange, in part because his mother is a phallic
mother, the phallic mother, Lacan insists, he is designating as an imaginary gure. She is
hypothesized as such by Little Hans in his dialectical efforts to decipher the meaning of
the sexual difference. Further, Lacan claims that Hans had not yet symbolized his
mother as different from himself because his father had not yet acted as a real father,

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one who indicates to the child his jouissance relation to the mother. And indeed there
are rumors that Hanss father could not fulll this paternal function because he had a
mistress. Put another way, no little boy can interpret his biological penis for psychic
meaning (sexuation)except insofar as it is given a meaning by the Otherthe
secondary Other of the symbolic order. The organ must be interpreted and its future
trajectory named. This is another way of saying that unless the real of sexuality is
represented, a child is disoriented within the chaos of the drives.
In Lacans view, that is precisely what the phobic object means. Such an object
a horse who bites in the case of little Hansis a signied stuck somewhere between the
(symbolic) signier for castration and the sexual drives that render an object real.
Whereas Freud called this signier the masculine superego, Lacan tried to ascertain precisely what concrete, real event precipitated Hanss phobia. The penis stopped functioning as an imaginary lure, Lacan says. It stopped being an imaginary object in reference to
which Little Hans could interrogate the lack-in-being whose rst interpretation ordinarily establishes meaning as dialectical, on the basis of an imaginary presence or absence.
After his sisters birth, the phallic organ became real for Hans, confronting him with the
anxiety that always accompanies the traumatic character of the real (S. IV, p. 225).
Yet Hanss phobia was cured, Lacan argued, because his father became a real
father; that is, one who nally says a no that enabled his son to interpret the penis as an
imaginary phallus that incurs lack, not endless jouissance. Lacan argued in Seminar XVII
that the male wish to retain the primacy of the imaginary phallus, nonetheless, causes
him to repress or deny his perception of castration, thus creating, in males, a failure of
the oedipal resolution to which Freud aspired for his analysands.41 At the start of his
analysis, Little Hans was caught in the male refusal to acknowledge that having the
penis did not make him the imaginary object that will fulll his mother at the point
where she lacked (and, thus, desires). Lacan says Hanss father became capable of
laying down the lawdisrupting the excessive xation of Hans to his motherso
to speak, once he was backed up by a strong symbolic father, Freud himself (S. IV, p.
230).
In The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,
delivered in 1958, Lacan argued that one has only to read the Three Essays on
Sexuality to observe, in spite of the pseudo-biological glosses with which it is decked
out for popular consumption, that Freud there derives all accession to the object from a
dialectic of return.42 In Freuds essay, he states clearly that the object is present only
insofar as it is lacking, moreover, making this a theory of castration. Lacans choice of
the words dialectic of return is crucial to his meaning here: To wit, that the object can only
return because it is absent. As one sees here and in Seminar IV, Lacan did not use the
word object in the sense Freud did, even from the start. Nor does he use it as it has been
developed in object-relations psychoanalysis.
Because of a dialectical movement of temporal tension in languagethe anticipation of meaning which only becomes clear retroactivelyan absent object can
return into the present as if it were there. And Lacan found the basis for such an

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interpretation of the dialectic, not only in Hegel, but also in the work of linguists
contemporary to the 1950s who had discovered that not only can meaning be made
diacritically (oppositionally and relationally) in the reference of one signier to another, be it in the relation of black to white or man to woman, or in the differing
phonemic sounds of i and e, but moreover in the logical time it takes to make
meaning in the space between primordial repressions and the associations drawn from
them.

Lacans Reinterpretation of Freud on Repression

With the idea that the object-cause-of-desire is implied between signiers, Lacan reinterpreted Freuds theory of repression in which the drives or id are repressed. Lacan sees
repression as occuring in a temporal tension. If something can be repressed, it is only
because it has already been constituted in a rst logical moment, then pressed under
(Urverdrangt) in a second logical moment, and it will return in a third logical time. The infants
desire for the breast is constituted by the loss of the gratications it affords and the
desire for its return is re-pressed in the time of deferral. The return of desire as drive,
or demand, constitutes a third moment, attesting to something lost or re-remembered
to the point one can ask for a substitutive form of it. Thus, the something repressed is
not a biological id pressure, not a primordial hallucination of pleasure, but the concrete
details of libidinal meaning Lacan called jouis-sens.
This experience of the cut or loss creates the real. The fantasy of the objects
return takes some imaginary forms while the demand for the object requires symbolic
articulation. Thus, the sense of an unconscious meaning appears between the imaginary
and the symbolic. The constitution of temporal tension is brought about, then, by three
different castrating operations: (1) the primordial loss that marks the cut () between
the image of a thing and the real of its bodily effect; the imaginary castration or
deferralDerridas apr`es-coupthat plays on the instability between images and words
() from which all kinds of decollages ensue; and (3) the symbolic castration of the
incest taboo, which links the real father of jouissance to the symbolic father of language
and law.
Insofar as jouissance meaning is constituted in three different ordersthe real
Other (); the phallic reality of a particular symbolic (); and the negativized image
of a gap between word and thing ()Lacan had begun to sketch a logic of the
intersecting parts as early as Seminar I. This logic portrays how body functions are
intertwined with mind. From 1974 on, Lacan argued that jouissance meanings are
rst experienced and then repressed by three different castrating or negative operations:
(1) The primordial loss that marks the cut as a gap between the object and its image,
[] that is, between the image of a thing and the real of its bodily effect; (2) the
imaginary castration that plays on the instability between images and words from which
gaps ensue (); and (3) the symbolic castration of the incest taboo, which links the

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real father to language as a law of interdiction (), placing a fourth order of the
symptom or knot in language itself (). The symptom is the point where sublimation
and the real coalesce, placing drive in language. These three castrations all circle around
the object (a) at the center of the Borromean unit, the object that rst causes desire and
that one seeks in subsitute forms to close the gap between drive and desire.
At the level of experience, however, repression makes itself known in a disconcerting if not unwelcome way, which Lacan called the return of the real into the symbolic.
That is, repressed memories return from the past into the present as enigmas or
unwelcome awarenesses whose affective modes bring discontinuity and disharmony.
But to grasp Lacans theory of repressionconscious language represses the realone
must understand the category of the real he rst began developing in Seminar II while
trying to grasp what really was at stake in the Wolf Mans dreams.43 As a result of this
critique, he redened the Freudian category of conict as an order of signications
made up of traumatic knots that appear as concrete knots or impasses in conscious
language. In this sense, knots are truth-functional paradoxes or contradictions that can
be untangled to yield up logical meaning that was previously thought of as nonsensical
or illogical.
Lacan insisted that it is possible for repression to function as the dialectical
return of the real into the symbolic precisely because the signier [has already]
install[ed] the lack-of-being in the object relation (The Agency . . . , p. 164). In
other words, repression is inseparable from the lack of a pregiven or innate internal
object. But if the object is internally lacking, how can it be repressed? This is a paradox
Freud never solved. In other words, repression proves that the object is external, rather
than pregiven or innate. It nonetheless constitutes affective memory out of traces or
traits of itself at the moment of its loss. In this way, the void place in being and meaning
is positivized by traces of an Ideal ego formation that becomes susceptible to interpretation within a transference relation. Although the real cannot be remembered as
thought, or reminiscence, its details repeat as a writing that symbolizes the signifying
chain and reappear objectively as sinthomes of rememorations. Jean-Paul Gilson calls this
a real ideational reliving, as opposed to an imaginary reminiscence.44

Millers Return to Lacans Theory of the Object in Psychoanalysis

From his rst course on, Miller argued that insofar as the symbolic order, by its very
denition, represses jouissance, it may succeed in putting it under erasure, but does not
actually destroy it. Thus, although whatever is repressed in the real will, de facto, return
in the symbolic, repression does not work very effectively.45 Sinthomes continue to write
a double of the signifying chain. Since Lacans death, Miller has continued Lacans
exegesis of Freuds theory of the object. In Extimite, his course of 198687, Miller
developed the structure of the Lacanian object (a)the notation by which Lacan
symbolized the object as lackingto explain how an object that has no positive

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features or actual existence can ex-sist anyway in the symbolic. In Donc, his course of
19931994, Miller linked his explanation of how an absent object can be present in
the symbolic, to the place of the pre-oedipal mother. Although Lacans object (a)
denotes absence as a concrete place in language and being, he never answered the
question of how an absent object can have the positive properties of present effects
within the symbolic order.
In Extimite, Miller referred to Lacans logic of alienation and separation from
chapters 16 and 17 of Seminar XI to depict the object (a) as acquiring unary traits at the
point of intersection between one thing and another:

Being

Thinking

In setting forth the structure of the object, he stressed that it shares properties of
insideness and outsideness, the object itself being, nonetheless, neither inside or outside.
It oats somewhere between and, in this sense, is extimate. Topologically speaking,
then, the object (a) has the tridimensional structure of a torus:

j a

Locatable between being and thinking, between mind and body, Miller says the object
(a) is structured in internal exclusion to itself. As a consequence, one seeks in the other
of object relations and in the Other of the symbolic order the traits that have already
structured ones own Ideal ego from the outside, traits that have been distorted
or transformed by the operations of substitution (metaphor) and displacement
(metonymy). These operations appear quite clearly in dream language. To attain the
other of object lovethe beloved partner one takes for ones soulone must seek him
or her in another, in a separate body, bringing a quality of strangeness into the
experiences of love and sex. And, this is of a piece with Freuds saying that the object
can be found only because it has already been lost.
Although these ideas may seem to have little to do with feminine sexuality or
with the pre-oedipal mother, they are the basis on which Miller put forward a new
theory of feminine sexuality in his reading of Lacans Seminar IV. Developing Lacans
idea that the symbolic mothers relation to lack concerns imaginary frustration, while
the object in question is a real organ (the breast), Miller elaborates the logic of the
interlinking of objects that cause desire and the master signiers later caught up in the

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drives that coalesce around these objects. Having translated Freuds Einzeger Zugen as
unary traitsthat is, a single identicatory stroke, detail, or letter that binds
language to the body via the various experiences of the object as lackingLacan gave
new meaning to Freuds concepts of identication. With his work on insignia, the
divine details, and the symbolic mothers giftsthe rst givensMiller shows
how the unary signiers that structure the eld of the real in the drives, the symbolic in
words, and the imaginary in images, join soma to language and images in a way that
produces three discrete but interlinked orderings that build up mind as criss-crossed
signifying chains.
In Lacans return to Freud, nothing is innate in mental life. Even the partial
drives, by which Lacan recongures the Freudian id, are constituted as montages of
associated forms and sounds as they eroticize the biological organism around the
objects that cause the desire for the repetition of lost pleasures. The drives are neither
instinctual nor natural, then, but are made up of a coalescence of language, images, and
the senses as they cluster around oral, anal, scopic, and invocatory experiences. It is this
materialthe primordial givens (which philosophy questions)that Miller calls the
rst gifts of love given by the symbolic mother.
Lacan adhered to the untenable thesis Freud could never prove: That all a
persons later thoughts have their roots in the rst experiences of primordially repressed
material, the Urverdrangt or la lalangue, which is organized into ever more complex
accretions of signifying units. But since the link between conscious meaning and the real
is disassociated in thought, the roots of meaning in memory disappear when one uses
language consciously. Yet they reappear in fantasy, symptom, and sublimation if one
knows how to decipher them. In the rst period of his teaching, Lacan presented
language as a kind of mask over jouissance or libido. In his nal period, jouissance had
become a formalized meaning system, placing libido in language as a sublimation of the
drives and a decallage between language and the fantasy object of desire. In trying to prove
that jouissance is repressed in the real of the sinthome, or knot, and sublimated in
language around an Ideal, Lacan dened a logic in Seminar IV that showed jouissance as
derived from three different relations to the object as lacking: symbolic castration,
imaginary frustration, and real deprivation. Castration or the lack-in-being supports the
social link ( j /S), while frustration and privation show the extremes of distress
occasioned by lack and loss (cf. the graph on page 269, Seminar IV).
Addressing this aspect of Lacans work, Miller returns to the rst teaching of the
early Lacan who made statements such as the letter killeth while the spirit giveth life
(Agency . . . , p. 158). Miller argued as early as 1981 that language represses jouissance. Not only do we not enjoy in language all the time, we are, generally speaking,
dead within italienated from jouissance. Still, some traces of the primordial, or preoedipal, mother remain in language, building a riverbed (la lalangue) of fantasy. In a very
large sense, any demand for satisfaction subsequently calls for the repetition of a prior
state of pleasure, known as such only in reference to the object rst implicated in the
interplay between desire and the lack Lacan called symbolic castration, or the internal-

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ization of a no whose rst objectal referent is the imaginary phallus (). It is not the
fathers imaginary phallus that is in question, however, but the imaginary phallus in
question between boys and girls. At the level of object relations, the real organ is the
mothers breast, which is offered or not, in one way or another, as the infants rst
symbolic gift. Millers focus is not on the breast as good or bad, a metonymy for the
quality of mothering, but on the symbolic love in question.
The xities that mark the real as countable unary traits (S1s) or sinthomes (re)appear as the infants demand for the return of the symbolthe base elementquickly
turns into the demand for consistency, which Lacan calls the repetitive imaginary. The
infant confronts a paradox: Pleasure is linked to the rigidity of ritualistic demand from
the start. We are confronted with a startling notion of the pleasure principle. The lack
of an object constitutes the demand for pleasure, not an ideal or idealized union
between mother and child. In this context, pleasure always contains the seeds of
displeasure within itself. Put another way, any infant knows the pleasure of an object
only in terms of the loss of that pleasure. Moreover, the real appears as sinthomes (S1 ; a)
that circulate around the organs engaged in seeing, speaking, eating, defecating, and so
on, where images, sounds and libidinal effects weave together the particular conditions
of jouissance (in Borromean units) that later govern a persons sexuality in terms of
libidinal response, as well as a persons thought, from the concrete pieces that compose
ever-owing fantasy (as reality) matter.
Early in his teaching, Lacan had argued that all language is built upon the jouissens of la lalangue or a primordial maternal murmuring. In Donc, Miller presented this
primordial language as constituting the rst gifts of maternal love to which Lacan
referred in Seminar IV, saying that a child does not depend on its mother or even its
experience of her at the level of partial object, but rather on her love. In Millers reading
of Seminar IV, maternal love is not a mystical essence, nor is it equatable with good
physical care, a good enough breast, or adequate mirroring. The concrete signifying
associations that surround the rst objects given in lovethe breast, care of the feces,
the voice, and the gazeprogram the infants brain with concrete information
subsequently communicated as affective messages through the synapses. This material
composes the primordial givens that phenomenological philosophy has either taken for
granted as a priori, or sought to dene, as did Merleau-Ponty, by an a priori natural.
Although it was Lacans position in Seminar XX that belief in the existence of an
essential Woman cannot be divorced from the natural fact of the mother, he advanced
no theory there, or elsewhere, of the pre-oedipal mother. Rather, he argued that there
was no pre-oedipal mother, there being no mother prior to the language that one uses to
describe her. Yet, insofar as the imaginary frustrations attendant upon interaction with
the real of the maternal breast are quickly subsumed by language as it seeks to represent
and, thus, negotiate the real, Lacan argued that the mother is subsumed by language: la
lalangue, a maternal llalation. Although religions and myths and psychoanalysis believe in
the mother as the ground beyond and beneath language, Lacan proposed in Seminar XX
that there is no essential Woman, not even as mother.

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Describing Seminar IV as a seminar on feminine sexuality, in Donc Miller described the feminine as constructed around the Lacanian object (a) which he had
presented in Extimite as the signier for the lack of an essential Woman, a profound lack
which places loss at the heart of the symbolic (). Although Lacan had conceptualized
the object (a) in 1964 as denoting a place of lack one seeks to ll, and had begun at the
time of his death to elaborate the meaning system of jouissance around this pivotal
matheme, showing this system as equal in complexity and organizational force to the
representational meaning system of signiers and images, Lacan never linked the object
(a) to the mother per se, except in reference to the real breast. And even though he
placed the object (a) on the side of the feminine in sexuation in Seminar XXwhere
feminine and passive become the position of the beloved in love and sexa position
that can be occupied by a man or woman, he did not give a logic to the relations among
Woman, mother, and the partial drives.
Lacans insistence that there is no essence of the feminine, no signier for Woman
qua Woman in the unconscious, has often been misinterpreted by feminists to mean
that he is a phallocrat who disdains women. As we have seen, Lacans axiom advanced in
Seminar XXThere is no the Woman(p. 68) means that Woman dwells in the
real, beyond the symbolic. In other words, there is no whole Woman who would be
equal to the various gures of Woman. But Lacan does not, then, equate Woman,
mother, jouissance, and the drives in an explanation of what it means for women to be
proximate to the real, although he implies in Encore that Woman is identied with the
real polymorphous perversity of objects that cause desire.
Freud viewed the task of becoming feminine as more difcult than that of
becoming masculine, given the girls additional challenge of turning away from the
mother and toward the father. Lacan implies the opposite: Being a man is an unnatural
identication with the difference he equates with the symbolic, itself an abstraction
derived from an asymmetrical veering away from Woman. In other words, a boy
becomes masculinetakes on attributes of manlinessthrough asymmetry, rather
than through an oppositional identication, as Karen Horney, Karl Jung, Jacques
Derrida, and countless others, have argued. In A Love Letter (S. XX, ch. 7), Lacan
argued that the real part of Woman does not exist in the symbolic order whose governing
principle is the differential feature of being named and counted. With no opposite-sex
parent to cause a conict between identicatory loyalty and the masculine jealousy that
wishes to remove a rival, the feminine evolves as an identication with a law beyond the
symbolic order laws that maintain masculine group cohesion. Thus, Woman is Other
to the phallic law of the symbolic by which the masculine bonds under the law of
obedience to group rules and a out of debt of deferred jouissance given to the Freudian
oedipal father whom Lacan renames the real father.
In relating Lacans concept of Woman to the mother, Miller implied in Matrice that if Woman, whom neither sex can ever conceptualize apart from the mother,
is radically Other to the symbolic order of language and social law, not only because she
is the rst all (the tout) against which any differential (the rien)all and nothing lying at

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the base of any dialectical intersection (of numbers, traits, etc.)is measured, but also
because Woman will always elicit jouissance responses that come from the primordial
part objects that cause desire.46 All, in this context, is used mathematically to mean
innity. Nothing limits innity. Yet, the alla line of pointsmust be intersected at
junctures along the line for meaning to exist. The points break innity into parts, in
other words. Lacan gave meaning to this structure by giving the point a dimensional
value of zero whose dimension is of the unary trait(s) that bind a hole to a trait; the line,
one; the surface, two; space, three; the knot, four (Seminar XX, p. 122). In other words,
the (re)presenting of words, images, and drives, as they inscribe themselves on the
biological organism, form the psyche topologically in a double ternary structure, rather
than in the imaginary or binary one to which conscious thought conforms. One can
argue that the primordial layer of being Lacan called an Ur-lining of the subject might
be equated with a pre-oedipal mother.
Insofar as Woman is identied in the unconscious of each subject with the
silence of the drivesjouissance being an absolute density which, as such, is not
empirically measurableWoman dwells in the nondialectical eld of sameness or
Oneness that Miller has described as the extimacy of a distant interior. And this distant
interior is the rst criterion by which any infant judges difference from the mother in
reference to distance, to the loss of objects that forms the primordial layer of being one
might equate with la lalangue or primary process. Moreover, these identications in the
real will always be confusedfor both sexeswith the engimatic meaning of the
mothers desire, such identications directed, as they are, toward her jouissance.
The pre-oedipal child takes on its rst layer of gender identity or sexuation,
thenwhich Freud called the active or passive part and which Lacan calls the masculine or feminine, or the positions of lover or belovedby confusing gender with
sexuality at the level where primordial repression is not gendered, but is, purely and
simply, a relation to the objects of the world that cause desire. Perhaps Melanie Klein
misread Freud, who argued that adult fantasies arise out of primordial experience of the
objects, the breast, and the feces, Klein pushing fantasy back into an innate prebirth
phenomenon. Since the object can only ever have the value of unary traits, Lacan
describes infant (and adult) experience of the object as experience of the trait(s) and the
holes they bind themselves to. While the object is a correlate of the real, which can be
recognized in imaginary lure, symbolic xations, or traces of the real, the signier that
demarcates the symbolic orderthe phallic signier for differencehas no signied,
except insofar as the structures of psychosis, neurosis, perversion, or the masquerade are
signieds that interpret this signifer.
Lacan placed Woman, by contrast, in proximity to the palpable hole in the
symbolic that pushes individuals to seek a consistency in jouissance through imaginary
identications, lest they encounter the void place at the heart of language and being
where anxiety speaks as the only true affect, the only one that cannot lie. Lifes quests,
then, are for unity, consistency, and a guarantee of stability, not for truth or knowledge
or justice. Although Woman as mother is generally taken as the guarantee of an ideal

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stability, a buffer against the anxiety that emanates from a void place in being created by
myriad losses and traumas that insert a concrete ordering of gaps between words and
things, Woman as mother is also identied with these losses. And Lacan argued that this
constitutes an epistemological (rather than ontological) place in language that both men
and women avoid touching upon. Men are uniquely traumatized by an encounter with a
void place in being insofar as they are unconsciously fearful of losing the male organ,
in addition to their very being being equatable with difference from the mother. Being a
man means always being subject to castration anxiety. In this context, male identication with the lawbe it the law of the social group or the superegois a defense
against the void in the Other. The masculine superego formation would not be a
response to oedipal guilt as Freud thought, but identication with a reality principle
linked to the name of some ideal father who would be whole, impervious to loss, and
whose rules are to be followed.
In Extimite (19851986) Miller rst elaborated the meaning of Lacans matheme for the barred Other (), or the hole in the symbolic, and, in so doing, gave
another meaning to the object (a) he called the extimate object. Millers clarication adds
an extension to Lacans proposition that Woman does not exist. Insofar as Woman
exists as mother in the real, she is, indeed, the primary cause around which the meaning
system of the three jouissance(s) of the Borromean knot circle. Lacans formula
Woman does not existwould be incorrect. If Woman is represented by the object (a)
around which the real, symbolic, and imaginary circle, and is inseparable from the
(the cut between the real and the imaginary that occurs at the moment of object loss),
then Woman does, indeed, exist as the embodiment of the only substance to which
Lacan would admit: positive jouissance. That is, woman exsists as object (a.)
Miller asked in Extimite what Lacan meant when he said there is no metalanguage,
no Other of the Other. Put another way, what does it mean to say that Woman is
linked to a void in the symbolic order? Arguing that the signier of the barred
the being the signier denoting a void place in beingis the object (a) (p. 238),
Miller suggested that Lacan felt a certain repugnance at writing such a formula that he
qualied as unthinkable. For from the moment one considers the signifying order as
based on the object (a), taken as a quod that the signier lacks, the names of the father can
only be taken as improper names.
Lacan never articulated this. And, indeed, he considered it an argument without
possible orientation, Miller says. In some sense, Lacan remained a nominalist. He could
not, therefore, elaborate the theory of affect implicit in the logic of jouissance he had
begun to map in the mid 1970s, a theory that can only take on its fuller sense in light of
Millers demonstrations of truth-functional conditions of the real that can be pinpointed, formalized, and studied and, thus, serve as guides in analytic treatment.
Miller gives a clear answer to Lacans impasse. Lacans matheme for castration
means simply presence or absence, but insofar as the barred Other is mathematically
equivalent to an imaginary value1it can also be written as imaginary castration
(). A symbolic-order value can be given to the logic of the cut. That is, a symbolic-

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order value can be given to the experience of loss because some real trait inscribes itself
as an effect of loss or separation. From this equivalence, Miller says, one nds a way of
approaching jouissance based on its interdiction (p. 241): Absence structures presence
via precise traits in the drives.
Although Lacan located Woman in the real of the eld of the drives, he never
specied precisely how the real can make a hole in the symbolic. Millers 19931994
interpretation of Seminar IV enables us to describe the hole in the symbolic (the ) as
the signied of the phallic signier (), which conates the mother of the drives with
Woman placed as a limit on innitude at the level where sex and love intersect. Thus, if
Woman exists in the real and ex-sists in the symbolic, even though there is no spirit of
Woman, no biological or psychological essence of the femininethe eternal feminine poeticized by Dante and Goetheanymore than there is a pregiven essence of
man, Woman still exists as the interface between language and a primary jouissance that
surrounds the nondialecticizable object (a) that refers all bodies to the mothers body
which, throughout recorded history, has been the site or matrix around which the
partial drives are constituted, giving a base to desire and fantasy.
Miller has claried Lacan to show that since the real of the object (a) is clothed
in imaginary guises of semblance and consistency that the symbolic tries to name as das
Ding, one can dialecticize the object in analysis by subverting semblances and using
language to work on the impasses and excesses in jouissance. These impasses index
xations in the real that have acquired all the inert power that Freud characterized as
the death drive. Operating from the site of the unspoken real, that which cannot be said,
the analyst occupies the place of Woman. But that has nothing to do with a would be
better mother. The analyst serves as a stand-in for a place outside symbolic order
strictures and alienations and outside imaginary order narcissism and mirror identications. He or she, thereby, enables the analysand to try to symbolize the real material
which, by denition, is the not-yet-spoken. Treatment does not bear on whether the
patient had good or bad parenting, then, but on the real of suffering that comes from
the ways in which a subject becomes xed in lethal jouissance. By pushing language
that is, thoughtto its limits, a person can challenge impasses in his or her jouissance
and begin to unknot the rigidity of old signifying units whose marks appear in the
symbolic as impasses from the real. Thus, Lacanian analysis works at the intersections
between the real and language and the real and the imaginary where an analysands
symptoms show up.
One could argue, in conclusion, that if Woman as real mother does exist in the
drives, then the referent of all language is corporal. Such an argument, moreover, would
not be the essentialist view of woman as reduced to her body or her biological destiny.
Rather, the real is inscribed, detail by detail, as a knowledge in the moments when the
enjoyment of an object, such as the breast (or bottle), or the objects of the world, is lost.
From the start, desire is constituted in dissonance with jouissance, or Oneness with the
object. But the unary trait that remains in the real attaches a remnant of lost jouissance
to language. That trait is incorporated as a mark that belongs to the set of meanings

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constituted around loss itself. And insofar as the trauma of the real equates the
primordial loss of the object with Woman as bearer of the drives, analysis will always
focus on this place. It is not Freuds Woman as giver of unity that one nds here. For
Freuds Woman as mother is asexual. Nor is it Lacans Woman who does not exist as
Other in the symbolic. Miller gives us, rather, Woman as the mother who was rst
experienced as sexual and erotic. This is neither Lacans theory that Woman does not
exist as a signier for difference in the symbolic because she is radically Other to man,
nor that Woman only enters the symbolic as mother, agent of frustration. Miller
portrays Woman as entering the symbolic as the giver of love at the point where love
and Eros are inseparable.
In some sense, Lacans formulaThe Woman does not existdoes not advance beyond Freuds pre-1931 theory that man is the standard or norm. Although
Lacan postulated the real as itself a limit to the symbolic, as a point of impasse at which
the unspeakable demands of jouissance constitute an ordering of the meanings of
jouissance, he did not, as has Miller, attach this theory to the position of the mother
who stands in as signier for the object (a) within the drives. Not only are the rst
gifts of this symbolic mother the real gifts of lovebe they made of gold or brass
this primordially repressed material also serves as the basis of the philosophical givens
(forms) out of which thought weaves itself.
Millers threading together of Freud and Lacan around the paradoxical meaning
of the pre-oedipal mother could well enable psychoanalysis to exit from the impasses of
object-relations theories in which the mother is taken for the whole object in a variety
of phenomenological equations of the visible with the person, or in which some part
stands in for an imagined whole. Such theories restrict analytic practice to the behavioral task of reparenting or repairing a defective ideal which was never One at all.

Conclusion

Since there is no one who is not concerned with gender and gender studies, a book on
sexuationthe logical development of the cause of genderis of interest to everyone.
Lacans theory of sexuation argues that men and women are sexuated psychically, not
biologically. That is, there is a psychic asymmetrical logic at work in differentiating
biological woman from biological man. The goal of this book has not been to offer an
alternative logic to those theories that claim that the sexual difference makes no
difference, or that gender studies have switched to a brother/sister model, or any other
such dismissive argument. I wished to challenge the essentialist roots of theories of
gender as they are taught in elds such as biology, sociology, psychology, and so on.
Lacans rethinking of sexuation concerns the conditions of jouissance that rotate
between pleasure and pain. He argues that the masculine and feminine are particular
psychic identications. The masculine identies predominantly with the symbolic
order of language and social conventions, while the feminine identies with the real of
affect, loss, and trauma. Whether one identies as masculine or feminine does not
concern ones biological sex, but the postion one occupies in reference to the masculine
all of knowledge, or the feminine not all of knowledge.
Lacans basic question is: What is womans nature insofar as it differs from
mans? He approaches this question by considering how jouissance conditions are
logically inscribed in the unconscious as an interpretation of the sexual difference. That
which we seek in everyday endeavors, as well as in abstract tasks connected with the
intellect, emanate from the precise real of what one will also seek as enjoyment. These
conditions are written in reference to the phallic signierthat is, that which
denotes difference qua differenceand the consequent castration or lack that follows upon learning that the difference has the effect of subtracting something from an
imagined whole. Lacan argues that not only does the phallic signier have imaginary
visible properties, it has abstract and affective properties as well.
The central thesis of this book has been an explication of the overwhelming
effects of the sexual difference and their ramications. Not content with wholistic
imaginary models, Lacan took up Aristotles modal (qualitative) logic and combined it
with the existential quantors of the universal () and the particular () in order to

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Conclusion

arrive at a rethinking of impasses in Aristotle and Freud, impasses that could be

brought together to offer a new way to think about the ramications of the sexual
difference. Whereas Aristotle was concerned to explain the cause of an act as necessary,
efcient, material, or instrumental (that is, as representable or quantiable), Lacans
interest lay in uncovering the causes of different libidinal (qualitative) modes of
response to the discovery and interpretation of the sexual difference. Whereas Aristotle
sought the source of cause in things or in the know how of technique, Lacan evolved
the logical modes of the possible, the impossible, the contingent, and the necessary as effects
whose cause is the interpretation made of the primordial phallus and its part-object
character of being absent or present. He maintained something as profound as this: The
base of mind lies in the varying outcomes of the interpretation of the sexual difference,
an experience that is initially traumatic for little children. Moreover, two of the
modesthe necessary and the possibledescribe a masculine way of being in language,
while the other twothe contingent and the impossibletake up a feminine epistemology.
Lacan claimed, moreover, that the loss of the primordial objects that rst cause
one to desire (the breast, the feces, the urinary ow, the imaginary phallus, the voice, the
phoneme, the gaze, and the nothing) simultaneously makes of them causal objects at
the moment they are lost. Lacan makes these the threads of connection an infant has to
his or her immediate world. As each object is lost, the desire for its return begins to
build up a signifying network of real, symbolic, and imaginary orderstrait by trait
loss signaling that something present is gone and that the return of a part of the object
is desirable. Loss sets forth the dialectical mechanism by which particular jouissance
conditions are laid down, singular trait by singular trait. Launching the innovative
hypothesis that loss is the prime mover in the genesis of any act, Lacan demonstrates
how Aristotle ended up in the impasse of a static primum mobile. In Lacans theory, the
leap to a metalanguage lies in the metas seeking in language a way to establish his
or her enjoyment. In this, any act of language is an act in and of itself, not a metaphorical duplicity. Not only does knowledge later become a savoir that is enigmatic, it is
enigmatic because it is replete with the primordial material of gaps, holes, and doublings by which one seeks to repeat seemingly stable jouissance conditions. Instead, the
quest for jouissance conditions always meets an instability between subject and object.
The object one nds is never quite it, das Ding of ultimate pleasure. The unconscious
is [thus] a savoir faire with la lalangue, la lalangue meaning the primordial layer of maternal
murmerings and sounds of an infants world given by the mother before the infant can
begin to shape these sounds into the words that name things.1 Lacan made the word for
spoken language la langue into a direct object, la lalangue, to challenge the linguistic notion
of a natural language.
In the later years of his work, Lacan presents topology as that which structures
the sites where the subject emerges, not as a self or an ego but as a redoubled effect of
having to represent itself as meaning, both representationally and libidinally. Put
another way, individuals are representationally identied with a signier for being x, y,
or zidentied with the phallic signier for difference from the mother as the

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condition of identityor with its lack. Such identications make of the necessary, the
possible, the impossible, and the contingent, modes of jouissance whose referent is
castration, or a lack-of-being whole. In other words, insofar as the phallic signier
marks a place in the symbolic, a subject is that place, as a signer representing a subject for
another signier. Put yet another way, the phallic signier denotes alienation by
representations that make of fantasies the fourth-order sinthomes (symptoms) or knots
that sustain a kind of pseudowholeness in being and thought, despite the constant
interplay of the falseness of an alienated identitythe gap between the image and the
word ()and the cut between the desired object and its loss ().
Alienation into language accompanies separation from the objecttwo logical
operationssuch that libidinal and representational meaning move by a constant
metonymic and metaphorical rhythm of deferral and substitution. We have gone from
Aristotles inert prime mover, Freuds biology, to Lacans Otherthe outside world
that imposes itself on us, making each person a concrete accretion of signifying units
that build into vast signifying necklaces we call mind or memory. We do not remember within this conception of mind, Lacan says. Rather, rememoration is the process
of repression whereby we continually draw upon associational meanings from the three
orders to enable us to move within secondary-process language.
Insofar as negation links fantasy to meaning vis-`a-vis four potential interpretations of the phallic difference and its lack, one ends up either foreclosing the sexual
difference (psychosis), repudiating it (perversion), denying it (neurosis), or repressing it
(the normative masquerade). These four possibilities denote precise logics, each of
which marks particular attitudes toward law, as well as toward desire. Lacan argues that
the problem in the constitution of male or female sexuality is not the organ qua organ,
then, but the dialectic between desire and jouissance. While desire cum lack will be
foreclosed, repudiated, denied, or repressed, at the level of jouissance, the masculine
necessary and the possible logics believe that all knowledge can be included in one space,
while the impossible and contingent logics know that not all meaning can be enclosed within a
space. Genevi`eve Morel demonstrates this in her work on compacity.
Aligning sexuality with the realthat which is palpable, while remaining unsayable and unrepresentableLacan argued that the conditions of enjoyment write these
four modes: In the possible, some symptom ceases writing itself, while in the impossible
some symptom or effect does not stop not writing itself. The necessary concerns what
does not stop writing itself, while the contingent stops not writing itself. Fittingly, the
necessary and possible modes of jouissance are on the masculine side of sexuation, describing that which must be known about law for a group to cohere as social. Lacan deduces
this logic from a rereading of Freuds Totem and Tabooas a defense against not being
allowed to remain one with the mother. Having set up the dialectical logic by which
society comes into beingby contrast, psychosis evolves no dialectic, no reciprocity
with another, and, thus, no social groupingLacan has also given a logical way of
reading the sexual difference (which the psychotic forecloses).
Having returned to Freud via Aristotle, Lacan is able to show how Freuds 1925

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biology yielded a few logical insights that are viable only outside the biologism in which
they are wrapped. Lacan claims that Freud proposed the pre-oedipal as a response to
the impasses he had run up against in his efforts to elaborate a theory of the Oedipus
complex. He also claimed that Freuds theory of a phallic phase was one and the same as
his concept of an oedipal identity. Lacan took us from Freuds biology to a notion of
the world outside where the Other names the infant in terms of its own unconscious
desire. Thus, an infant starts life under the aegis of an alienated identity. From the start,
mind and body are intertwined.
Moreover, by Seminar XX Lacan will say that the body is thought. While
jouissance depends on the universal of how an infant assimilates the exception to the
rule of difference with its particular consequences for any singular subject, masculine or
femininexx/xxthe phallic signier demonstrates three different ways of
negating these terms: , , . The exception is marked by two negations on the
feminine side of sexuation. Lacans is a complex logic of the phallus, taken as the differential in
reference to which thought evolves as dialectical, or not. The phallus also marks a jouissance
relation to desire as representational (necessary, possible) or libidinal (impossible, contingent).
Because representation is shot through with jouissance, this determines that one is never
whole (except in psychotic delusion) and that mind and body are never disintricated
(except in a psychotic split).
The logics of the necessary and possible enjoyments are contiguous with a belief in
the all of the completeness of knowledge that equates what one knows with what there
is to know. When one is not all under the phallic sway of tallying reality with language,
jouissance has not completely been anesthetized. Feminine subjects are not all under the
phallic conventions and can, thus, take a certain distance from the all of the master
discourse. Thus, alienation falls on the side of masculine knowledge. The master knows
it all, is identied with a totalized jouissance, and substitutes knowledge for truths of
the unconscious. On the feminine side of sexuation, separation from the object of
satisfaction is of a piece with a supplemental bodily jousissance that ties diffusion to the
interrogatory not all in symbolic-order knowledge.
These positionsall in the symbolic or not all in the realare marked as well by
primary identication either with the real maternal Other of the drives, or the symbolic
father of the group, of language, and of a local (universal) law of reality, while la lalangue
marks the feminine side with maternal murmerings of jouis-sens (an enjoyed meaning).
When Lacan argues that such logics are epistemological ways of knowing, he supports
his claims by the topological that is not necessarily visible. He is, thus, positing a
structural way of linking truth-functional contradictions by dissimilars. While Freud
read imaginarily, taking the thing to be itself, Lacan reads topologically, taking
primary functions to be, paradoxically, made up of secondary functions that construct
the primary one. In other words, the hole is constructed by the unary traits which bind
themselves to a void, making it a hole. Topologically speaking, the hole comes rst, not
second.

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Masculine knowledge is positivized, thencountable, visiblewhile feminine

knowledge, refusing closure, is negativizedthe qualitative, the invisible. The objectcause-of-desire that builds up the primordial la lalangue becomes language in constructing fantasies and the Ideal ego of unconscious formation, from which people, in turn,
act and know. The depiction of the most complete unit of mind is the Borromean knot
that Lacan later called a picture in the real, or that which shows a site from which
something is given to be seen, or heard, or known. The three circles that interlace the
Borromean unit are intersecting parallels that mark the topologicalthe logic of
placedimensions of a surface as imaginary (as in the schema), inscribed (as in
graphs), or presenting real places, as in a picture. These are joined, not only by the
knotthe Fathers Name signier raised to the second degreebut also by three
kinds of jouissance: the capital phi of alienation into language (), the negative phi of a
gap between word and thing (), and the cut in the Other that makes all sets, at least
partially empty ().
While Freud insisted on the harmony of the masculine and feminine, Lacan
discovered a universal disharmony and attributed that to the logical structure of
difference between a boy and a girl. While Freud believed that difference as a difference
from the sameboth for boys and girlsresults in sociological roles, Lacan argued
that the symbolic is identied with boys who are dened in asymmetrical disharmony
from the rst one with whom they are the same, the mother. There is no superiority of
sex or organ, in Lacans teaching, only a superiority of the symbolic insofar as it is the
place of difference and Otherness. Indeed, it belongs to both sexes. The symbolic is
valued insofar as it starts a count, ushering in the realm of the social, of others, while the
real remains intimate and replete with secrets of agony and ecstasy, a realm of conict,
excitation, discontinuity, and disharmonious impasses.
But, nally, Lacan and Frege, whom Lacan followed in certain areas, manifested
themselves as anti-Aristotelian. One of the paradoxical consequences of all womens
lacking the totalized phallic injunction is that all are not all (xx) under the sway of its
requisites. This logic of the all not all is what Lacan called a discordential feminine
doubling of the libido, not a double foreclosure of Woman as some readers have
misunderstood. The point is that Lacan reverses Aristotelian logic in feminine sexuation by making the particular (xx) both negative, as well as that which gives rise to
the universal (xx) as positive.
Chapter 1 maintained that identifying with the phallic signier, for Lacan, does
not mean identication with an organ. It means identifying with difference as an
abstraction, an invisible thing. It means taking a position vis-`a-vis difference. This is
one reason Lacan talks about subject position as being a concrete lack in a chain of
referential meanings. By introjecting the Other, absolute kinds of identications are
represented as the fragments Lacan called unary traits. Their ordering is real and
chaotic, not developmental and smooth. Such real material reenters the symbolic as
discontinuities, or as privileged moments, or as epiphanic revelations. At the least,

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Conclusion

one can say that the real distorts any cohesive or consistent symbolic-imaginary narrative by bringing loss, lack, or negation into the smooth ow of narrative or vision. Such
cuts into the symbolic give the phallic signier a paradoxically strong superegolike
quality and yet, a fundamental instability. Perhaps we could say the phallus is an
omnium-gatherum word for Realitat (psychic reality) and Wirklichkeit (sense-data reality)
combined. The point is that the phallus starts the count of an order, of the serial (1,2,3;
a,b,c), not because it is the object observed in the sexual differenceobserved as an
imaginary object by both sexesbut because the sexual difference is the rst difference
that impinges on human consciousness.
Borrowing Freges symbol for the propositionLacan makes the (phallic)
proposition itself a signier without a signied. Its logical function is to evoke difference, to serve as a differential basis for thought that arises in reference to concrete
lacks in our perceptions and identications. The phallic differential, in other words,
postulates a lack between signiers that Lacan calls the subject. This is a radically
different theory than that feminine and masculine attributes are simple oppositional
binaries. Rather, sexuality takes on nonbiological specic masculine or feminine epistemological assumptions. Moreover, sex is not what or where we think it is. The
reconceptualization Lacan gives us of the feminine and the masculine has the utmost to
do with the terms and questions posed by feminist debates. Indeed, Lacans logic of
feminine sexuality demonstrates an epistemological position, not a one-down place in
society. Constituted in a combinatoryby the law of the signier that represents a
subject for another signiermasculine and feminine sexualities are redened in terms
of conict, not pleasure. Further, Lacan makes no one-to-one equation of sexuality
which resides in the eld of the drives (oral, anal, invocatory, and scopic)with
jouissance. While sexuality is xed in fantasy, jouissance is lost in bits and pieces
through alienation into language and separation from the primordial objects-cause-ofdesire. At another level, jouissance tries to maintain a consistency by equating itself with
imaginary wholeness, with semblance.
In the third period of his teaching, Lacan argued that the unconscious is sexuality
in function, secondary-process representations being riddled with remnants of primaryprocess fantasy and desire. Moreover, he argues that language is linked to drives via
jouissance. We ask for something in the eld of the oral drive (for nourishment), the
anal drive (for control), the scopic drive (for recognition), and the invocatory drive (for
being heard). In this sense, one can argue that the paternal metaphorthe Lacanian
Oedipus complexcan be rewritten as the Fathers Name signier (language itself )
over the Mothers unconscious desire (Fathers Name/Mothers Desire Mothers
Desire/?), which produces the Fathers Name as the Other over the phallus that
supplants the mothers unconscious desire with some interpretation of it. The product
is the Other (of culture and representation) supposed as a savoir which is, at one level,
repressed maternal desire. It is through such logical operations that biological sexuality
becomes psychic sex. While the object (a) charts the pathways of drivesitself the
cause of the dialectic underlying the drives insofar as desire is equal and respondent to

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the lack that is its inverse sidemind can be deduced from lack and loss supplemented
by myths of the essential Woman who should exist; jouissance; the object (a); as well as
the representing language and law as a local (universal) reality.
Mind cannot be deduced from organs and their various displacements, as Freud
thought, any more than one can readily see that the gap is itself a function in language
and, as such, is an attribute of language. One gets to this in analysis through transference love that links desire to the drives whose structure is not only that of the signier,
but also the gaplike structure of the unconscious itself. Thus, the question of what
determines sexuality is, for Lacan, desire, the partial drives, and love. That is, there is no
genital drive per se that imposes itself on being as some blind, mechanistic id force.
Love joins desire to the drives whose structure is that of the signier and the unconscious. Woman, moreover, is not the drive object she is thought to be, but a signier
interpreting her ction of the father. Between man and woman reside the asymmetries
of their construction, as well as the particular Otherness of the unconscious of each.
One cannot say, then, as do object-relations theorists, that identication is with objects
rather than with a biological psyche. Identication is with signiers, whose structure is
already dialectical. Between being and meaning, the object (a) is the subject that is
recoverable from the structure of separation.
Furthermore, there is no equation between a reproductive instinct and the sexual
drive. Drives are constituted as a montage of signiers and images, while produced as a
residue of what is left over of cuts from the objects that rst caused desire for lost
objects, and what remains after the oedipal drama. Put another way, Thanatos cum
alienation spoils a would-be universal Eros. Thus, the object (a) is not only not
nothing, it is, indeed, ones cause. Furthermore, there is no inscription for man or
woman in the unconscious; there is no signier for sex there. This places confusion,
illusion, myth, and mysticism at the heart of sexual relations, not peace, love,
harmony, and bliss. Sexuality is replaced by the object (a) of fantasy on the side of loss
and by the other as partner on the side of lack.
Lacan gives a new theory of the place to look for sexuality. Going in the opposite
direction of the imaginary pinups of the month, he situates sexuality in the master
signiers that make up ones singular jouissance marks. Not only do these compose
thought, they also dictate the particular conditions of love. In this sense, jouissance
sublimates all human relations, making them automatically erotic and libidinal. To try
to eliminate the threat of the real that this poses, the masculine in discourse, knowledge,
and logic impose the One signier whose nickname could well be the superego. On
the feminine side, the woman exposes the real void place in the symbolic set of
ensembles, thus pulling the rug from under anyones feet who thinks The Woman
exists as a guarantee for wholeness and stability, given that the Fathers Name does not.
The goal of sex becomes twofold: to ll up the void with as many identications and
objects as possible and to capture the othersthe beloved onesagalma (that in one
that is more than one). Agalma would be a point where desire joins itself to jouissance to
show that beyond the man and woman, beyond the masculine and the feminine, lies the

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Conclusion

phallus and its lack, creating symbols of difference that are themselves the pivot around
which all things turn.
Whereas Aristotle settled for a universalist picture of the All when he could not
see his way out of impasses such as how movement begins, Lacan made a subtle
distinction between totality and the all. Taking up a point of slippage between Aristotles and Freges formulas, Lacan points out that the notion of a totality is opposed to
an ensemble <> which evokes an open relation based on supplementarity, not complimentarity. There is no all, Lacan argues, except as empty, or as a propositional function
of contingency, Thus, the logic by which one inscribes oneself as all within the phallic
function is already based on a sham whose truth is given by the not all of the sexual
masquerade. Male sexuality is all enclosed in a logic of difference from the mother,
while female sexuality is not all enclosed in this logic of difference, for the girl resides in the phallic camp as well as outside it. What Lacan is doing, then, is using
negativity, or its lack, as philosophical values which demonstrate how one moves in
language.
Insofar as a child assumes his or her sexuation in reference to the asymmetrical
relation of Man <> Woman, he or she learns that he or she is not all one sex, nor is he or
she the mothers only treasure. The Fathers Name imposes itself between the infant
and the mother, claiming her as his at the level of desire. This no teaches males and
females alike that they are castrated or lacking-in-being. Indeed, any maledespite
being all identied with the symboliclearns castration in reference to the group
which accepts to defer to a leader. Such deferral, paradoxically, places a tendency
toward masculine openness at the site of his thrust toward encompassing the all, being
all identied with the law of the group, while the feminine position within knowledge is
based on the closed set that need not aim for innity since she already knows she is not
all subjected to the signier One of masculine castration logic. One can say that oedipal
identications as all or not all begin around age ve or six, along with the acquistion of
secondary-process language. Meanwhile, the feminine bedrock of language is laid down
as the famous discovery of a feminine pre-Oedipusla lalanguethat xes the life of
desire and the drives during the rst four years. Afterward, primary jouissance and
secondary representations will struggle with this war in each persons breast. That is, the
primary imaginary opposes the secondary symbolic, the rst seeking the consistency of
jouissance and the second seeking to ll the lack in the Other.
The /S the subject lacking in being a whole essenceis spoken by language. Lacan
dened the subject as a gap in the signifying chain by going back to reconsider Aristotles
own impasse. Never having separated logic from languagethat is, grammar from
languagehis propositions begin from the universal and proceed to a particular
negation that is, erroneously, presupposed positivistically. Lacan, rather, approached the
negative/positive divide of the subject residing in language, as a function of language.
Moreover, it is created primarily by the loss of the object a and secondarily by the
traumatic assimilation of sexual difference. During the primordial period, infants

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depend on the object that causes desire and the mothers love, but once the rst oedipal
moment is experienced identicatorily, the phallus takes on a +/ value that ignores all
physical, mental, and social attributes of the person and simply works to valorize
difference (+) and to devalue sameness (). Such a structural logic pushes men and
women toward telling each other who and what they are at the level of attributes with
a near disregard for gender, Lacan claimed, thus, constructing the battle between the
sexes.
In assessing what is particular to the feminine and not to the masculine, Lacans
work on the paternal metaphor (Freuds Oedipus complex) is crucial. The incest taboo
is a function that is coequivalent with castration. It not only gives birth to the
possibility for metaphor (substitutions) and dialectic, it affects both sexes differently.
At one level, Lacan says, the cause of mentality is to cover over the real and to negotiate
desire. This occurs through identications with the paternal metaphor that produce
particular sinthomes that represent something like a wholeness of ones being. Lacan
developed his sexuation tables to insist that existence claims demand material proof. The masculine logic
of the whole or all is an epistemological position based on a logic of contradiction.
That is, identication with the all, immediately implies its own limit which, Lacan says,
is to be found in jouissance. Identication with the not all on the feminine side creates a
double negative that is much like the number 2 in number theory. Two cannot be
inscribed as a rational number because it consists of mirror-stage illusions owing in
and out of a pseudo-one. Rather than speak of a double negative, however, Lacan called
the femininebased on the idea that there is no exception to the rule of castrationa
discordential logic.
Still, how does sexuation explain Freuds quandaries about the sexual difference?
Freud uncovered in 1931 and 1932 that girls reject their mothers at the second oedipal
stage. Lacan maintained that this is because they want to be dened by the symbolic,
not the real. Based on the hypothesis that there is no pregiven genital drive, the
nonrapport between the sexes will stem not only from a radical difference, but from
different solutions in identity as well. The interplay goes back and forth between a
1+1 and a 1+1 such that masculine closed sets evolve the following two logics,
both against the Aristotelian universal: For Lacan there is a concrete universal based on
a negative. That is, there is an exception to the rule, one who is supposed as not
castrated, x; the consequence is that all who are not this exception are castrated in
reference to him or her. The two feminine logics work differently. Lacan says that a
concrete universal based on a negativethe no exception to the rule of castration on
the feminine sidemeans that there is not one who is not dened by this lack. The
paradox is that this double negative ends up creating a positive: There is not one who is
not all castrated. Thus, there is one part of the feminine that is free from the obligations
of a given symbolic law. Women, thus, belong to closed sets, sets with limits, while men
belong to open sets, trying, paradoxically, to break out of the strictures in which they
are enclosed in the symbolic. The woman, having one foot already outside the symbolic,

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Conclusion

belongs to a closed set. The major point Lacan is making here is that the primacy of the
phallus is correlatednot with jouissance, butwith the castration complex, with the
identication of having or not having of the phallic imaginary partial object.
Lacan takes up what he means by sexuality, showing the consequences for gender
studies when masculine (psychic) sex is formed as an asymmetrical veering to the side
from feminine (psychic) sex. That does not mean that man and woman are not
constituted as signiers in a combinatory of language. It means, simply, that while a
man may be preponderantly identied with the feminine, and a woman with the
masculine, cultural mores try to tally biological gender to psychic identication. One
can thereby understand the revolutionary character of Lacans ethical stance which
argues that one can only face oneself in the truth of desire by not giving up on it. Lacan
wanted to be clear about the lack of equation between jouissance and sexuality. While
sexuality is xed in fantasy, jouissance is lost in alienation into language and separation
from the primary objects that rst caused desire. For this reason, Lacan equated the
unconscious with sexuality, whose dual language is that of secondary-process repressions and denials and primary-process la lalangue of fantasy and desire. Mind is deduced
from loss and supplemented by Woman, jouissance, the (a), as well as the for the
Fathers Name signier. All these letters denote psychic realities that are, in Lacans
teaching, formal properties of language that can be disengaged from language and
studied as such. Moreover, they add up to a logic of desire, fantasy, and jouissance.
Given these premises, it should not be so shocking to think of the subject as an actual
gap in language, as well as a function in it.
This brings us back to the question of what sexuality is. Arguing that there is no
sexual drive per se, no reproductive instinct, Lacan says Freud shows us where sexuality
is in his work on the drives which, on closer scrutiny, appear as a montage of all the
identications particular to one. But what does this have to do with the sexual difference? A woman is a signier who interprets the ction of the father, Lacan maintains,
while man is a ction who believes in the myth of the essential Woman. These are not
natural descriptions, nor are they harmonious within their own terms. People love one
another by identication with signiers and objects. Yet, since there is no signier for
sex in the unconscious, one must make do with substituting the object (a). Thus, at the
level where meaning joins being, ones cause is ones cause as an object (a). Insofar as
each subject depends on the imaginary other and the symbolic Other to verify/reify
who he or she is (or is not) as an Ideal in the elds of the scopic, invocatory, oral, and
anal partial drives, one must say that sexuality is hooked to a lack of being all and the
loss of the objects that cause desire.
What this meansthat there is no signier for the sexual difference in the
unconsciousis that we must take our self-believed descriptions from the signiers
that make up our thought out of traces of jouissance. This places all human relations
not just artunder the sublimation of the jouissance that Lacan nally equates with
the Fathers Name signier, as it becomes the knot in the real he calls the sinthome. The

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189

master signier, on the side of the Fathers Name, is what Lacan called the One
signier, or an identication with the all, while the feminine signier for The Woman
who does not exist refers to the void place in the Other that marks a real emptiness
there. The goal of sex, then, is to ll the void with the object (a) and to capture the
others agalma.
Sexuality starts, then, as a response to the real, symbolic, and imaginary at the
level where the jouissance engaged is experienced as active or passive. One either actively
seeks to ll the void place in the Other (), or one lets oneself be used passively as the
ller. Beloved or loverthese labels mark us all and take the moralistic tone out of
Freuds description of active (i.e., successful) boys and passive (i.e., long-suffering) girls.
The rst separations from the object (a) create a hole in the Other which, in turn, is
lled by an identication (an S1, a master signier). This produces jouissance which can
be described as the object (a) that sutures the void: /a. Everything that has to do with
language, concept, proposition, or hypothesis is undergirded by and held in the cusp of
primordial givens that, in turn, connect desire to love and love to language.
Drives, then, are a meaningful substance of jouissance that ll the void, not a
mythology as Freud thought. Indeed, says Lacan, Beyond the Pleasure Principle proves that
all drives are death drives. Another way to say this is that we are our own sinthomes. What
trips us up are the repetitions that are ours and, thus, serve as our limits. Sexuality is
the desire for jouissance, Lacan says, and it is never separate from language. Its causes
are as innumerable as are fantasies. The point is that sex is not the issue but that one
repeat, rather, the particular, singular conditions that constitute ones jouissance. In
Lacans teaching, the object (a) is no myth. Freud spoke of the myth of the drives, while
Lacan, nally, depicted the object (a) as real. Jean-Paul Gilson calls this an (a) spheric
knowledge. This (a)-spherical writing begins with the object (a) that is lost and then
returns in other forms to ll the hole its loss has created. In the usage of language, he
says, the aspheric is creative, constructionist. This renders language living and means that
what one can invent as new will always contain a small piece of the real which forges the
paths of rememorationor repressionrather than those of reminiscence. While
reminiscence is not a savoir but a relived ideation belonging to the imaginary, rememoration belongs to the signifying chain and to the knot that makes something
unconsciousenter into our knowledge as a savoir that was already there. This theory
of knowledge is nothing less than a new writing that symbolizes the chain that it, in
turn, represents.
While the jouissance that maintains the status quo, or the ups and downs of
affective life, has a plus or minus value in reference to the phallic signier, one proof
that the subject is a nonbiological subject at the level of meaning lies in the interplay
between jouissance and desire. While desire is structured by the dialectic of the Ideal
ego and the ego ideals referring themselves to the Fathers Name signier, the limit of
jouissance that can be brought forth by the subject concerns the interplay between the
all (the phallic signier) of jouissance and the not all of fantasy and desire. Lacans point

190

Conclusion

is that the prime mover is neither Platos Form nor Aristotles thought. The prime
mover is the (a) as lost. Since the (a) cannot be pinned down because it is always
disappearing, imaginary lures, language, and law must supplement it, stand in for it.
Indeed, this makes representation seem more substantial than libido. One begins to see
how the drives can materialize entire meaning eldsinvocatory, scopic, oral, and
analwith jouissance given that the human drive par excellence is to replicate oneself
as Ideal. The drive is to be whole, to ll the void presupposed by the demand which, for
Lacan, is the drive. In sex and in love, we think we are incorporating the (a), while we
are actually incorporating the others soul as a ller to our own lack. While love aims at
the soul, sex aims at an organ. But neither satisfaction can make any one of us whole
once and for all. Indeed, the gap from which love comes is the demand for more love
which, by denition, is an insatiable, even narcissistic, demand. Desire, meanwhile,
splits love between sex and the soul, which Lacan denes as the likeness between
individuals.
Lacans theory does not allow for any innate hetero- or homosexuality in man or
woman. Nor is there a pre-oedipal mother who can ll the void with satiation. There is
the symbolic mother, the infants drives, and, in between, the gifts she has to offer. It is
not that Lacan in any way minimalizes the importance of sexuality in relations of desire
and love. It is, instead, that he sees that the stakes are so much larger than pleasure. After
orgasm, after fulllment, one is left with a oneness +, with the search (encore) for the
agalma, ones greatest good as lost, missing, just missed. In his sexuation graph, the tables
interpret the modal conditions of jouissance, its positive and negative features. If one
chooses to reside on the feminine side, be it a biological man or a woman, ones subject
choice is a being-for-the-other. If one chooses from the masculine side, ones choice is
for reifying self and lling lack.
Insofar as the masculine identies with the lack-in-being (/S) and the positivized
phallus () and the feminine identies with the object a and the void place in the Other
(), one can say the male identies with castration (/S/lack), while the female identies
with the void (/loss). Moreover, four fundamental concepts are regularly at play in
structuring the interwoven mind/body of Lacanian thoughtthe unconscious, repetition, transference, and the driveswhile three kinds of negation bear on the jouissance
of being: the , the and the . With these strictures, we use language to get the
jouissance we can, showing that identity and sexuation are one and the same. Indeed,
the unconscious is a secondary formation, erected in the assumption of sexuation.
Lacans logical tables show that instead of being sexual in one way or another, we are
sexuated in taking a stance toward lack of the phallus (or not as in psychosis). Thus,
there is no binary of a biological sexuality opposed to a masculine or feminine identity.
Rather, masculine and feminine link the active and passive around power and desire as
they negotiate the all of symbolic of knowledge, or the not all of another kind of
knowledge, the real.
Insofar as certain sinthomesidenticatory sinthomes that are real knotscreate
the self as a series of knots concerning the mothers unconscious desire and the place

Conclusion

191

of the Fathers Name signier in the social realm, they can be undone. Lacan called this
using the symbolic to work on the real. And sinthomes always concern ones place in the
masculine or feminine. Indeed, Lacan goes so far as to say that the symbolic and
imaginary orders arise as interpretations of sexual difference. He calls this principle of
difference the phallic differential, or the oedipal cut. This signier both creates lack and
denies it, all the while joining jouissance (to be recuperated) to castration. Indeed,
Lacan argues nothing less than that knowledge itself defends against castration and, in
the process, founds social law. We have gone from Freuds organ- and contentbased explanations to Lacans topology in which a boy is opposed to a girl in reference to a tertiary term, the phallus. The result of the interplay between castration and jouissance in language is that we speak symbolically and imaginarily, but in
real time.
Lacans arguments will necessarily lead him to a new denition of the distinction
that serves as the criterion for subject/object disalignment. Not only is the object not
the image as the-thing-in-itself, as Lacan suggested in the seventies, the object is most
present in its insignia of lack: anxiety, doubt, fear, panic. This is the level at which the
object is real and makes use of the imaginary to cover over the real. In this sense, the
imaginary is doubled, imagines wholes, and is marked by repetitions, in antithetical
distinction to the discrete differences and partial qualities of the symbolic. Further,
insofar as the oedipal axis is the differential that both causes and permits desire, as well
as delimiting jouissance, difference from the mother will be comparable to distance
from the object (a). There is real privation of the object, symbolic castration of it, and
imaginary frustration by it. Further, one nds that subject/object instability proves that
the object is external, bringing temporal tension into any quest of realizing desire and
into any effort to reify or maintain jouissance.
It is to make new points about the object that Lacan reinterprets Freuds Little
Hans case in which Hanss effort to solve the oedipal riddle shows three different ways
in which the object can be lacking: , , . And, although it may seem that castration
fear is what Lacan is all about, his concern is not to map out why the self suffers, but how.
At the very least, one sees that there is no developmental theory of stages in Lacan.
Rather, the emotions and intellect mature together in reference to j/S, linked to the
(a) (the formula for fantasy), and to the three jouissances. These functions bring logical
time (the time of desire and lack) into language, making them attributes or properties
of language. Turning Freud on his head, Lacan reveals conict as a result of subject
structuration, not the cause of tension between a preexisting id and superego. The real
is there, in language, in present time, not regressed to some unknown, repressed past.
Indeed, repression of castration concerns lack, loss, and negation; not only sexuality.
Moreover, when repression is revisited, one nds the object as lacking and thus
cognizable only insofar as it produces positive unary traits. Male repression of castration both gives a man a place in the social group and a double task in afrming his
masculinity. Females need not repress castration to the degree the male does because
they always already have one foot in the real.

192

Conclusion

Practically nothing is innate, Lacan teaches. There is no mind versus body, nor
any inner versus outer. Rather, experience is rooted in the pre-oedipal mother Lacan
calls la lalangue and that Miller denes as the primordial symbolic mother, giver of the
rst gifts and the rst givens. Thereby, Miller gives a new twist to Lacans axiom that
The generic (essential) Woman does not exist. Woman ex-sists at the level of the (a) and
in the space of the real where love and Eros join in the symbolic, giving her a quality of
being both there and beyond.

NOTES

Chapter 1. On the Signication of the Phallus (1958) According to Lacan

1. Genevi`eve Morel, La difference des sexes, course given at the University of Lille,
France (19961997), in the department of psychoanalysis, p. 17, unedited course.
2. Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assist. Alex
Strachey and Alan Tyson (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of PsychoAnalysis, 1974), vols. 124. Hereafter referred to as SE. Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes (1925), SE, 19: 24858;
Female Sexuality (1931), SE, 21: 225 43; Femininity (1932), SE, 22: 11235.
3. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud Life and Work (3 vols) (London: Hogarth,
19531957), vol. 1, pp. 133.
4. Ana Martinez Westerhausen, Le phallus, Pierre de touche de la question de la realite
de Freud, La lettre mensuelle, no. 97 (March 1991): 34 36.
5. Sigmund Freud, The Project of a Scientic Psychology (1950[1895]),
SE, 1: 294 397.
6. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE, 4 and 5.
7. Jeanne Granon-Lafont, Topologie lacanienne et clinique analytique (Cahors: Point
Hors Ligne, 1990), p. 18.
8. David Macey, Phallus: Denitions, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical
Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 11; cf. also reference to
Elizabeth Grosz, pp. 31820.
9. Sigmund Freud, The Infantile Genital Organization (1923), SE, 19:
139 45.
10. Jacques Lacan, The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1953), The Rome Discourse Ecrits: A Selection, trans. and ed. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 5053.
11. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XIII: Lobjet de la psychanalyse (19561966),
unpublished seminar; cf. also Gerard Wajcman, Painting Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan,
ed. Ellie Ragland (New York: Hall, 1999), pp. 142 48.
12. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IX: Lidentication (19611962), mai et juin,
1962, unedited seminar.

193

194

Notes to Chapter 1

13. Jacques Lacan, The Signication of the Phallus (1958), Ecrits: A Selection, trans., and ed. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 28091; cf.
p. 287.
14. Jacques Lacan, La troisi`eme jouissance, Lettres de lecole freudienne, no. 16 (1975):
178203.
15. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, The Paternal Metaphor: A Lacanian Theory of
Language, Revue internationale de philosophie, vol. 46, no. 1 (1992); cf. also chapter 6 of
Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995).
16. Jacques-Alain Miller, Le sinthome: un mixte de symptome et fantasme, La cause
Freudienne, Revue de la psychanalyse: Les maladies du nom propre, no. 39 (mai 1998), p. 11.
17. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Lacan Seminars on James Joyce: Writing as Symptom and Singular Solution, Psychoanalysis and . . . , ed. Richard Feldstein and Henry
Sussman (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 6786; cf. also Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire,
livre XXIII (19751976): Le sinthome (19751976), unpublished seminar.
18. Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire
in the Freudian Unconscious (1960), trans. and ed. Alan Sheridan, Ecrits: A Selection
(New York: Norton, 1977), p. 317.
19. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Encore, Book XX (19721973), ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. with Jacques Lacan, with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton,
1998), p. 133. Seminar hereafter referred to in parenthical references as S.
20. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), SE, 19: 366.
21. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre V: Les formations de linconscient (19571958),
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p 511.
22. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921),
SE, 18: 67143.
23. Elizabeth Grosz, Phallus: Feminist Implications, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 320
23.
24. Jacques Lacan, Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet (1959), trans.
Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, nos. 5556 (1977): 1152.
25. Jacques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as
Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. and ed. Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 4 5.
26. Stuart Schneiderman, Jacques Lacan: The Death of an Intellectual Hero (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 4 5.
27. Jacques-Alain Miller, Suture (Elements of the Logic of the Signier),
Screen, vol. 18, no. 4 (Winter 19771978): 24 34; cf. p. 25.
28. John Holland, Le Nom Propre et la Nomination: Russell et Gardiner Avec Lacan,
Memoir pour Obtention du DEA Concepts et clinique (Sept. 1998); cf. also Jacques
Lacan, Of structure as an Immixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever. The
Structuralist Controversy: The Sciences of Man, ed. by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).

Notes to Chapter 1

195

29. Tim Dean, The Germs of Empire: Heart of Darkness, Colonial Trauma and
the Historiography of Aids, The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 309; cf. also Louis Althusser, Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin in Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster
(New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 162.
30. Cathy Caruth, Introduction, Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. with intro.
Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), cf. pp. 9192.
31. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. with intro. Werner S. Pluhar,
with foreword by Mary J. Gregor (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1987), Book II, Analytic
of the Sublime, 97141.
32. Jacques-Alain Miller, Ce qui fait insigne, course given in the department of
psychoanalysis, Paris VIII, Saint Denis, 1986-1987, unedited course.
33. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis
(1964), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1977); cf. also Ellie Ragland, Lacan, the Death Drive, and the Dream of the
Burning Child, ed. Sarah Goodwin, Death and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994), pp. 80102.
34. Elizabeth Bronfen, Castration Complex, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 41 45; cf. also
Hel`ene Cixous, Portrait of Dora, Diacritics 13 (1): 232.
35. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IV: La relation dobjet (19561957), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 46.
36. Gerard Wajcman, Painting, Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan, ed. Ellie Ragland
(New York: Hall, 1999), p. 143.
37. Charles Pyle, Lacans Theory of Language: The Symbolic Gap, unpublished ms. All rights reserved to the author.
38. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (Urbana
& Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986); cf. ch 1.
39. Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses (19551956), ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. with notes by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993); cf. also Sigmund
Freud, Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia
Paranoides) (1911), SE, 12: 282.
40. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan
Copjec, trans. Denis Holier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson and Jeffrey
Mehlman (New York: Norton, 1990).
41. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1977 [1985]).
42. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Seeking the Third Term: Desire, the Phallus and
the Materiality of Language, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and
Judith Roof (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 4064.
43. Jacques-Alain Miller, Silet, course given in the department of psychoanalysis,
University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, 1994 1995, unpublished course.

196

Notes to Chapter 2

Chapter 2. Freuds Female Sexuality (1931) and Femininity (1932)

1. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freuds Technique of Psychoanalysis
(1954 1955), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John
Forrester (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 109.
2. Daniel Machado, Phobia and Perversion, Journal of the Centre for Freudian
Analysis and Research, no. 2 (Summer 1993), p. 24.
3. Jacques-Alain Miller, To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, nos. 1 & 2 (Sping/Fall 1989): 3050.
4. Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre IX: Lidentication (19601961), unedited
seminar.
5. Genevi`eve Morel, Lacan et la difference des sexes, course given in the ACT
(Association de la Cause freudienne)Lille, Seminaie des Echanges (19961997).
6. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses (19551956), ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. with notes by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993).
7. Sigmund Freud, Female Sexuality (1931), SE, 21: 223 43. Joan Rivi`ere
also translated this essay from the German Uber die Weibliche Sexualitat.
8. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore (19721973), ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), cf. ch. 1.
9. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IV: La relation dobjet (19551956), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), cf. p. 269.
10. Jacques Lacan, Letourdit (1972), Scilicet, no. 4 (Paris: Seuil, 1994);
Stunned, trans. into English, Jack Stone.
11. Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York:
Routledge, 1995), cf. ch. 6.
12. Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire
in the Freudian Unconscious (1960), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1977), p. 315.
13. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XVIII: Dun discours qui ne serait pas du semblant
(19701971), unedited seminar.
14. Jacques Lacan, On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis (19571958), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,
1977).
15. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoaque dans ses rapports avec la presonnalite, suivi de
Premiers ecrits sur la paranoa (Paris: Seuil, 1975).
16. Serena Smith, The Structure of HysteriaDiscussion of Three Elements, A-nalysis: The Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field, no. 7 (1996), p.
109; Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death, ch. 6, notes 118. Cf. also Elizabeth
Newman, The Sexuation Forumlas and Love, A-nalysis, no. 7 (1996), p. 61; cf.
Seminar XX, ch. 2, To Jakobson.
17. Sigmund Freud, Instincts and Their Vicissitudes (1915), SE, 14: 111
40, cf. p. 126.

Notes to Chapter 2

197

18. Ellie Ragland, The Structure of the Drives: Where Body and Mind Join,
On the Drives, ed. Dan Collins, forthcoming as an Umbr(a) book.
19. Gilles Chatenay, Real of Interpretaion, A-nalysis: The Australian Centre for
Psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field, no. 7 (1996), p. 109.
20. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (19121913), SE, 13: ix162.
21. Leonardo Rodriguez, The Family and the Subject: A Lacanian Perspective, A-nalysis: The Australian Centre for Psychoanalysis in the Freudian Field, no. 7 (1996): 21
33, cf., p. 23.
22. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, (1921),
SE, 18: 67143.
23. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (19591960),
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (New York: Norton,
1992), pp. 12, 187, and 228.
24. Joel Dor, Idenication, Umbr(a): Identity/Identication, no. 1 (1998): 6370;
cf. p. 68 where he cites Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IX: Lidentication, April 4, 1952,
unedited seminar.
25. Jacques Damourette, Des mots a` la pensee; essais de la grammaire de la langue francaise,
tome 6 (Paris: Collection des linguistes contemporains, 1930), p. 172.
26. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXI: Les non-dupes errent (19721974), unedited seminar.
27. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XVIII: Dun discours qui ne serait pas du semblant
(19701971), unedited seminar.
28. Jacques Lacan, La troisi`eme, Lettres de lecole freudienne, no. 16 (1975): 178
203; cf. also Letourdit, note #10.
29. John Holland, Russell, Les noms propres, et lameublement dernier du monde,
DESU thesis, p. 51; cf. also Jacqes-Alain Miller, Extimite (19851986), unedited
course, Jan. 22, 29, and Feb. 6, 1986.
30. Kirsten Hyldegaard, Sex as Fantasy and Sex as Symptom, Umbr(a):
Identication/Identity, no. 1 (1998): 4352, cf. esp. p. 48.
31. Jeanne Granon-Lafont, Topologie lacanienne et clinique analytique (Cahors: Point
Hors Ligne, 1990), p. 14.
32. Jeanne-Granon Lafont, La topologie ordinaire de Jacques Lacan (Cahors: Point
Hors Ligne, 1986, p. 106; cf. also Le seminaire IX and Le seminaire XXIII (19751976):
Le sinthome. In Le sinthome, an unpublished Seminar, Lacan reintroduces the tripartite logic
of the torus.
33. Jean-Jacques Bouquier, Retournements de Tores et Identications. Analytica, vol. 46
(1986): 918, cf. pp. 1011; cf. also Le seminaire IX and Le seminaire XXIII (1975
1976): Le sinthome.
34. Genevi`eve Morel, The Hypothesis of Compacity in Chapter 1 of Encore:
Seminar XX (19721973), Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan, ed. Ellie Ragland, G. K.
Hall World Author Series (New York: MacMillan, 1999), pp. 14960.

198

Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

35. Sigmund Freud, On Transformations of Instinct Exemplied in Anal

Eroticism (1971), SE, 17: 12633.
36. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre VIII (19601961): Le transfert, ed. JacquesAlain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
37. Jacques Lacan, Remarque sur le rapport de Daniel Lagache: Psychoanalyse et structure
de la personnalite (1960), Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 64784.
38. Genevi`eve Morel, La Jouissance Sexuelle dans les Ecrits et le Seminaire ENCORE de
Jacques, Lacan. Course given in the Association de la Cause freudienneBordeaux, Seminaire des
Echanges (November 1992 to June 1993).

Chapter 3. Feminine Sexuality, or Why the Sexual Difference Makes

All the Difference
1. Jacques Lacan, Propos directifs pour un Congres sur la sexualite feminine
(1960), Ecrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 725; See the translation in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques
Lacan and the Ecole freudienne (New York: Norton, 1985).
2. Cf. Jean-Paul Gilson, La sexualite, Ca
sextrait, Actes de lEcole de la Cause
freudienne: La sexualite dans les deles du signiant, vol. 17 (October 1989), p. 133.
3. Guy Trobas, Topologie de la realite sexuelle, conditions du choix dobjet,
Actes de lEcole de la Cause freudienne: La sexualite dans les deles du signiant vol. 17 (October
1989), p. 125.
4. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920): SE, 18: 164.
5. Jacques Lacan, De la psychose paranoaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalite suivi de
Premiers ecrits sur la paranoa (Paris: Seuil, 1975); The Seminar, Book III (19551956), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with Notes by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993);
cf. also Le seminaire, livre XXIII (19751976): Le sinthome, unedited seminar.
6. Russell Grigg, Lacans Four Discourses, Analysis, no. 4 (1993): 35.
7. Jacques Lacan, A Jakobson, The Seminar, Book XX (197273): Encore, text
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (Paris, Seuil, 1975), p. 17.
8. Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York:
Routledge, 1994), see chapter 6 on the Oedipus myth or paternal metaphor.
9. Jacques-Alain Miller, Les divins details, course (1989) in the department
of psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, May 3, 1989, unedited course;
cf. also Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in
the Freudian Unconscious, trans. Alan Sheridan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton,
1977), p. 315.
10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, text ed. Jacques
Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), ch. 9.
11. Jacques-Alain Miller, To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan,
Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 1989): 46.

Notes to Chapter 3

199

12. Jacques-Alain Miller, A Reading of Some Details in Television in Dialogue

with the Audience, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 4, Nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 1990):
4 30.
13. Jacques Lacan, cf. Ch. 16, The Subject and the Other: Alienation, The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, text ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Norton, 1978).
14. Marc Du Ry, Desire in Dreams, Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and
Research (JCFAR), no. 1 (Winter 19921993), pp. 3233.
15. Jacques Lacan, Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the
Freudian Unconscious (1960), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York:
Norton, 1977), p. 315; cf. Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria (1905 [1901]), SE, 7: 3122.
16. Jacques Lacan, Hommage faite a` Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de
Lol V. Stein, Ornicar? Revue du champ freudien no. 34 (Autumn 1985): 713; cf. p. 9.
17. Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI (1964): The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: Norton, 1978).
18. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, Seeking the Third Term: Desire, the Phallus and
the Materiality of Language, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Judith Roof and Richard
Feldstein (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 4064.
19. Sigmund Freud, On the Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinction between the Sexes, SE, 19: 24360.
20. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre XXIII (19751961): Le sinthome, unedited
seminar.
21. Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, SE, 23: 21153.
22. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre VIII (19601961): Le transfert, text ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 185.
23. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, text ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Annette Michaelson, Rosalind Krauss, Dennis Hollier and
Joan Copjec (New York: Norton, 1990).

24. Ellie Ragland, chapter 5, Lacan and the Ethics of Desire, in Essays on the
Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge, 1995).

200

Notes to Chapters 3 and 4

25. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, SE, 20: 75176.
26. Jacques-Alain Miller, Sur Andre Gide, course for 19891990 in the department of psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
27. Jacques-Alain Miller, De la nature des semblants, course for 19911992
in the department of psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited
course, February 5, 1992.
28. Jacques-Alain Miller, Donc, course for 19931994 in the department of
psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
29. Jacques Lacan, The Signication of the Phallus (1958), Ecrits: A Selection,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).
30. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II: The Ego in Freuds Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1954 1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New
York: Norton, 1988), p. 243.
31. Jacques-Alain Miller, Duty and the Drives, Newsletter of the Freudian Field,
vol. 6, nos. 1 & 2 (Spring/Fall 1992): 515.
32. Genevi`eve Morel, La jouissance sexuelle dans les Ecrits et le Seminaire de Jacques
LACAN, ACF-BORDEAUX Seminaire d echange, Nov. 1992June 1993, pp. 2731.
33. Carmen Gallano, De la femme aimee a` la femme desirante, La cause freudienne: La
revue de psychoanalyse: LAutre sexe, no. 24 (June 1993), p. 92.
34. Eric Laurent, Positions feminines de letre, La Cause freudienne: La revue de
psychoanalyse; LAutre sexe, no. 24 (June 1993), p. 107.
35. Silvia Tendlarz, The Dream of Being the Most Beautiful, article in Ms.
36. Jacques Lacan, The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its
Power (1958), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p.
256.

Chapter 4. A Rereading of Freuds 1925 Essay

1. Jacques Lacan, A Love Letter (Une lettre damour), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan,
Book XX: Encore on Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (19721973), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998): 78
89, esp. sexuation graph on p. 78.
2. Marie-Hel`ene Brousse, Feminism with Lacan, Newsletter of the Freudian Field
(NFF), vol. 5, nos. 1&2 (Spring/Fall, 1991): 113.
3. Sigmund Freud, Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (1909), SE,
10: 3149.
4. Sigmund Freud, Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937), SE, 23:
21153.
5. Sigmund Freud, Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Difference between the Sexes (1925), SE, 19: 24358.

Notes to Chapter 4

201

6. Sigmund Freud, Female Sexuality (1931), SE, 21: 223243; cf. also
lecture 33 Femininity (1932) [from the New Introductory Lectures to Psychoanalysis] SE, 22:
11235.
7. Aristotle, On Interpretation, in The Complete Works, rev. Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes in two vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1984); cf. also Jean-Paul Gilson, La Topologie de Lacan: une articulation de la cure psychanalytique
(Cap-Saint-Ignace, Quebec: Editions Balzac), p. 68.
8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), SE, 18: 364.; cf. also
Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Plesasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York: Routledge,
1995).
9. Genevi`eve Morel. The Hypothesis of Compacity in Chapter 1 of Encore:
Seminar XX (19721973), Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan, ed. Ellie Ragland (New York:
G. K. Hall, 1999), pp. 14960; cf. also Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, Un trait de perversion:
remarques sur un cas de Lacan, Quarto: Traits de perversion, no. 43 (mai 1991): 40 42;
cf. p. 41.
10. Jacques Lacan, Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York; Norton, 1977), p. 43.
11. Jacques Lacan, Langoisse, livre X (19621963), unedited seminar; cf. also
Michel Bousseyroux, Les series de la decouverte freudienne: a-bords de la p`ere-version, vol. 6 (July
1990): 120.
12. Jacques-Alain Miller, Les noms-du p`ere et les semblants (19911992), course
given in the department of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis,
unedited course.
13. Jean-Paul Gilson, La Topologie de Lacan: Une articulation de la cure psychanalytique
(Cap-Saint-Ignace, Quebec: Les Editions Balzac, 1994), p. 15. Cf. Sigmund Freuds
efforts to evolve an account of an energetics, as, for example, in Project for a Scientic
Psychology (1950 [1895]), SE, 1: 281397.
14. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses (19551956), ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. with notes by Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993).
15. Jacques Lacan, Letourdit, Scilicet, vol. 4 (1973): 552.
16. Jacques Lacan, Le sinthome: livre XXIII (19751976), Unpublished seminar.
17. Jacques Lacan, Dun discours qui ne serait pas du semblant (19701971): livre
XVIII, unpublished seminar.
18. Joyce avec Lacan, ed. Jacques Aubert (Paris: Navarin, 1987), p. 332.
19. Jacques Lacan, . . . Ou pire, livre XIX (19711972), unpublished seminar.
20. Jack Stone, The Fantasy, Le Sinthome, and the Babbling Pumpt of Platinism: From
Geometry, to Topology, to Joyce, a dissertation presented to the University of MissouriColumbia Graduate School in partial fulllment of the requirements for the degree,
Doctor of Philosophy, May 1998.
21. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre V: Les formations de linconscient (19571958),
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1995), p. 511.

202

Notes to Chapter 4

22. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), SE, 7:
125245.
23. Sigmund Freud, The Question of Lay Analysis (1926), SE, 20: 179258,
cf. p. 212.
24. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), SE, 4 and 5.
25. Sigmund Freud, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1901 [1905]), SE,
7: 3122.
26. Sigmund Freud, The Development of the Libido and the Sexual Orientations, no. 21 in Introductory Lectures in Psycho-Analysis (Part III), SE, 16 (19161917):
32038.
27. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IV: La relation dobjet (19551956), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 269.
28. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXII: R. [real] S. [symbolic] I. [imaginary]
(1974 1975), unpublished seminar.
29. Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of
the Origin of Sexual Perversions (1919), SE, 17: 177204.
30. Sigmund Freud, The Infantile Genital Organization (1923), SE, 19:
141 45
31. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Super-Ego (1923), SE, 19: 2839; cf.
also The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924), SE, 19: 17379.
32. Cf also Sigmund Freud, Femininity, lecture 33 of The New Introductory
Lectures (1932), SE, 12: 11235.
33. Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940 [1938]). SE, 23:
141207.
34. Jacques Lacan, Seminar of 21 January 1975, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan
and the ecole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. J. Rose (New York:
Norton, 1982), pp. 16271; cf. p. 170.
35. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, The Sexual Masquerade: A Lacanian Theory of
Sexual Difference, Lacan and the Subject of Language, ed. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan and Mark
Bracher (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 4980.
36. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre VIII (19601961): Le transfert, ed. JacquesAlain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), pp. 278, 281, and 284
37. James M. Mellard, Lacan and the New Lacanians: Josephine Harts
Damage, Lacanian Tragedy and the Ethics of Jouissance, PMLA, vol. 113, no. 3 (May
1998), p. 395.
38. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), SE, 13: 1164.
39. Jacques Lacan, Les Complexes Familiaux dans la Formation de lindividu: Essai
danalyse dune fonction en psychologie (Paris: Navarin Editeur, 1984), pp. 4073.
40. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre IX (19611962): Lidentication, unpublished
seminar.
41. Gerard Wajcman, Painting, Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan ed. Ellie Ragland

Notes to Chapter 4

203

(New York: Simon & Schuster/G. K. Hall, 1999), Twayne Critical World Author
Series, pp. 142 48.
42. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book II (1954 1055): The Ego in Freuds Theory and
in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, with notes by John Forrester
(New York: Norton, 1991), pp. 109243.
43. Bruno Bettleheim, Freud and Mans Soul (New York: Knopf, 1982).
44. Helena Schultz-Keil, Review of Freud and Mans Soul by Bruno Bettleheim, Lacan
Study Notes, special issue, Hystoria 60 (1988): 26266, cf. p. 260.
45. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923 [1927]), SE, 19: 363.
46. Jacques-Alain Miller, Le Sinthome: un mixte de symptome et fantasme, Revue de la
psychanalyse: Ecole de la Cause Freudienne: Les maladies du nom propre, no. 39 (mai 1998), p. 11;
cf. also the course Ce qui fait insigne, given in 19861987, in the department of
psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, unedited course.
47. Jacques-Alain Miller, First Course, given in 19811982, in the department
of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, unedited course.
48. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XVII: Lenvers de la psychanqalyse (19691970),
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991), cf. ch. 8.
49. Jacques Lacan, La troisi`eme jouissance, Lettres de lecole freudienne, no. 16 (1975):
178203.
50. Marc du Ry, Desire in Dreams, Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and
Research, vol. 1 (Winter 19921993): 28 44, cf. p. 34.
51. Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death (New York: Routledge, 1995) cf.
ch. 6 on the paternal metaphor.
52. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921),
SE, 18: 67143.
53. Charles Pyle, Logic, Markedness and Language Universals, chapters 8 (The Law of
Marks) and 9 (On the Mark), July 11, 1991, Unpublished Ms. All rights reserved
to the author; cf. also Toward a Buddhist Theory of Language, The Proceedings of the
First International Conference on Tai Studies, July 2931, 1998 (Mahidol: Mahidol University Press, forthcoming).
54. Marc Darmon, Essais sur la Topologie lacanienne (Paris: Editions de lAssociation
Freudienne, 1990).
55. Jacques Lacan, On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of
Psychosis (19571958), Ecrits: A Selection, trans, with notes by Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1977), p. 189.
56. Genevi`eve Morel, La difference des sexes, course given in the department of
psychoanalysis, the University of Lille (19961997), p. 20, unpublished course.
57. Jacques Lacan, Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality
(1960), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, ed. Juliet Mitchell and
Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1982).

204

Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

58. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, Anxieties (1926), SE, 20: 77

175.
59. Sigmund Freud, The Taboo of Virginity (1917), SE, 11: 192208; cf.
also . . . Ou pire (19711972).
60. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre VI (19581959): Le desir et son son interpretation,
unpublished seminar. Hamlet (seminar of April 29), trans. James Hulbert, Yale French
Studies, nos. 55/56 (1977): 1152; Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,
ed. and trans. Shoshana Felman in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading
Otherwise (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
61. Sol Aparicio, Le desir au feminin, La cause freudienne, la revue de psychanalysis:
Lautre sexe, no. 24 (June 1993), p. 26.
62. Pierre Naveau, La Querelle du Phallus, La cause freudienne: Revue de psychanalyse,
no. 24 (June 1993), pp. 1516.
63. Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa, A Theory of Genitality (1924), (New York:
Norton, 1968).
64. Dorion Sagan, Gender Specics: Why Women Arent Men, The New York
Times, section 15, Sunday, June 21, 1998, pp. 1 and 20.
65. Jacques-Alain Miller, Commentary on a Fragment of Spring Awakening
by Jacques Lacan, Analysis 6 (1995): 3539.

Chapter 5. The Place of the Mother in Lacanian Analysis

1. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre IV: La relation dobjet (19561957), ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller, (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
2. Steven A. Mitchell, Gender and Sexual Orientation in the Age of Postmoderism: The Plight of the Perplexed Clinician, Gender & Psychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1996): 4573.
3. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of PsychoAnalysis (1964), ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton,
1981).
4. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXVI: La topologie et le temps (19771978),
unedited Seminar; seminar of November 10, 1978.
5. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome (19751976), unedited
seminar; partially published in Ornicar?, nos. 6 to 11.
6. Jacques Lacan, Les complexes familiaux dans la Formation de lindividu: Essai danalyse
dune fonction en psychologie (Paris: Navarin, 1984). The text was written for vol. 7 of
lEncyclopedie francaise for the part on mental life and was placed under the section on
The Family (1938).
7. Ellie Ragland, Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan (New York:
Routledge, 1995), cf. chapter 6.

Notes to Chapter 5

205

8. See Lacans simplication of his schema L where he shows the subject as

stretched over the four corners of the schema:
S(ubject)
o[ideal ego]

o(ther) [ego ideal]

O(ther)

in On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (Dec. 1957

Jan. 1958), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 193.
9. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book XX: Encore (19721973), ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998) (Paris: Seuil,
1975), p. 78; cf. A Love Letter.
10. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book III: The Psychoses (19551956), ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. with notes by Russell Grigg, (New York: Norton, 1994).
11. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of
Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Carol Gilligan, In a Different
Voice: Psychological Theory and Womens Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1982).
12. Lacans rst rewriting of Freuds concept of the Oedipus complex is to be
found in On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis in
Ecrits: A Selection (p. 200):
Name-of-the-Father.
Desire of the Mother,
Other
Phallus

Desire of the Mother j Name-of-the-Father

Signied to the subject

See also Lacans completed graph of desire in The Subversion of the Subject and
Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious (1960) in Ecrits: A Selection, where the
base is constituted of the I(O), Lacans matheme for the ideal ego, and the /S, or the
lack-in-being that marks a split in the ego between ones own Ideal formation and the
role of others and the Other in constituting it on an imaginary axis (p. 315).
13. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Cornell University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction
(New York: Routledge, 1990).
14. Genevi`eve Morel, La jouissance sexuelle dans les Ecrits et le Seminaire Encore de Jacques
Lacan, Associates cause Freudienne, Seminaire des EchangesBordeaux, course given in Nov. 1992
to June 1993: The feminine symbols have no grip except an imaginary one. Thats
because these images are, in fact, subjected to other symbols in the unconscious. Thats
what Freud meant or understood in attacking femininity in a surrealist manner (how
does one speak of a castrated woman?) to a complex of castration and a castrated
mother (p. 27).

206

Notes to Chapter 5

15. Jacques Lacan, On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of

Psychosis, cf. Schema I, p. 212 of Ecrits: A Selection.
16. Sigmund Freud, Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence (1937),
SE, 23: 27578; cf. also pages 201204 in Freuds discussion of the phenomenon of
ego splitting under pressure from the external world as applicable to the neuroses, as
well as the psychoses, and cases of fetishism in An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1940
[1938]), SE, 23: 138207.
17. Jacques-Alain Miller, To Interpret the Cause: From Freud to Lacan,
Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 3, nos. 1 & 2 (FallSpring 1989): 3050. Jacques
Lacan The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (1953)
Ecrits: A Selection, trans and ed. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1974).
18. Jacques-Alain Miller, De la nature des semblants, course given in the department
of psychoanalysis 19911992, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
19. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre X (19621963): Langoisse, unedited seminar.
20. Ellie Ragland, Lacan, Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed.
Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 203.
21. Jacques-Alain Miller, Extimite. Course given in the department of psychoanalysis in 19851986, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
22. Jacques Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, ed. Joan
Copjec, trans. D.Holier, R. Krauss, A. Michelson, and J. Mehlman (New York: Norton, 1990). In Television (1974), Lacan solidies the third phase of his teaching, which
elaborates the real and jouissance, a phase clearly ennunciated in Encore (19721973).
23. Jacques Lacan, The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire
in the Freudian Unconscious (1960), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. with notes by Alan
Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 14961.
24. Jacques Lacan, The Signication of the Phallus, Ecrits: A Selection, trans.
with notes by Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 28191.
25. A classic example can be found in the case of Judge Daniel Paul Schrebers
Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter, with a new
intro. by Samuel M. Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Schreber solves the dilemma brought on by his psychotic break concerning whether he
is a man or woman, not at the level of organ reality, but by a delusory reorganization of
his subjective worldview such that he becomes the wife of God, identifying both as God
and as Gods wife; cf. also Louis A. Sass, The Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber, and
the Schizophrenic Mind (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). Sass stresses that
schizophrenia is not concomitant with poor reality testing, nor is delusion. Lacan
taught that delusion is a strange use of language that tries to impose a lack where there is
none, tries to answer the question of sexual difference where difference has been
foreclosed.
26. Robert Groome, Towards a Topology of the Subject, Umbr(a): Aesthetics
and Sublimation (1999): 8392; cf. pp. 83 and 86.

Notes to Chapter 5

207

27. Jacques-Alain Miller, Divine Details (1989), course given in the department
of psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
28. Nancy Chodorow, Heterosexuality as a Compromise Formation: Reections on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexual Development, Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, vol. 15: 267304, p. 273.
29. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXIII (19751976): Le sinthome, unedited
seminar, partially published in Ornicar?, nos. 6 to 11. In this seminar, Lacan depicted
James Joyce as manifesting a kind of schizophrenic language. This study led him to his
third theory of psychosis in which he argued that the void in the Otherthe hole in
the symbolic ()is lled by objects rather than signiers. The object takes preponderence over the dialectical interaction of signiers (S1S2). The object, unlike the
signiers, is absolute, non-dialectical, and stabilizes the schizophrenics universe when
he or she is not in an episode which is marked by being plagued by the objects, such as
the gaze or the voice, experienced as separated from the body.
30. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XXII (1974 1975): R.S.I., seminar of
March 18, 1975, unedited seminar.
31. Jacques Alain Miller, Donc (19931994), course given in the department of
psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
32. Rosine Lefort, in collaboration with Robert Lefort, Birth of the Other (Urbana
& Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994): The essential character of the object
relation [is]its being a relation with the lack of objectwhich found[s] desire (pp.
27677).
33. Ellie Ragland, The Psychical Nature of Trauma: Freuds Dora, The
Young Homosexual Woman, and the Fort! Da! Paradigm, Topologies of Memory: Essays on
the Limit of Knowledge and Memory, ed. Linda Belau and Peter Ramadanovic (New York:
Other Press, 2002), pp. 75100.
34. Sigmund Freud, The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924), SE,
19: 17187; Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between
the Sexes (1925), SE, 19: 24360.
35. Alexander Stevens, Two Destinies for the Subject: Neurotic Identications
and Psychotic Petrications, Newsletter of the Freudian Field, vol. 5, nos. 1/2 (Spring/Fall
1991): 96112.
36. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913): SE, 13: 1161.
37. Jacques-Alain Miller, Silet (1994 1995), course given in the department of
psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint Denis, unedited course.
38. Ellie Ragland, Lacan and the Subject of Law: Sexuation and Discourse in
the Mapping of Subject Positions That Give the Ur-Form of Law, Washington and Lee Law
Review, vol. 54, no. 3 (Summer 1997): 10911118.
39. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre VI (19581959): Le desir et linterpretation du
desir, unedited seminar; cf. Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet, trans.
James Hulbert, Yale French Studies, nos. 55 & 56 (1977).

208

Notes to Chapter 5 and the Conclusion

40. Jacques Lacan, La troisi`eme jouissance, Lettres de lecole freudienne, no. 16 (1975):
178203.
41. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, livre XVII (19701971): Lenvers de la psychanalyse,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
42. Jacques Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason
since Freud (19571958), Ecrits: A Selection, trans. with notes by Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1977), p. 14678.
43. Ellie Ragland, An Overview of the Real, Reading Seminars I and II, ed. R.
Feldstein, B. Fink, and M. Jaanus (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995);
cf. also Sigmund Freud, From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918 [1914]), SE, 17: 2
122.
44. Jean-Paul Gilson, La topologie de Lacan: Une articulation de la cure psychanalytigue
(Cap. Saint-Ignace, Quebec: Les Editions Balzac, 1994), p. 194.
45. Jacques-Alan Miller, First Course (19811982), course given in the department of psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII, Saint-Denis, unedited course.
46. Jacques-Alain Miller, Matrice, Ornicar? no. 4 (1975); cf. also Matrix,
trans. Daniel Collins, lacanian ink, no. 12 (Fall 1997): 44 51.

Conclusion
1. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge:
Book XX: Encore, 19721973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes by Bruce Fink
(New York: Norton, 1998), p. 125.
2. Genevi`eve Morel, The Hypothesis of Compacity in chapter 1 of Encore:
Seminar XX (19721973), Critical Essays on Jacques Lacan, ed. Ellie Ragland (New York:
Macmillan, in the G. K. Hall Twayne series on World Authors, 1999), pp. 14960.
3. Jean-Paul Gilson, La Topologie de Lacan: Une articulation de la cure psychanalytique
(Cap-Saint-Ignace, Quebec: Editions Balzac, 1994), p. 194.

Index

A
Abraham, Karl, 2, 5, 65
A Child Is Being Beaten (Freud),
102
Adler, Karl, 68
Agalma, 80, 185, 189
Agency, of the Fathers Name, 6; See also
agent
Agent, 8, 101, 113, 124, 159, 16163,
167, 178
Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Freud), 92, 107
Androgyny, 137
Aparicio, Sol, 15758
Apulee, 56
Argument, 8
Aristotle, 4, 8, 31, 34, 45, 51, 53, 56,
59, 61, 92, 9596, 134, 139, 140
41, 179, 181, 183, 18687, 190
(a)spheric, 189; See also sphere
Austin, John, 12
Autism, 160

B
Bedeutung, 38; See also Organischen Bedeutung
and Sinn
Bentham, Jeremy, 40
Besetzung, 112; See also cathect
Bettleheim, Bruno, 111

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 66,

93, 99, 189
Blue Velvet, 22, 128
Boole, George, 140
Borromean knot, 49; See also knot
Bronfen, Elizabeth, 19
Buddhist language theory, 122
Butler, Judith, 12, 65, 77

C
Cantor, Georg, 14
Caruth, Cathy, 15
Cathect, 112; See also Besetzung
Cauchy series, 93
Cause et consentiment (Cause and Consent) (Miller), 80
Categorical imperative, 40; See also Kant
Ce qui fait insigne (Miller), 18
Chatenay, Gilles, 38
Chodorow, Nancy, 146 47, 158
Che vuoi graph, 12, 69; See also graph of
desire, 104; 106
Cixous, Hel`ene, 19, 25
Cognitive studies, 157; See also
psychology
Collected Papers (Freud), 129
Combinatory, 184, 188
Comedy, 5
Communication theory, 67

209

210

Index

Compacity, 181; See also compact and

The Hypothesis of Compacity
Conict, 156, 159, 161, 167, 183
Control variable, 157
Correspondence, 31
Countertransference, 150
Courtly love, 84
Cross-cap, 7, 18, 155

D
Damourette, 45, 61; See also discordential and Pichon
Darmon, Marc, 127
Dante, Aligheri, 177
Das Ding, 7778, 137, 177, 180
De la femme aimee a` la femme desirante
(Gallano), 86
Dean, Tim, 15
Derrida, Jacques, 11, 25, 66, 169, 174
De Saussure, Ferdinand, 8, 140
Descartes, Renee, ix; res extensa, 5, 11,
17, 150
Desire and the Interpretation of Desire
in Hamlet (Lacan), 13738; See also
Le seminaire, livre VI: Le desir et son
interpretation
Deutsch, Helena, 2, 65
Developmental theory, 104, 119, 152,
191; See also Piaget; developmental
sequences, 159
Die Begriff Schrift (Frege), 140
Discordential, 45, 61, 136, 187; See also
Damourette and Pichon
Discourse places, 124
Discourse structures, 104
Disorder, 153, 162
Divine Details (Miller), 73, 78, 81
Donc (Miller), 81, 174
Dor, Joel, 43
Dora (Freuds case), 25, 35, 62, 72, 100
Duty and the Drives (Miller) 84

E
Ecriture feminine, 25
Edge, 4, 123
Editors Note to The Standard Edition
(Strachey), 108
Eforence, 109; See also Frublute
Eindruck an, 117; See also interprets
Elektra complex, 5, 39
Empty set, 60; See also Peirce, Charles S.
Entmannung (unmanning), 129; See also
The Schreber Case (Freud) and
Verweiblichung
Epistemology, 2, 13, 31, 134, 141,
146, 157, 180, 182, 184, 187; epistemological places, 42; epistemological position, 65;
Essais sur la Topologie lacanienne (Darmon),
127
Excluded middle, 155
Existential element, 56; See also
quanticator
Exllos, 16
Extimacy, 47, 15556; See also Extimite
Extimite (Miller), 17071, 174 76

F
Family Complexes (Lacan), 109; See also Les
complexes familiaux
Female Sexuality (Freud), 2, 32, 50,
55, 58, 60, 92
Femininity (Freud), 2, 92
Feminism and Psychoanalysis (E. Wright,
Ed.), 16
Fenichel, Otto, 8586, 95
Fetish, 13, 22, 76, 104, 128, 135, 149
Findung, 152
First Course (Miller), 114, 170
Flesh, real of, 6, 161
For a Congress on Feminine Sexuality
(Lacan), 132
Foucault, Michel, 66

Index

Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,

(Freud),100; See also Dora
Frege, Gottlieb, 8, 14, 31, 124, 131,
140, 18384, 186
Freud and Mans Soul (Bettleheim), 111
Frublute, 109; See also Eforence
Function, 8, 10, 20, 31, 71, 73, 128,
131, 135, 140, 162, 165, 186

G
Gallano, Carmen, 8687
Genital, 30, 5152, 59; See also The
Infantile Genital Organization: An
Interpretation into Theory of
Sexuality
Gilligan, Carol, 146 47
Gilson, Jean Paul, 66, 134, 170, 189
Godel, Kurt, 13
Goethe, Wolfgang, 177
Graph of desire, 104; See also che vuoi graph
Grigg, Russell, 67
Group Psychology and the Analysis of
the Ego (Freud), 12, 62, 120
Grosz, Elizabeth, 6, 12, 16, 24

H
Hegel, Georg, 169
Herr K., 7273; See also Dora
Hole, 4, 68, 10, 18, 36, 38, 15354,
59, 95, 101, 112, 121, 123, 127
28, 15354, 156, 163, 17576,
180, 182, 189
Hommage fait a` Marguerite Duras
(Lacan), 73
Horney, Karen, 2, 5, 17, 65, 91, 174
Horsens, 155
Husserl, Edmund, 154
Hyldegaard, Kirsten, 52
Hysteria, 3536, 62, 65, 67, 87, 89, 111,
124, 129, 133, 140; See also Dora

211

I
Idealist thinker, 148
Identication (Dor), 43
Image, lack-in, 10
Imaginary number, 14, 50, 53
Innity, 17, 39, 93, 97, 175
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
(Freud), 132
Instinkten, 11
Interprets, 177; See also Eindruck an
Intersection, 125, 128, 177
Introductory Lectures (Freud), 100
Intuitionist logic, 52
IPA, 149
Irigaray, Luce, 1315, 27, 65
Irrational number, 38, 93

J
Jakobson, Roman, 8, 67
Jones, Ernest, 2, 5, 8, 10, 17, 65,
91
Joyce, James, 9, 149
Joyce le symptome II (Lacan), 96
Jung, Karl, 2, 5, 68, 76, 83, 144,
174

K
Kant, Immanuel, 1718, 40, 108; See
also categorical imperative
Klein bottle, 18
Klein, Melanie, 2, 5, 35, 72, 101, 175
Knot, 10, 21, 49, 105, 120, 12324,
128, 132, 134, 144, 146, 155, 170,
18890; See also Borromean knot
and knots (symptoms)
Knots (symptoms), 181; See also knot
Knowledge, ix, 36, 7879, 85, 123,
126, 129, 135, 139, 150, 152, 155,
179, 18991; See also S2 and
unconscious

212

Index

L
Lacans Theory of Language: The
Symbolic Gap (Pyle), 22
La difference des sexes (Morel), 44, 131
Lafont, Jeanne (Granon), 3, 18, 53,
123
La lalangue, 23, 28, 70, 74, 9697, 99,
109, 118, 147, 162, 17273, 175,
180, 186, 188; See also llalation and
primary process
Lamelle, 113; See also libido
La Querelle du Phallus (Naveau), 138
Le desir a` feminin (Aparicio), 137
Letourdit (Lacan), 33, 134
La langue, 180; See also la lalangue
Le seminaire, livre V: Des formations de linconscient (Lacan), 101
Le seminaire, livre XXVII: Dissolution
(Lacan), 113
Le seminaire, livre XVIII: Dun discours qui
ne serait pas du semblant (Lacan), 34,
9697
Le seminaire, livre X: Langoisse (Lacan),
154, 163
Le seminaire, livre VI: Le desir et son interpretation (Lacan), 13738, 166; See also
Desire and the Interpretation of
Desire in Hamlet (Lacan)
Le seminaire, livre IX: Lidentication
(Lacan), 31, 41, 53, 101, 109
Le seminaire, livre IV: Lobjet de la psychanalyse
(Lacan), 33, 143, 146, 153; See also
The Seminar IV (Lacan)
Le seminaire, livre XXI: Les non dupes errent
(Lacan), 62
Le seminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome
(Lacan), 9, 67, 9697, 134
Le seminaire, livre VIII: Le transfert (Lacan),
109; See also, The Seminar, Book VIII:
The Transference (Lacan)
Le seminaire, livre XIX: . . . Ou pire
(Lacan), 62, 97, 134, 136, 138

Le seminaire, livre XXII: R.S.I. (Lacan),

101
et fanLe sinthome: un mixte de symptUme
tasme (Miller), 9, 16
Les complexes familiaux (Lacan), 109, 147;
See also Family Complexes (Lacan)

Letter (lOtre),
4, 66
Libido, ix, 30, 52, 59, 6768, 83, 104,
11213, 12122, 13233, 139,
172; See also lamelle and primary
process
Lindner, 118
Little Hans (Freuds case), 30, 91, 143,
160, 164 68, 191
Llalation 173; See also la lalangue
Lust-Ich, 109; See also pleasure principle
Lynch, David, 22

M
Macalpine, Ida, 129
Madchen, 130, 164
Mahler, Margaret, 157
Marcuse, Herbert, 33
Marx, Karl, ix, 84
Masquerade, 1, 4, 21; normative relations, 28; 31, 33, 36, 51, 68, 77,
85, 8889, 98, 13233, 138, 157,
175, 181; See also normative
Master discourse, 3537, 56, 107, 147
Masters and Johnson, 65
Material, 178
Materialist, 10, 46, 84, 143, 178; See
also Marx and material
Mathemes, 32
Matrice (Miller), 174
Matrix, 146; See also Matrice
Mellard, James, 106
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 173
Metalanguage, 180
Metaphor, 8, 23, 26, 53, 67, 72, 74,
86, 98, 127, 132, 180

Index

Metonymy, 8, 23, 5253, 59, 69, 72

73, 83, 98, 127
Miller, Jacques-Alain, x, 9, 14, 16, 18,
2021, 26, 31, 51, 55, 6870, 72,
78, 8082, 84, 114, 15556, 165,
17078, 192
Mitchell, Juliet, 16
Moebius strip, 7, 1819, 123, 144,
148, 155, 161
Morel, Genevi`eve, 18, 21, 23, 44, 46,
49, 5859, 61, 84, 86, 30131,
135, 140, 181
Morgan, Conwy L., 140
Mourning, 77
Mulvey, Laura, 19
Myth, 49, 76, 116, 129, 131, 136,
185, 189

N
Naveau, Pierre, 138
Neuroses, 1, 21; neurotic relations, 28;
30, 35, 51, 57, 68, 76, 8586, 98,
105, 111, 125, 128, 130, 139 40,
150, 157, 175, 181; See also masquerade, neuroses, normative, perversion, and psychoses
Niederschriften, 72
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, 43
Nominalist, 176
Nor-male, 133; See also masquerade and
normative
Normative, 28, 51, 57, 8687, 98, 105,
124 25, 128, 133; normal, 140; normative development, 149; normalcy,
150; 157, 180; See also masquerade,
neuroses, perversion, and psychoses

O
Object-relations theorists, 23, 100, 112,
185

213

Obsessional, 67, 87, 111, 129, 140

On a Question Preliminary to Any
Possible Treatment of Psychosis
(Lacan), 35, 37; See also psychoses
Organischen Bedeutung, 38; See also Bedeutung
On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplied in Anal Eroticism
(Freud), 59
Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 103

P
Painting (Tableau) (Wacjman), 10,
20, 132
Panofsky, Irwin, 11
Paranoia, 160; See also psychoses
Parole, 28; See also parole pulsionelle
Parole pulsionelle, 66; See also parole and
Triebkrafte
Peirce, Charles S., 6061, 122
Penis envy, 5, 86, 92, 108, 131, 138;
See also Penisneid and Wunsch nach dem
Penis
Penisneid, 138; See also penis envy
Perception, 161
Perversion, 2122; perverse relations,
28; 51, 57, 6768, 76, 78, 85, 87,
98, 105, 12829, 150, 157, 175,
181; See also masquerade, neuroses,
normative, and psychoses
Phallic mother, 164
Phenomenological idea, 154; phenomenological philosophy, 173
Phobia and Perversion (Machado),
36, 168; See also Little Hans
Phobic, 143
Piaget, Jean, 152
Pichon, 45, 61; See also Damourette and
discordential
Plato, 56, 60, 160, 190
Pleasure principle, 73, 8183, 9899,
109, 120, 127, 153; See also Lust-Ich

214

Index

Post-structuralism, 11, 71, 76

Primal phantasies, 118
Primal scene, 117
Primary process, 23, 28, 68, 175, 188;
See also la lalangue
Primum mobile (prime mover), 18081,
190; See also agency and agent
Proposition, 6, 10, 24, 31, 34, 131,
133, 140, 184, 186, 189; See also
function
Proust, Marcel, 23
Psychologists, cognitive, 23, 157; See also
cognitive studies
Psychology, positivistic study, 4
Psychoses, 1, 21, 23; psychotic relations, 28, 35; schizophrenia and paranoia, 35, 160; 40 41, 46 47, 51,
57, 6768, 7576, 78, 8587, 98,
105, 125, 12830, 141, 146, 149
52; 15557, 160, 162, 167, 175,
18182, 190; See also masquerade,
neuroses, normative, perversion and
The Seminar, Book III: The Psychoses
(Lacan)
Pyle, Charles, 22, 122

Q
Quanticator, 56, 59, 61; See also existential element

R
Rabelais, Francois, 4, 36
Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 16
Rational number, 187
Real number, 14, 49, 93
Realitat, 23, 5, 78, 12, 23, 2628,
184; See also reality principle and
Wirklichkeit
Reality principle,4, 30, 8283, 48 49,
120, 123, 127, 129; See also Realitaat

Referent, 11, 13, 20; of the Fathers

no, 23; 52, 123, 135, 142, 157,
162
Rendung, 152
Regression, 161
Remark on the report of Daniel
Lagache (Lacan), 63
Rememoration, 181, 189; See also
repression
Reminiscence, 189
Repression, 16970, 175, 181, 189,
191; See also rememoration and
Urverdrangt
Rhetoric II (Aristotle), 95
Rodriguez, Leonardo, 39
Roszak, Theodore, 139
Russell, Bertrand, 61

S
Sn, 36; See also knowledge
Schema I, 149
Schema L, 82, 110; See also The Mirror
Stage as Formative of the Function
of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Science, 2
Science of the real, 104
Scilicet, 134
Schizophrenia, 160; See also psychoses
Segal, Hannah, 2
Semblant, 8889, 120, 122, 164
Set theory, 1314, 93
Sense (sens), 69, 75, 109
Silet (Miller), 164
Sinn, 38; See also Bedeutung
Smith, Serena, 36
Socratic philosophy, 84
Some Psychical Consequences on the
Anatomical Distinction between the
Sexes (Freud), 2, 7578, 92, 100,
102, 107, 136, 138, 160

Index

Sphere, 18, 128; See also (a)spheric

Splitting of the ego, 149
Splitting of the Ego in the Process of
Defence (Freud), 150
Square root of the negative, 10
Stone, Jack, 97
Sublimation, 4, 139, 188
Subversion of the Subject and the
Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian
Unconscious (Lacan), 7273
Supplementarity, 31, 65, 133, 186
Suppression, 115; See also Unterdruckung
Suture, 94, 189
Symbols, ix, 26, 5859, 87, 95, 105
Symptom, Inhibition, Anxiety
(Freud), 146
Synecdoche, 26; See also metaphor

T
Television (Lacan), 26, 70
Temporal tension, 191
Tendlarz, Sylvia, 88
The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud
(Lacan), 168
The Dissoluton of the Oedipus Complex (Freud), 103, 108, 160
The Dream of Being the Most Beautiful (Tendlarz), 88
The Ego and the Id (Freud), 10,
108, 115
The Ego and the Super-Ego (Ego
Ideal) (Freud), 103
The Function and Field of Speech and
Language in Psychoanalysis (Rome
Discourse) (Lacan), 24
The Hypothesis of Compacity
(Morel), 58; See also compacity and
compact
The Infantile Genital Organization:
An Interpretation into Theory of

215

Sexuality (Freud), 56; See also

genital
The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 3,
100
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the I as Revealed in
Psychoanalytic Experience: (Lacan),
153; See also schema L
The New Introductory Lectures (Freud), 103
The Project for a Scientic Psychology (Freud), 3
The Seminar, Book XX: Encore (Lacan), 34,
5759, 7071, 8081, 96, 010,
110, 112, 115, 125, 134 35, 142,
145, 151, 16364, 17374, 182
The Seminar, Book I: Freuds Papers on Technique (Lacan), 169
The Seminar, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 69
The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 73
74, 7677, 100, 113, 158, 171
The Seminar, Book IV: The Object of Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 146, 158, 16065,
168, 17174, 177; See also Le seminaire, livre IV: Lobjet de la psychanalyse
(Lacan)
The Seminar, Book XVII: The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis (Lacan), 168
The Seminar, Book III: The Psychoses
(Lacan), 31, 67, 95; See also
psychoses
The Seminar, Book VIII: The Transference
(Lacan), 60; See also Le seminaire, livre
VIII: Le transfert (Lacan)
The Schreber Case (Freud), 24, 26, 41,
12930, 149; See also transsexualism
The Signication of the Phallus
(Lacan), 18, 59
The Structure of Hysteria
Discussion of Three Elements
(Smith), 36

216

Index

The Symposium (Plato), 60

The Taboo of Virginity (Freud),
134
The Third Critique (Kant), 18
The Standard Edition (Freud), 129
The Vicissitudes of the Drives
(Freud), 38
The Young Homosexual Woman
(Freud), 159
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud), 100, 118, 157
To Interpret the Cause (Miller), 70,
80, 165
Topics (Aristotle), 95
Torus, 18, 72, 112, 12223, 171
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 39 40, 54, 97,
128, 151, 163, 181
Transcendental signier, 11
Transsexualism, 24, 41, 149; See also The
Schreber Case (Freud)
Trieb, 111; See also Triebkrafte
Triebkrafte (motive force), 111, 118; See
also parole pulsionelle, Trieb and
Triebkonstitution
Triebkonstitution, 111

U
Unconscious as Unbewusste, 26; See also
knowledge

Unterdruckung, 115; See also suppression

Urverdrangt 169, 172; See also
repression

V
Verweiblichung, 129; See also Entmannung
and The Schreber Case (Freud)
Vorstellungen (Sach and Wort), 72; See also
Vorstellungsreprasentanzen
Vorstellungsreprasentanzen, 72; See also
Vorstellungen

W
Wacjman, Gerard, 11, 20, 132
Westerhausen, Anne, 3
Winnicott, Donald, 158
Wirklichkeit, 3, 5, 78, 26, 28, 184; See
also Realitat
Womb envy, 5
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8
Wunsch nach dem Penis, 138; See also penis
envy

Z
Zeno, paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, 17; 35, 93
Zizek, Slavoj, 25