From, " Lacan, the meaning of the phallus and the ‘sexed’ subject [online]".
Hook, Derek (2006)
London: LSE Research Online.
Available at:http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/960
Available in LSE Research Online: July 2007
The human in language: an unnatural fit
....The role of language in all of this, we should emphasise, is pivotal; as Freudian psychoanalysis had initially borrowed notions from medicine and biology to strengthen its conceptual purchase on the human psyche and sexuality, so Lacanian psychoanalysis borrows from (and extends) the study of structural linguistics so as to further its engagement with the unconscious processes of subject formation. In investigating the structure and operations of language, Lacan is also intrigued more generally with the power and structuring principles of the larger category of the Symbolic, which is the pre-existing domain of language and law, the social and cultural structure into which the child is born.
So, importantly, for Lacan, masculinity and femininity are not biological essences but are instead symbolic positions. The assumption of one of these two positions is an obligatory component of human subjectivity. Each sex, furthermore, is defi ned separately with respect to a third term. In the words of Fink (1995: 105): ‘Men and women are defi ned differently with respect to language, that is, with respect to the Symbolic order.’
There is an entire ‘world of language’ which pre-exists the infant; it is into this world of symbolic exchanges and meaning that the ‘human animal’ of the infant is born. As Mitchell (1982: 5) states:
Language does not arise from within ... [it] always ‘belongs’ to another person. The human subject is created from a general law that comes to it from outside itself and through the speech of other people, though this speech in its turn must relate to the general law.
Being in the Imaginary
We can emphasise the ‘unnaturalness’ of language (along with the forced imposition of sexual identity to which it is related) with reference to the state of being which precedes the child’s acquisition of language. This is where Lacan introduces his concept of the Imaginary. The Imaginary is an order of experience, a ‘state of being’ that characterises the infant’s earliest pre-verbal and ‘pre-social’ interactions with the mother.
Here no clear distinction exists between the ‘self’ and other, between internal and external worlds. There is no clearly defi ned ‘I’ at this point, rather a loosely bounded and undifferentiated mass of sensations in which the body, much like the emerging ego, has not taken on a coherent form. We have here a ceaseless exchange where the ‘self’ seems to pass into objects, and objects into it. (Lacan is suspicious of all conceptualisations of a ‘self’ that imply that there is in fact some substantive or cohesive entity underlying the sense we have of what we are. He hence avoids this term altogether, preferring the notion of the ‘subject’ who is always divided, split, or barred.)
The Imaginary is thus an order based on the incorporation of sameness; there is no separation or gap between the experience of the child and the world it inhabits, with which, as Minsky asserts, it is fused:
Objects in the Imaginary repeatedly refl ect themselves in a kind of sealed unit where everything is an extension of the self which has been projected onto the external world so there are no apparent differences of divisions (Minsky 1996: 146).This is the pre-Oedipal world of narcissistic identifications and mirror reflections. It is a world, as Wright (2000) explains, in which the child patterns its emerging ego on Imaginary counterparts that appear to offer the promise of unity, cohesion and integrity. It is also however a domain of rivalry and aggressivity. Not only does the child narcissistically identify with, fall in love with, its mirror image (or refl ection in others), it also experiences confl ict and hateful relations with these images, from which it is as yet not wholly differentiated.
The absent object
Despite the intensity of the mother–child bond, it is never an exclusively dyadic relationship; there is always, insists Lacan, a third term present, something beyond the child to which the mother’s desire is aimed: the phallus. To be clear: the child is situated within the ‘fi eld’ of the mother’s desire – the infant does, after all, represent a nodal point of love, investment and care (at least for most mothers) – but it does not exhaust this desire. We are in a position now to offer a fi rst tentative defi nition of what Lacan might mean by his understanding of the phallus: the phallus is the Imaginary object of the mother’s desire which remains outside of the child’s reach, something it can neither grasp nor bring into being, something quite ‘other’ than it.
Being the phallus
The child then must realise that, as important as it may be to the mother, it will never be the exclusive object of her desire. It experiences itself as marked by a lack by virtue of the fact that it does not possess the phallus. It is, in other words, not able to fully satisfy her desire. The mother, however, is also marked by lack; she is incomplete because she does not possess the phallus she desires. Indeed, she must be incomplete: why else does she desire? Both mother and child are hence bound to the phallus; as Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986) emphasise: ‘the infant is bound to the mother, who is herself bound to the phallus in so far as she does not have it’ (131)
We now begin to understand something of the quandary in which the child fi nds itself. It is situated within the fi eld of the mother’s desire, but is not able to fulfi l it. This attempt by the child to be the object it thinks the mother lacks/desires permits for an endless amount of variation; it takes no one form or given set of activities.
What might the attempt ‘to be’ the phallus entail? Well, it is an Imaginary position that would permit for as much variety as there are different mothers and children; it seems to be the child’s attempt to be everything for the mother. Leader (1996) gives some examples: it might mean to be a glowing, seductive child, or the effort to enchant or puzzle the mother, to impress or seduce the adults it comes into contact with – whatever form seems to interest the mother the most.
Phallus as signifier of lack
What we need to remain aware of here is the fact that, although the phallus is the signifier of the mother’s desire, it is also always the signifier of lack. It helps here to reiterate that the phallus (for the child) is both that which the mother desires, and that which she does not have, both a signifier of desire and a signifier of lack. Adams (1992) and Luepnitz both comment on this paradoxical aspect of the phallus. On the one hand the term ‘phallus’ refers to our wish for completeness, ‘the phallus is what no one can have but everyone wants: a belief in bodily unity, wholeness, perfect autonomy’ (Luepnitz 2002: 226). The phallus, in this respect, is a wishful means of defending ourselves against castration. However, given that the phallus is the ‘covering of lack par excellence’ (Adams 1992: 77) it also becomes the signifier of lack, of the fact that there is something that needs to be covered. The paradox here is that the very thing that promises an Imaginary completeness comes also to signify the very opposite of completion; it calls attention to the fact of a lack that needs to be attended to.
The phallus as it exists in the Imaginary and in the Symbolic
The phallus is not only an Imaginary object; it also exists in the domain of the Symbolic. The Symbolic of course is a very different order of existence. Unlike in the Imaginary, the phallus here is not an Imagined object locked into a succession of images with which the child is constantly attempting to identify itself. Here the phallus is a signifi er of the mother’s desire. A signifi er, as discussed above, is something capable of conveying meaning – such as a sound, a mark, a letter, a gesture. In speaking of the phallus as it exists in the Symbolic as a signifi er, we are reiterating the fact that there are a great many things that can stand in for ‘the mother’s desire’. Just as any number of words can stand in for a given concept, an infi nite number of activities and objects can stand in for ‘that which is worthy of mother/father’s desire’.
In Lacan’s reading of the Oedipus complex during the 1950s, the child comes gradually to recognise (not in a conscious way) that it cannot somehow ‘incarnate’ the phallus for the mother. It comes to understand this because the phallus is not an attribute of an individual, but instead a signifi er of sorts.
Indeed, the attempt to be the Imaginary object of the phallus gives way to the realisation that there are many, many different possible things, activities, relationships that seem to hold the desire and fascination of the parents. It is at this point when the child understands the phallus in a Symbolic capacity. Luepnitz (2002) is helpful here when she asserts that the phallus is here not so much a thing as a position through which different objects circulate:
Adults can use wealth, accomplishments, or their own children as phallic objects. In this way, the ‘objects’ are desired for their representative value, their capacity to make the subject feel complete [for how it places them in the eyes of others] (226).
Here are the basic co-ordinates then of what the phallus means for Lacan: initially an Imaginary object that the child wishes to be, so as to secure the desire of the parents, to be that desire, yet, eventually, the phallus takes on a Symbolic signifi cance as a signifi er of what the mother or father desires, a token of what the child does not have. As such it is equally a signifi er of lack.
The phallus can thus be understood – in the dimension of the Symbolic – as a ‘signifi er of desire’, a ‘signifi er of the other’s desire’, a signifi er of overwhelming importance to the child. It is crucial we grasp the difference between these two different versions of the phallus: the Imaginary phallus is perceived by the child in the pre-Oedipal phase as the object of the mother’s desire, ‘as that which she desires beyond the child; the child thus seeks to identify with this object’ (Evans 1996: 142).
The Symbolic phallus is, by contrast, the signifi er of the other’s desire. So, whereas the castration complex and the Oedipus complex revolve around the Imaginary phallus, the question of sexual difference revolves around the Symbolic phallus (Evans 1996). This is explained in more detail as we continue.
It should be becoming clear that Lacan’s conceptualisation of the phallus means it never has to be identifi ed with a physical aspect of the body, or, indeed, with the penis. As an Imaginary object, the phallus is always something the child cannot reach, something it does not have, something it understands as lacking. As a Symbolic element, as the signifi er of the other’s desire, the phallus could potentially be an infi nite number of possible things.
