agencies. In other words, proper repression requires proper individuation, and
the unconscious can properly be so named only with the emergence of self-
consciousness: this is achieved only with the formation of the ego-ideal at the end
of the Oedipus complex.
In the end, we have to admit that Lacan is providing us with twodifferent no-
tions of primal repression: generally speaking, primal repression is the conse-
quence of primordial frustration at the beginning of the first stage of the Oedipus
complex. “Primal repression corresponds to the alienation of desire when need is
articulated in demand.”^197 For the sake of clarity, we could call this kind of primal
repression inscription.On the other hand, primal repression stricto sensuwill corre-
spond to the retroactive shaping of the unconscious—in concomitance with the
consolidation of a conscious ego—enacted by the paternal metaphor at the end of
the third stage of the Oedipus complex; in this sense, primal repression corre-
sponds to the repression of the traumatic proto-signifier Desire-of-the-Mother,
and to the parallel formation of a fundamental fantasy. In other words, the primal
scene is finally “legalized” by the fundamental fantasy: the father has the right to
have the mother; his apparently violent conduct during coitus finally makes sense,
and the “What does she want?” finds an answer in the phallus.
With specific regard to the fundamental fantasy, an apparent contradiction
needs to be resolved immediately: the fundamental fantasy provides the structure
of the (unconscious) subject but, at the same time, contains “signifiers in their
pure state... emptied of their subject”;^198 the symbolic order here is desubjec-
tivized. All things considered, this simply means that the fundamental fantasy
retroactively structures the trauma (Desire-of-the-Mother) and, for this very rea-
son, the subject can never consciously assume it: in the phallic fundamental fan-
tasy, the Name-of-the-Father works retroactively as a sign with respect to the
trauma. Since the unconscious is ultimately held together by the fundamental
fantasy, accessing it, exposing the trauma, is ultimately the same as undoing self-
consciousness itself. This also explains why the paternal metaphor as the imposi-
tion of a phallic fundamental fantasy is itself necessarily repressed:^199 it is so since,
by substituting itself for the Desire-of-the-Mother, the signifier Name-of-the-
Father is directly linked to the Real of a trauma.
In Seminar III, Lacan suggests that there are two fundamental sets of questions
that the symbolic order, due to its differentiality, cannot answer. The first concerns
the subject’s singular existence, his individuation: “Why do I live and die?”; “How
was I born and how will I die?” The second concerns, for both men and women,
the “minus” of female sexuality when considered independently of the phallic
“plus”: “What is it to be a woman?”; “What does a woman want?”^200 The (pri-the subject of the symbolic (other)