mal) repression of these questions is a prerequisite for the subject’s active entry
into the symbolic order, as well as for his concomitant sexuation. In this context,
fundamental fantasies are nothing but (unconscious) palliative answers to these
questions. It is only by covering the lack inherent to the Symbolic that the child
can enter it as an individual at the end of the Oedipus complex. At this stage of his
work, however, Lacan thinks that the phallic answer provided by the Name-of-
the-Father is an entirely successful panacea: there is an Other of the Other; the dif-
ferentiality of the Other is contained/encircled by the oneness of a transcendent
Law.^201 In other words, Lacan believes that the paternal metaphor efficaciously
freezes the “intense archaic experience”—witnessing parental coitus, but also,
for instance, being “seduced” by the mother—in which the child is compelled to
ask himself questions that the Symbolic cannot answer (“Why is Daddy ‘violent’
with Mummy?”; “What does Mummy want from me?”); the trauma is thus retro-
actively organized in a (phallic) fundamental fantasy. Again, the latter is therefore
nothing but a defense against these questions. One should at the same time, how-
ever, underline how it is only with the formation of the fantasy that the trauma—
which had thus far been “inactive”—becomes operative in a retroactive way.
Certainly, we should not understand these questions as being literally asked by
the child: in a sense, it is the Symbolic as such that asks itself these questions
through the child at the moment when the latter is undergoing an “intense ar-
chaic experience.” Strictly speaking, their traumatic value for the child is only
caused/actualized by the answers that will have been given to them in the fantasy:
“Woman wants the phallus,” therefore “what is feminine sexuality beyond the phal-
lus?” (scene/trauma of seduction); “The father’s phallus generated me,” therefore
“how was Ireally born?” (scene/trauma of parental coitus).
To conclude, it is important to emphasize how the retroactive nature of the pro-
cess through which both the subject’s access to symbolization and the emergence
of his unconscious are achieved obliges us to acknowledge that Lacan is tacitly
presupposing the existence of four different kinds of signifier: ( 1 ) the Desire-of-
the-Mother; ( 2 ) the Name-of-the-Father; ( 3 ) the phallus; ( 4 ) all other signifiers
involved in the life of a subject who has successfully resolved the Oedipus com-
plex. As for this last category, in Chapter 2 , we considered how signifiers (S2)
operate both in consciousness and the unconscious according to the laws of meta-
phors and metonymy. In the early 196 0s, Lacan will move on to elaborate his for-
mula according to which signifiers (S2) represent the—unconscious—subject
for a Master-Signifier (S1): in the context of the first formulation of the paternal
metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father, the signifier that fixes the primal scene in a