Let us look at this issue of counting more closely. We have already explored from
various standpoints the way in which symbolic identification is brought about by
the phallic signifier which organizes the lack in the Other; the problem, however,
is that the subject represses the fact that such an organization is not equivalent to
an overcoming of lack: as Lacan says in Seminar IX, (primal) repression is gener-
ated by nothing but a literal miscalculation (un erreur dans son compte).^99 At the level of
the unconscious, the identifying representation (one) of the subject’s own failing
in the object anecessarily institutes difference (not-one), and thus gives rise to
the repetitive series 1, 1, 1, 1... in which each “count” is started anew, each “go”
is absolutely unique; repetition is the impossibility of repeating the primordial
identification with pure difference. On the other hand, at the level of self-
consciousness, the subject’s naming of himself as “I”mistakenly adds 1+ 1 + 1 +1...
and obtains 2, 3, 4... —that is to say, the diachronic “temporal” continuity of his
lived experience.
Let us attempt to reformulate the kernel of the difficult issues I have just raised in
a somewhat simplified and illustrative way. When it comes to providing specific
examples of fundamental fantasies, Lacan is not very eloquent: he usually prefers
to confine his descriptions to the field of perversions (especially pathological
masochism and fetishism) and reassess Freud’s seminal texts on the formation of
fantasies (first and foremost “A Child Is Being Beaten”).^100 We should now dare to
ask these straightforward questions: what kind of scene is staged in a “standard”
phallic fantasy? In what precise sense is the emergence of the fundamental fantasy
simultaneous with that of self-consciousness?
I do not think I am forcing Lacan’s theories in suggesting that the object ain the
“standard” phallic fantasy Samust necessarily refer to the secondary (symbolic)
identification with the father which promotes the formation of the ego-ideal.^101
More specifically, as we saw in Chapter 3 , in secondary identification the child
identifies himself with the symbolic father—embodied in the real paternal fig-
ure—as the one who has Φ, and who is thus able retroactively to signifierize the
desire of/lack in the (m)Other. In and around Seminar VI, Lacan further specifies
that secondary identification allows the child to proceed to a subjective assump-
tion—and a parallel sexuation—which is inflected between “having” and “be-
ing,” and is succinctly expressed by the formula “he is not without having it” (il
n’est pas sans l’avoir).This is to say that when, at the resolution of the Oedipus com-
plex, the child symbolically identifies himself with the father as bearer of Φ(by
means of an imaginary alienating identification), he represents himself in the ob-
ject a(the phallic Gestalt) precisely as “not being without having it.”^102 The object a
in fantasy is both an irreducible lack and the result of an organization of lack