manages to superimpose these two dimensions upon one another: he conjectures
that he is the exclusiveobject of the Desire-of-the-Mother—that he is loved by her,
love corresponding here to “having the Other to oneself ”^44 —precisely insofar as
his identification with her body image means that he desires what she desires
while, at the same time, also identifying himself with these objects.^45
We can therefore conclude that, at the end of the first stage of the Oedipus com-
plex, the child realizes that the mother does not have the (imaginary) phallus, and
thus that she desires it insofar as she lacks it: this superimposition of desire and lack
necessarily terminates her omnipotence.^46 Moreover, the child retroactively real-
izes that he has been desired only as a partial stand-in for the imaginary phallus.
To summarize: a “fundamental disappointment”^47 is produced in the child when
he acknowledges that (a) “he is not the mother’s unique object,” because (b) “the
interest of the mother... is the phallus,” since (c) she is “deprived” of the latter,
“she herself lacks this object.”^48
Before moving on to treat the second and third stages of the Oedipus complex,
we should consider the dialectic of frustration more closely by focusing in partic-
ular on what the emergence of the symbolic object implies for the subject.
( 1 ) After primordial frustration, what is at stake in the child’s relation with the
mother “is not really the object [the real object] but rather the love of the one who
can give you this gift [the object quasymbolic object].”^49 In such a way, the child
activelysymbolizes his relation with the Other for the first time: however, in this
protosymbolization “the gift is only associated with a certain gratuitousness....
That which is behind the other, the entire chain thanks to which the gift takes
place, is not yet grasped.”^50 In other words, the child does not yet realize that the
mother wants something specific in return.
( 2 ) As a consequence of protosymbolization, the child’s demand (for love) is al-
ways unsatisfied. Even when a particular demand is satisfied, the child perceives the
gift as somehow frustrating: demand “immediately projects itself onto something
else,” onto a “symbolic chain of gifts,”^51 in order to confirm the mother’s uncon-
ditional dedication. It is in this context that Lacan formulates his well-known def-
initions of love for the first time: “What one loves in a being is beyond what she
is, that is, in the end, what she lacks”;^52 and, in parallel, “there is no bigger sign
of love than donating what one does not have.”^53 The first formula implicitly
refers to the lover, the second to the beloved: we can infer that, during the dialec-
tic of frustration, they indiscriminately apply to both the child and the mother.
Theirs is a “love relation”:^54 as lover, the child does not demand the object of sat-
isfaction but “the [symbolic] object as grasped in what it lacks”: Lacan also calls it
“being,”^55 given that this object, “which is beyond,... is not nothing since it has