be noted that the Fort!–Da!game, the fact that “the signifier is introduced... in de-
mand,”^74 also coincides, from the child’s standpoint, with the mythical moment at
which pure need is somehow repressed for the first time. I shall discuss this mul-
tifaceted point in the final section of this chapter.
3.4 The Second and Third Stages of the Oedipus
Complex
Lacan clearly considers privation and castration to be two different kinds of lack of
an object. Privation is defined as the real lack of a symbolic object, the symbolic
phallus, and it applies exclusively to woman. Castration is defined as the symbolic
lack of an imaginary object, the imaginary phallus, and it applies to bothwoman
and man;^75 symbolic castration—which initiates the third stage of the Oedipus
complex, its resolution—is the precondition of the subject’s active entry into the
symbolic order; without undergoing castration, no subject can truly individuate
him- or herself through symbolic identification.
Let us start with privation, which, as we have seen, determines the passage from
the first to the second stage of the Oedipus complex. First of all, what does it mean
to lack a symbolic object in the Real? What does woman as such lack? Two notions
of the Real are implicitly at stake here: in the Real to be understood as everyday re-
ality, woman clearly “lacks” the penis (the real phallus); yet the vagina as a real or-
gan is not per sea lack, it does not stand for that which one acquires when one is
deprived of the penis.... In other words, it is clear that, according to a different
definition of the Real—on the basis of our previous discussion of the real object,
we could call it “the virtual Real” which precedes symbolization—woman does
not lack anything. Privation as a real lack makes sense only when the lack of the pe-
nis is oppositionally related to the penis (or, better, to its Gestalt), when the object
which is “really” lacking is symbolized +/−, that is, when the penis turns into the
phallus. As Lacan clearly points out: “Everything that is [virtually] real is always
and necessarily at its place.... The absence of something in the [actual] real is
purely symbolic.”^76 It is only insofar as we establish by some kind of law that some-
thing should be in a certain place that we can say that “an object is missing”; this
expression is nothing more than an oxymoron when it is abstracted from a sym-
bolic context.^77 Most importantly, privation as a real lack of a symbolic object
means that, within a symbolic dialectic +/−, “what one does not have is as exis-
tent as the rest. Simply, it is marked by the minus sign.”^78 Woman’s lack of the sym-
bolic phallus (−), her state of privation, which is not to be confounded with the
vagina as a real organ, is, even at the symbolic level, as existent as the symbolic
phallus (+).