If we return to the onset of the second stage of the Oedipus complex, it is once
again important to remember how the child is able fully to assume privation, and
therefore sexuation tout court,only when the complex is finally resolved: the initial
emergence of sexual difference during the phallic phase is completely symbolized
only in a retroactive way. Moreover, as in the case of the dialectic of frustration, it
is vital here to take account of the fact that the second stage of the Oedipus com-
plex is two-faced: by depriving the mother of the child quaphallus, the (imaginary)
father also simultaneously dispels the child’s mistaken belief that he is the only ob-
ject of his mother’s desire. For both the mother and the child, what is prohibited
by the (imaginary) father is their incestuous relationship (“You will not sleep with
your mother!”; “You will not reintegrate your offspring [produit]!”).^79
At this point, we should ask ourselves one basic question: when precisely does
the (imaginary) father interrupt the dialectic of frustration, the child–mother love
relationship? Why was it not considered incestuous from the very beginning? The
exact moment at which the “No!” of the father—the voice of the Law—resonates
for the first time is logically concomitant with the child’s realization that the
mother (and he himself) lacks the phallus and, as a consequence, with his attempt
to directly identify with it, to be her phallus. During the dialectic of frustration the
child does not know about the phallic Gestalt:this is why the father does not yet
openly intervene. The child starts to compete aggressively with his (imaginary)
father in order to be his mother’s phallus only after the mother has actually been
deprived (of him).
In a few pages of Seminar V, Lacan provides a particularly dense but lucid ac-
count of this key passage. As we have already seen, a double alienating movement
allows the child to identify himself with a “multiplicity of elements... in real-
ity,”^80 that is, with the imaginary objects of his mother’s desire. The child has to
“delude her desire,”^81 in order to preserve himself as the exclusive object of her de-
sire (in order to delude himself). He identifies himself with the mother and, thanks
to this identification, he identifies himself with what she desires. (For this same
reason he is able to believe that she is a desiring being who does not lack anything.)
Lacan points out how this series of identifications is not only imaginary, given that
the child’s demand for love, which here perfectly overlaps with what the mother
desires, is already based on an experience of symbolic lack: through “all his suc-
cessive identifications [the child] himself assumes the role of a series of signifiers,... of hieroglyphics... which punctuate his reality with a certain number of
marks and makes it a reality filled with signifiers.”^82 The objects of the mother’s de-
sire with which the child identifies himself (+) are given always against a back-
ground of lack (−). These double identifications are ended when the mother really
desires the phallus/penis (of the father) and, as a consequence, the child attempts
oedipus as a metaphor