directly to identify with it: at this precise moment, the imaginary father intervenes
to stop the incestuous relation. By prohibiting the child’s direct identification with
the phallus, the father “suddenly promotes the object of the mother’s desire to a
properly symbolic rank.”^83 In other words, it is only the Law’s designation of the
phallus as a forbidden object that allows the child to group his previous opposi-
tional signifying identifications (with the object of the mother’s desire) +/−into
an ordered sequence. I shall return to this point.
If we compare this account of privation with my previous description of it, we
realize that the two are by no means incompatible: Lacan is simply drawing our at-
tention to different aspects of privation. The first account emphasized the “natu-
ral” role of the phallic Gestaltin the child’s initial assumption of sexual difference
(the child realizes that the mother is deprived as a result of the fact that he is cap-
tivated by the phallic Gestalt). The second account underlines how this same real-
ization can effectively be put into practice only insofar as the mother is already
characterized as a deprived being by a preexisting symbolic Law. We could attempt
to link these two accounts of privation by supposing that, for Lacan, the moment
at which the child is captivated by the phallic Gestalt(first account) coincides with
that at which he directly identifies with the phallus qua forbidden object of his
mother’s desire (second account).
We should emphasize that the prohibition of incest undoubtedly concerns both
the use that the child makes of his penis and the circulation of the phallus/phallic
Gestaltas an imaginary signifier. With regard to this issue, how is the second stage
of the Oedipus complex experienced by its protagonists more specifically?
- After privation, the childoffers himself to his mother as a gigantic phallic Gestalt/
imaginary phallus: he is now aware of her lack, which, from his standpoint, he had
been able temporarily to avoid during the first stage. We must also remember, how-
ever, that the prohibitive “No!” which inaugurates the second stage is also logically
concomitant with the genital drive’s first emergence in the child—that is, infan-
tile masturbation—and with the child’s consequent awareness of the utter inade-
quacy of his real organ. The child understands that his mother desires him as an
image but, at the same time, it is only at this stage that he would like to be desired
for his by now awakened real phallus, which he therefore also offers to her. More
generally, we should emphasize how, despite the fact that, according to Lacan, un-
like most psychoanalytic theories, genitality can never be understood simply as the
synthetic and harmonious achievement of psychosexual maturity—sexuality as
such can never be harmonious—there undoubtedly exists a relationship between
the Oedipus complex and genitalization.^84