already being subjected to the paternal Law, by allegedly being omnipotent, she
imposes on the child an “uncontrolled law.”^93 As we have seen, her “articulated
whims”^94 render the child an assujet:his demand is totally dependent on her de-
sire. We shall later explore the paradoxes of this law understood as a signifier sui
generis.For the time being, suffice it to underline how Lacan feels obliged clearly to
distinguish the “veiled” form of the paternal Law in the first stage of the Oedipus
complex from its “mediated” form in the second stage: in the first case, the Name-
of-the-Father remains inaccessible to the child, he perceives only the discourse of
the mother “in the wild state,”^95 the mother does what she wants with the father’s
speech; in the second, “the father’s speech effectively intervenes in the discourse
of the mother”^96 by promoting a “Do not!”
( 3 ) The command “You will not reintegrate your offspring (produit)!” actually de-
prives the mother for a second time. She is now deprived as mother,having been de-
prived as womanwhen she was a little girl and underwent the Oedipus complex. In
other words, one must distinguish between: (a) the first privation of woman as a
speaking being whose sexuation is obtained by identifying symbolically with the
“minus side” of the fundamental signifying couple +/−provided by the phallic
Gestalt;(b) the second privation of woman quamother who attempts to compen-
sate for her symbolic lack, as well as for the imaginary lack generated by the dif-
ferentiality of the symbolic opposition +/−as such,^97 by equating her child with
the (symbolic and imaginary) phallus. I will return to this issue, as well as to the
problematic way in which Lacan thematizes the little girl’s initial privation, her
sexuation, in due course.
How do we overcome the second stage of the Oedipus complex? One final crisis is
needed, namely castration, which coincides with the intervention of the real father.
Since “the [real] father is revealed as the one who hasit,”^98 and he “neither ex-
changes nor gives it,”^99 the child realizes that it is useless to compete with him, to
keep on attempting to bethe phallus of the mother. We can speak of a resolution of
the Oedipus complex in the third stage only insofar as, due to castration, the child
identifies himself symbolically with the real father as the one who has it: this same
identification marks the emergence of the ego-ideal.^100
Here it is important to underline the fact that during the second stage of the
complex the child is unable to understand that the father hasthe phallus/phallic
Gestalt.And this despite the fact that the child (a) identifies aggressively with the
image of the father as a rival, and (b) identifies with the phallic Gestaltas the ob-
ject of the mother’s desire; at this stage, the child isthe imaginary phallus, his
proto-ego equates with it. If the second stage negatively imposes on the child the
fact that the imaginary father (the way in which the mother relates to his speech)