deprives the mother of the phallus, it is only during the third stage that the child
manages constructively to “symbolize, to render privation fully significant.”^101
This can occur only if the real father demonstrates to the child that the “No!” which
deprives the mother depends on him; if he can show that, as the sole agent of the
Law, he can donate and withdraw the forbidden phallus at will.^102
Lacan defines castration as the symbolic lack of an imaginary object: it might
be helpful to analyze this rather obscure formula in more detail. Where symbolic
lack is concerned, Lacan specifies that it should be understood in terms of debt.
This can be interpreted in two overlapping ways. First, the child is indebted to the
real father insofar as he saves him from the threat of being engulfed by the mother:
“The subject is freed from the impossible and anxiety-provoking task of having to
bethe phallus by realizing that the father hasit.”^103 Secondly and more generally, by
accepting that the phallus belongs to the real father alone, the child actively enters
the domain of symbolic Law, of which the real father is the agent; as Freud had
already envisaged in Totem and Taboo,the subject’s very entry into the Law—the in-
stitution of the tyrannical agency of the superego—renders him always-already
potentially liable to be persecuted, and consequently a priori guilty. Moving on to
the nature of the castrated object, this is nothing but the imaginary phallus—it is
clear that the very menace of castration, “If you use it one more time, I’ll cut it
off!,” does not operate on the real organ. The fact that the child is castrated ofthe
phallus actually means that he renounces beingthe imaginary phallus of his mother.
During the passage from the second to the third stage of the Oedipus complex, “the
question is: to be or not to be the phallus?”^104 Why does the child generally decide
notto be the phallus anymore? Because the real father finally intervenes as the one
who hasthe phallus. On the other hand, in the second stage, rivalry with the father
relied on the fact that, in a certain sense, the imaginary father washimself the imag-
inary phallus.^105 We could suggest that the child was simultaneously identifying
and competing with the same Gestalt,as always happens in narcissistic alienation:
on the one hand, the rivalry with the paternal Gestalt was clearly based on the fact
that the child compared the latter’s completeness/perfection, due precisely to the
presence of the phallus, with his own incompleteness. On the other, in order to
be the phallus, the child was identifying with the same paternal Gestalt quaphallic
Gestalt: buthe was not identifying with the father qua bearerof the phallic Gestalt.
Having said this, one should not underestimate the importance of the compet-
itive relation that the child establishes with the imaginary father during the second
stage of the Oedipus complex: it is nothing less than the precondition of the sym-
bolic identification which is achieved in the third stage. Lacan is extremely clear on
this point: “The conquest of the Oedipal realisation... is carried out... by way
of an aggressive relationship [with the father]. In other words, it’s by way of an imag-
inary conflict that symbolic integration takes place.”^106 He goes so far as to draw a generaloedipus as a metaphor