genetic father, but the person who partially embodies the symbolic father (as func-
tion) for the child in reality—and who might, but need not necessarily, corre-
spond to the so-called biological father.^114 On a closer inspection, the very notion
of a real father as biological or genetic father is absurd: the Real (father) can make
sense only from the standpoint of the Symbolic—one then understands why
Lacan sarcastically observes that “there is only one [‘genetic’] real father: the
spermatozoon.”^115Such a discrepancy between the paternal function and its embodiment also ex-
plains another fundamental distinction: although we are compelled to assume that
what the real father concretely has and “shows” at the moment of castration is the
penis, his possession of the latter is important only inasmuch as it represents the—
always partial—embodiment of the phallus. As Lacan puts it in a particularly in-
tricate passage from Seminar IV, during the third stage of the Oedipus complex,
everything “is about knowing where [the phallus quareal penis] really is”: on the
contrary, up to that moment “the phallus was never there where one found it.”^116
In other words, in the first two stages of the Oedipus complex the phallus should
be equated with the imaginary “absolute object” that the child attempted to be for
the desire of the mother: such an imaginary object could originate only within
the dialectic of a symbolic object +/−which was “contemporaneously present
and absent.”^117 The symbolic object emerged as absent precisely when it was pres-
ent (as gift) in the guise of some contingent imaginary object, and as present
when it was absent, that is, it was precisely the fact that no contingent imaginary
object (of demand) was ever sufficient to represent the symbolic object fully, it was
such an inadequacy, that rendered the latter present. (The “absolute object,” the
imaginary phallus, would then be nothing but the—by definition—impossible
representation of the sole +“pole” of the symbolic object +/−.) Therefore, the
child undergoes castration only when there is an “equalization between a sort of absolute
object, the phallus, and its being put to the test in the real [the penis]”;^118 as a consequence of
this operation, it is no longer for the child a matter of “all or nothing” (+as “all,”
−as “nothing”),^119 “the object is no longer the [absolute] imaginary object thanks
to which the subject can lure [the desire of the mother], but the [partial] object
which the Other [father] can always show the subject that s/he does not have [girl]
or has in an insufficient way [boy].”^1203 5 Sexuation and the Feminine Oedipus Complex
As Lacan clearly points out in Seminar III, there is, in the end, one basic principle
on which Freudianism relies: “The subject’s sexual position is... tied to the sym-
bolic apparatus.”^121 Therefore, if the (resolution of the) Oedipus complex corre-the subject of the symbolic (other)