animal life and the Symbolic is what radically distinguishes man from animal life,
Lacan is fully aware of “the paradoxthat results from certain functional interweav-
ings between the two planes of the symbolic and the imaginary.”^128 In more detail:
if, on an initial level, it seems that the Symbolic is what renders our “world sys-
tem” specifically human (“it’s because man has words that he has knowledge of
things”), and that the Imaginary is unequivocally linked to ethology (“the sexual
relation implies capture by the other’s image”), on a second level everything be-
comes more complex given that (a) it is only insofar as “the function of man and
woman is symbolized... literally uprooted from the domain of the imaginary...
that any normal, completed sexual relationship is realized”; and (b) the realm of
knowledge is dependent on imaginary identifications thanks to which “the object
is realized as an object of competition.”^129
This analysis provides us with a general explanation of the symbolic character
of human sexuality. Two broad overlapping issues, however, remain to be tackled.
First, we need to analyze the consequences of the fact that sexuation is asymmet-
rical for man and woman: in order to be properly sexuated, man needs only to be
castrated, whereas woman undergoes both castration and privation. Secondly, it is
necessary to examine closely the role of the phallus in sexuation; as we have seen,
the phallic Gestaltis an imaginary signifier, and consequently it always partakes of
both the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Yet, if during the first two stages of the Oedi-
pus complex the imaginary aspect of the phallus is prominent (the child attempts
to be the imaginaryphallus of the mother), in the third stage it is the symbolic as-
pect of the phallus that acquires more importance.
Castration is a prerequisite for the child (boy or girl) to be able to identify sym-
bolically with the father as the bearer of the symbolicphallus:^130 the result of such an
identification is the subject’s assumption of his or her sexual position (masculine
or feminine). On the one hand, renouncing being the imaginary phallus of the
mother, the girl assumes her sexuality insofar as she realizes that she does not havethe
(father’s) symbolic phallus; this not-having, her being deprived, is itself a symbolic
form of having. On the other hand, the renunciation of being the imaginary phal-
lus entails for the boy the assumption that he hasthe symbolic phallus, albeit for
the time being through the intermediary of the father: the symbolic debt to the
father is for him also a pact, the promise that he will effectively dispose of the sym-
bolic phallus once he reaches puberty. For the boy, having the symbolic phallus
means above all that “he will one day be able to access the problematic and para-
doxical position of being a father,” partially embodying the Law.^131
The girl’s castration, and her consequent identification with the father as the
bearer of the symbolic phallus, presupposes that she also undergoes privation. In
other words, the sexuation of man and woman is asymmetrical insofar as “there isoedipus as a metaphor