no symbolization of woman’s sex as such”; this is due to the fact that, in the case
of the female sex, “the imaginary furnishes only an absence where elsewhere there
is a highly prevalent symbol... the phallic Gestalt.”^132 In other words, this asym-
metry means that the girl is not able to identify symbolically with the mother,^133
and that she has “to take the image of the other sex as the basis for her [symbolic]
identification.”^134 She cannot assume her sex at the symbolic level in a direct way;
her “minus” cannot be acquired from another (maternal) “minus”: she is sexuated
only with respect to the father’s phallic “plus.”
Two points should be made here: ( 1 ) The fact that the vagina as a real organ can-
not be directly symbolized—due to the fact that in the woman’s case “the sym-
bolic lacks the material”^135 —does not exclude the possibility that “the little girl
herself feels something in her womb and that her experience is without doubt
different from that of the little boy from the beginning.”^136 The important issue
lies, rather, in the fact that in order to symbolize her sexual organ—and as we have
seen, it is meaningless to talk about a nonsymbolic sexuality in the case of human
beings—the girl has to relate herself to the phallus, which she does not have.^137
( 2 ) As I have repeatedly pointed out, “not having the phallus symbolically also
means participating in it out of absence and therefore, in a way, having it.”^138 In-
sofar as woman is deprived, at the imaginary level she nostalgically desires the
phallus, but at the same time the phallus as imaginary signifieris also functioning in
and through her at the symbolic level; “Given that she is taken up into the inter-
subjective relation, there is for man, beyond her, the phallus that she does not have,
the symbolic phallus, which exists here as an absence. This is entirely independent
of the inferiority that she might feel at the imaginary level.”^139 To put it simply,
man, who is also symbolically castrated, does not have woman’s not-having as a form of symbolic
having:his desire depends on such a lack. This is one way in which to explain why:
(a) “the biggest desire is lack”;^140 (b) what one loves (as a man) in a being is what
the beloved (woman) lacks.^141 One should not, however, overlook the fact that
such a love of what woman as such lacks in the end paradoxically coincides with
the most radical quest for the whole.Woman’s missing phallus is the pendent of man’s
“plus” as a castratedbeing: man is castrated since he symbolically lacks the lack (qua
imaginary object).
How does the girl relate to her father more specifically? Here Lacan takes up
Freud’s idea that the girl attempts to compensate for her privation by asking her
father for a baby as a substitute for the missing phallus. If the symbolic identifica-
tion boy–father relies on the promise that he will have the phallus, the symbolic
identification girl–father relies on the girl’s expectation that she will have the baby
(quaphallus). The girl’s sexuation as “minus” is consequently reinforced inasmuch
as the father fails to provide her with the baby she desires: she then waits “until the
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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