father is finally substituted with the one who will adopt exactly the same role, the
role of the father, and will effectively give her a baby.”^142
More importantly, when a woman becomes a mother, the child functions both
as a symbolic substitute for her symbolic lack of an imaginary object (castration),
as an imaginary phallus, and as an imaginary substitute for her real lack of a sym-
bolic object (privation), as a symbolic phallus. This detail is of fundamental im-
portance if one is to understand the entire dynamics of sexuation and the overall
role of the symbolic order as such. Through her child, the mother attempts both
to have the symbolic phallus—that is, to overcome her privation and to symboli-
cally be a man qua“plus” in the “plus/minus” dialectic of sexual difference—and,
beyond man, who is himself castrated, to have the imaginary phallus, that is, to
suspend castration, to become whole.Consequently, when the imaginary father de-
prives the mother in the passage from the first to the second stage of the Oedipus
complex, he actually deprives her of (the child as) both the imaginary and the sym-
bolic phallus. It is in this context that we can appreciate most appropriately what
the prohibition of incest as the imposition of the Law (of sexuality) aims at: far
from applying to the avoidance of incestuous “animal” mating—which is strictly
speaking impossible for human beings—the proscription of the mother’s “reinte-
gration” (+) of her child must be interpreted as the preservation of symbolic dif-
ference +/−and therefore of the order of the Symbolic tout court.Mythically, woman
enters culture and allows its propagation when she exchanges her child for her
symbolic designation as “minus”:^143 in this way, she also furthers the preservation
of the species. Conversely, her temporary revocation of castration/privation risks
pulling her out of culture and endangering the preservation of the species.
Despite overcoming Freud’s misogynous psychological explanation of
woman’s “inferiority” and consequent “penis envy” by explaining this phenom-
enon through the superimposition of the logic of the signifier and Gestalttheory—
to cut a long story short, for Lacan, the problem with the vagina is simply that it
does not “stick out”^144 —in his discussion of the feminine Oedipus complex in
Seminars IV and V, Lacan neverreally departs from the father of psychoanalysis.
Given that in these seminars he often openly disagrees with Freud on other issues,
we must assume that he believed the Freudian account to be substantially reliable.
A more radical rethinking of woman’s symbolization will be offered only in the
197 0s with the so-called “formulas of sexuation” after the discovery of a specifi-
cally feminine dimension “beyond the phallus.”^145
It is often argued that Lacan’s explanation of the feminine Oedipus complex is
radically different from Freud’s, since according to Lacan, (a) both boy and girl
“love” the mother; (b) both resolve the complex by identifying with the father.
One could object that although it is evident that Freud initially believed that thethe subject of the symbolic (other)