girl’s Oedipus complex worked in a perfectly symmetrical fashion to the boy’s—
love for the father and hatred for the mother—he himself later came to acknowl-
edge the existence of a “pre-Oedipal” indiscriminate attachment to the mother.^146
And as we know, the first stage of the Lacanian Oedipus complex, in which both
sexes love the mother, is nothing but a rethinking of the “pre-Oedipus.” The same
ambiguity also applies to the resolution of the complex: unlike Lacan, Freud
thought that the girl’s sexuation implied an identification with the mother, but at
the same time he also assumed that a privileged relationship was established be-
tween the girl and the father (from whom the girl wants a child). The hypothesis
of a proximity between Freud’s and Lacan’s ideas concerning the final identifica-
tion of the Oedipus complex is reinforced by Lacan’s own hesitations, if not con-
tradictions, on two specific points. First, if on the one hand, in Seminar III, Lacan
explicitly affirms that the girl resolves the Oedipus complex by symbolically iden-
tifying with the father’s image,^147 on the other, in Seminar V, he explicitly denies
that the girl identifies with him in such a way.^148 I believe that the only way to re-
solve this deadlock is to assume that Lacan is here implying that the girl assumes
her sexuality by “negatively” confronting herself with what he elsewhere names
the “paternal object”—the symbolic phallus—as the object of her desire, not with
the paternal Gestalt stricto sensu.Such a distinction nevertheless remains partly unclear.
Secondly, Lacan does not even seem to be sure whether the girl ever leaves the Oedi-
pus complex: thus he seems to share Freud’s view according to which for her, un-
like the boy, the castration complex is the point of entryinto the Oedipus complex
(she loves the father from whom she expects a baby).^149
In one specific passage of Seminar IV, things are interestingly rendered even
more complicated: “Castration is the essential crisis through which every subject...
qualifies to be... fully oedipized.”^150 Lacan seems to suggest that if the child ap-
propriately carries out symbolization, regardless of his or her sex, he or she never
leaves the Oedipus complex. Here Oedipal attachment is clearly synonymous with
successful heterosexual symbolic sexuation, and should not be identified with a
sterile incestuous relationship with the mother. In the end, it is not only woman
who tends to re-create with men her primordial relationship with the father;^151
man equally tends to re-create with women his original relationship with the
mother.^152 Does this mean that we eventually recover some sort of symmetry be-
tween the sexes? Not at all. Lacan believes that woman’s phantasmatic “model” of
sexual relationship is monogamous,precisely because it is always founded on her link
with the father: in her case, there is an “identification between the [symbolic] love
object [the phallus that she lacks] and the [imaginary/real] object which gives
satisfaction”;^153 in other words, all she really wants is “the [paternal] phallus all for
herself.”^154 On the other hand, man is bigamous“insofar as the normative and legal
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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