union is always marked by castration,” the renunciation of the child–mother love
relationship: in other words, man undergoes a “division, a split” between woman
as legal object of satisfaction authorized by the Law of the father and the forbid-
den/inaccessible woman as maternal object of love. Man pursues the latter pre-
cisely for what hesymbolically lacks—that is, the phallus that shelacks.^1553.6 The Paternal Metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father,and the Phallus
As I have repeatedly pointed out, the phallic Gestalt partakes of both the imaginary
and the symbolic order. The phallus is an imaginary signifier. Despite referring to
one and the same notion, Lacan often distinguishes the imaginary phallus (φ) from
the symbolic phallus (Φ). We have also already analyzed how φand Φare interre-
lated as a result of asymmetrical sexuation in man and woman. On this point,
everything could in the end be reduced to the fact that the phallus is, as symbolic
object +/−par excellence,always an object that lacks (something). Even possessing it
(+) actually always means lacking the oppositional −on which the +depends. In
other words, man can partially embody (Φas +) the symbolic phallus (Φas the
transcendent Law of the +/−) only after being castrated. Castration is in fact ex-
pressed in Lacanian algebra as − φ, the symbolic lack of the imaginary phallus. The
differentiality proper to the signifier creates the space of symbolic lack which is
equally valid for woman, who locates/sexuates herself on the −pole of the signi-
fier, and man, who locates/sexuates himself on the +pole of the signifier.
The asymmetrical fashion in which sexuation is achieved, however, obliges us
to treat φas the unachievable “universal object” that emerges as a consequence of
castration (−φ) independently of φas the imaginary aspect of the phallic Gestalt
+/−. The former does not directly refer to the image of the penis: it would be ap-
propriate to suggest that it is that which lurks in the background of the (always
different/renewed) concrete^156 object that bothman’s and woman’s unstoppable
demand for love perpetually request. This explains why Lacan also defines this first
acceptation of φas a “metonymic object”:^157 the space of symbolic lack opened by
castration (−φ) is strewn with an imaginary sliding of objects that can never attain
the status of “universal object.” On the other hand, the second acceptation of φun-
doubtedly isthe image of the penis:^158 if, on the one hand, such an image has a cer-
tain importance for the child regardless of his or her sex during the passage from
the first to the second stage of the Oedipus complex, on the other, after sexuation,
it becomes the privileged object only of woman’s desire. This noticeably entails
that, in the case of woman, the pursuit of the universal object which, as a conse-oedipus as a metaphor