27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., pp.70‒71(emphasis added).
29. Ibid., p. 57. This should also explain why the pre-Oedipal relation is triadic for the
mother whereas it is dual for the child (however, this duality relies on a third element
that the child is not able to recognize).
30. Ibid., p. 71.
31. Ibid., p. 81.
32. On the fact that the existence of early vaginal masturbation cannot be disputed, see ibid.,
p. 97.
33. Some important passages of Seminar IV may be used to defend my claim: “All this hap-
pens at the level of the imaginary father. We call him imaginary equally because he is
integrated into the imaginary relation which forms the psychological support of the
relations with the fellow man, which are, properly speaking, relations of the species,
the background of every libidinal capture as well as of every aggressive erection” (ibid.,
p. 220 ; see also ibid., p. 207 ).
34. “We should not forget that the phallus of the little boy is not much more valid than that
of the little girl” (ibid., p. 193 ).
35. Where the second stage of the Oedipus complex is concerned, it is as a result more cor-
rect to state that the child identifies himself with the phallic Gestaltwhile competing with
the imaginary father.
36. This is not sexuation proper: here, the child simply identifies himselfwith the imaginary
phallus; sexuation is properly concluded only when he locates himselfwith respect to the
symbolicphallus.
37 .Le séminaire livre IV,p. 242.
38. Ibid., p. 243. For a clear-cut definition of anxiety, see ibid., p. 226. In Chapter 5 , I shall
return to the notion of anxiety and its relation to the Real.
39. M. Safouan, Lacaniana: Les séminaires de Jacques Lacan, 1953–1963(Paris: Fayard, 2001 ), p. 57.
40. The continuation of this quotation provides us with important clues about the child’s
individual entry into the Symbolic and, more generally, the “birth of the Symbolic” as
such: “The erected stone gives us an example; another example is the notion of the
human body insofar as it is erected. It is in this way that a certain number of elements,
all related to corporal height and not simply to the lived experience of the body, consti-
tute the first elements [of the signifier], taken from experience but completely trans-
formed by the fact that they are symbolized” (Le séminaire livre IV,p. 51 ).
41. Ibid., p. 71 (emphasis added).
42. It is not completely correct to say that, at this stage, the mother is phallic for the child,
since the phallus as +can emerge only against the background of its oppositional −with
the advent of the phallic phase (when the mother is discovered to be deprived). During
the dialectic of frustration, the child simply ignoresthe phallic Gestalt,and the mother is
“non-deprived.” Thus, the fantasy of a “positively” phallic mother is always retroactive.
43. “It is only... insofar as the round trip of the subject’s profoundly aggressive tension to-
ward the other [the father]—around whom the successive layers of what will constitutenotes to pages 68–73