is here isolated only by way of abstraction; it interests us only because it is suc-
cessively resumed in the quartet which is constituted by the entry of the paternal
function.”^23
The relation between the mother and the child that follows primordial frustra-
tion is said to be dialectical. Why? “The child expects something from the mother,
he even gets something.... Let’s say, by approximation,... that the child may be-
lieve himself to be loved for what he is.”^24 Following the emergence of the sym-
bolic object as gift, the child demands that the mother love him. His demand (to
be distinguished from a mere appeal/cry relating to the satisfaction of biological
needs) consists in an unconditional demand for love: up to a certain point, the
child thinks he is loved by her. It is crucial, however, to distinguish between what
happens from the child’s perspective and what happens from the perspective of the
mother: the dialectic that unites them is asymmetrical. For what does the mother
expect from the child? Does she really love him? We should recall that the mother
is already an active part of the symbolic order and, as such, a desiring being. Lacan
reminds us that, according to Freudian theory, the privileged object of desire is the
phallus. Two important specifications should immediately be made: first, the phal-
lus is not the penis. “This object is defined as imaginary, and thus it is impossible
to confound it with the penis in its reality, of which it is the proper form,that is, an
erected image.”^25 Secondly, the imaginary phallus “is more important for those
members of humankind who lack its real correlate [the penis], that is, women.”^26
Lacan believes that, from the mother’s standpoint, a dialectic is established with
the child insofar as the child can represent for her a substitute for the missing
imaginary phallus: “If the woman finds a satisfaction in the child it is precisely
for as long as she finds in him something that, to different degrees, calms her
need of the phallus.”^27 This is precisely where the asymmetry in the mother–
child dialectic that follows frustration lies: on the one hand, the child may be-
lieve himself to be loved for what he is, but on the other, the mother only “calms”
her search for the phallus through him. For the mother, there is never a com-
plete equation between the phallus and the child: “Far from being harmonic, the
relation of the mother to the child is redoubled... there is always something that
remains irreducible in the mother.”^28 Commentators usually fail to make this
distinction between what happens from the child’s perspective and what hap-
pens from the perspective of the mother, and thus wrongly claim that, in the first
stage of the Oedipus complex, the childidentifies with the imaginary phallus.
Lacan is very clear on this point: “Is it in a spontaneous and direct way that the
relation mother–phallus is given to the child? Does everything happen simply
because he looks at the mother and realizes that she desires a phallus? It seems
this is not the case.”^29oedipus as a metaphor