a gigantic phallic Gestalt/image] and what he can give [his little real penis].”^38 It
should by now be clear how the competition with the father (via alienating iden-
tification) in the second stage of the Oedipus complex represents a preliminary es-
cape from the mother: it enables the child to keep her at bay, as it were, by means of
the father’s imaginary phallus—which, at this stage, the child literally em-bodies/is.
Let me add a brief preliminary definition of the phallic Gestalt.Safouan writes
that “the phallic Gestaltprovides human society with a signifier which serves to dif-
ferentiate the two sexes as marked and unmarked.”^39 The phallic Gestaltis therefore
an imaginary signifierlying at the crossroads between the imaginary and the symbolic
order. At the imaginary level, the phallus works as a Gestaltwhich promotes alien-
ating identifications. As a signifier, it differentiates man and woman in the first
symbolic couple +/−(undoubtedly, the minus does not count here as “less” than
the plus; it is an oppositional element, not a deficiency in the Real per se). There are
few places in which Lacan discusses this basic point; however, the following quo-
tation seems to me to point uncompromisingly in the above direction: “The sig-
nifier avails itself of a series of elements which are linked... to the body.... There
are a certain number of elements, given to experience as accidents of the body,
which are resumed in the signifier and which, as it were, give it its novitiate. We
are dealing here with things that are both elusive and irreducible, amongst which
there is the phallic term, plain erection.”^40
Above all, it is imperative here to emphasize that the consolidation of the phal-
lic image in the child during the passage between the first and the second stage of
the Oedipus complex must correspond with the realization that “the mother lacks
this phallus.”^41 The child has not perceived the mother’s lack any earlier than this.
During the first stage of the Oedipus complex, due to primordial frustration, the
mother is experienced as a desiring Other (the Desire-of-the-Mother), but this de-
siring Other is not thought to lack anything (the imaginary phallus). This distinc-
tion is central: at first, the Desire-of-the-Mother is not associated with lack.How else could
we justify the fact that Lacan continuously maintains that the child considers his
mother to be omnipotent? Conversely, it is exclusively by (retroactively) supposing
that the mother is phallic that the child may believe that he is loved by her per se.^42
In other words, the child wrongly presumes that he is able to satisfy the Desire-of-
the-Mother fully—although at no point does he consider this desire to be extin-
guished.^43 Why? Because he identifies himself with the various concrete objects of
her imaginary desire, the same objects which are responsible for his own frustra-
tion: more specifically, the child carries out a doubleimaginary and alienating iden-
tification. We have already seen how, even simply at the imaginary level, desiring
the other means, for Lacan, both desiring to be desired by the other—to be the ob-
ject of his desire—and desiring the objects of his desire. The child temporarilythe subject of the symbolic (other)