Subjectivity and Otherness A Philosophical Reading of Lacan

• The motherhas always desired the child as a huge imaginary phallus (even before
  privation) and has never been completely satisfied by it—this is why she also
  consoled herself with the father’s penis, which could be defined as a privileged
  embodiment of the phallus. Now, the child’s offer of his own penis, which the Law
  prohibits, simultaneously makes her recollect that she must also renounce the child
  quaimaginary phallus. With reference to little Hans’s case, Lacan says: “The mother’s
  behavior with little Hans—whom she drags everywhere she goes, from the loo to
  her bed—clearly shows that the child is her indispensable appendix”; however,
  “when she has to get down to brass tacks and to put her finger on the little thing
  that the child has taken out and is asking her to touch, she is suddenly taken by a
  blue funk.”^85


• The imaginary fatheris not, by definition, a real person. The “No!” is not actually
  uttered by the real father: the Law is already internalized by the mother, since she
  is already actively involved in the symbolic order. Privation is therefore operated in
  “a mediated way by the mother”^86 herself. “The function of the father, the Name-
  of-the-Father, is linked to the prohibition of incest, but nobody has ever... be-
  lieved that the father effectively promulgates the law of prohibition of incest....
  The mother is herself able to show the child how that which he offers her is insuf-
  ficient and to pronounce the prohibition to use the new instrument.”^87 Because of
  all this, I think we could actually reread the aggressive competition between the
  child and the imaginary father for control of the mother as the mother’s “inner
  fight” with herself: the child’s—by now explicit—offer of himself as a phallic
  Gestaltis juxtaposed to the Father’s prohibition of incest.

Some further points should be made with regard to the way in which the symbolic

Law, the Name-of-the-Father, already functions in and through the mother:

( 1 ) What specifically does it mean to say that the Law is “mediated” by the mother?

How does the Law concretely enable the child to perceive that his mother is de-

prived? The acknowledgment of privation is triggered in the child not by the “per-

sonal relationships between father and mother”—“it is not about whether one

plays footsie with the other or not”^88 —but by the way in which the mother relates

to the father’s speech.^89

( 2 ) The agency of the father is already present in a “veiled form”^90 during the first

stage of the Oedipus complex. In other words, the dialectic of frustration is itself

dependent on the symbolic Law insofar as “the question of the phallus is already

posed somewhere in the mother,”^91 and it is a matter for the child to track it down.

However, this very phase is ambiguously called by Lacan the “law of the mother”:^92

with this definition he intends to emphasize the fact that, although the mother is

the subject of the symbolic (other)