So, welcome to our lecture today, which is going to be about the phallus, the Oedipus and Lacan in general. What we are going to talk about today has to do with some work that we have been doing in our guided reading group. So, a work on a specific article called “the signification of the phallus”, which Lacan published in a key… so we did some work we’re gonna do, we’re gonna demonstrate a little bit of that, but then we’re gonna go a bit further, and yeah, again feel free to participate and ask questions and we’ll see where we get to. I have several ideas of where I want to take the lecture, but again, we could take it anywhere.
I’ll represent myself briefly. My name is Leon Brenner. Thank you. Yes. I’m a PhD candidate and then expert on let’s say in autism theories. That’s what my work revolves… the theory of autism, and also I love Lacan dearly, and I’ve been working on Lacan for years. Also, that’s part of the reason that we’re doing this lecture today. Yeah, so let’s start.
Okay, when we think about the phallus, it’s a really big deal in psychoanalysis at least, or anywhere I guess. Everybody wants to have the phallus to know what is the phallus, and I think the significance of the phallus is greatly diminished in a very Freudian joke, which is also a horrible joke. But it is a Freudian joke about the phallus, and it goes pretty much like this. Anna Freud, who is Freud’s daughter and a very famous analyst-to-be, is sitting in the living room with Freud in their apartment in Vienna – that’s before she became an analyst, so she’s a very inquisitive woman and she asks Freud, “Dad, can you tell me what is the phallus?” And Freud said, “Yes, no problem, obviously, but in order to do that, we need to step into my office.” They stepped into Freud’s office – he goes behind his desk, unzips his pants and takes his pants off, and he tells Anna, “This is the phallus.” And then, Anna said – and this is the punchline of the joke – she said, “Oh, so the phallus is just like the penis, but smaller.” So yeah, this is like a kind of a horrible joke, but it really shows us what Freud was aiming for when he was talking about the phallus. Freud was talking about the penis, right? An actual part of the body, and what Freud was saying (is) that the penis is the biological marker for the psychological difference between men and women. Ok, so we have to differentiate these two things. It’s not a biological marker… or say the biological difference between men and women. Freud was taking at one point one step further and was saying that it is all about the psychological of sexuality. And what Freud was actually saying (is) that the phallus plays a really crucial role in what is called the “castration complex”, which is a very big deal in the child’s development and also in what Freud defined as the Oedipus complex, which we’ll get back to soon, but let’s do a brief introduction of that.
So, Freud was saying like the Oedipus, and you enter the Oedipus, and let’s say the drama of the Oedipus has a lot to do with the phallus, and it’s different from (or “for”?) boys and girls. A castration is different for boys and girls. Let’s say for boys, the castration complex or castration anxiety has to do with them exiting the Oedipus complex. Ok, they get into the Oedipus; they sort of notice that mommy or their sister doesn’t have one; they get pretty anxious of “why will somebody take it from me?” and at the point where the castration complex is resolved, the boys get out of the Oedipus complex intact, hopefully. Okay, so for boys, it’s concluding the Oedipus. For girls, it starts the Oedipus because they get into the Oedipus after they already have lost that thing. Let’s say mommy took it, okay, mommy took it from the get-go, and the Oedipus starts, and the whole idea is to sort of find to compensate, so both sides as (or “have”?) a compensation, but then, there is a different kind of compensation; this is very briefly Freud and the phallus in this whole drama. So, we see the phallus has a very important role in the organisation of children’s sexuality from a very early age… a lot of questions about that. In that sense, Freud has said the very famous quote “Anatomy is destiny.”
There is something about the biological essence of sexuality which portrays or defines the psychological destiny of men and women. So, that’s Freud, and for Lacan, which we’re gonna mostly discuss today and not only is destiny, if we take into consideration that the phallus is a signifier. So, anatomy is destiny if the phallus is a signifier. That’s the bottomline here.
Now there is a very famous quote from the article “The signification of the phallus” where this a paraphrase like Lacan said, the phallus is a signifier explicitly, and he also said that it’s not a regular signifier, but it’s a unique signifier – a signifier designating meaning effects as a whole . That is the quote. Now, Lacan also said in direct relation to that that the only way to understand Freud’s idea of the unconscious is by thinking about signifiers. So, this very crucial moment of anatomical destiny is turned into linguistics – into the field of linguistics – and we have to know something very crucial about that before we progress into the Oedipus and understanding the role of the phallus in miracles.
So, just generally speaking about signifiers, let’s think about language. Let’s think about how language works, and we’ll sort of divide into three stages, let’s say in our understanding of language. So if any of you have read who caused (or “which calls”?) “the order of things”, he discusses that specifically that at a certain point in history – and we can relate that to religion – words, signifiers were considered to have a direct relationship to things, not as a representative of things, even just directly embodying things. Now, I usually relate that to the Jewish religion, which – you know, the first creation of the universe according to the Jewish religion was a sentence – was a saying – it was God saying, “Let there be light”. So, the weight of words for the Jewish religion, let’s say, has a metaphysical dimension. A word is a manifestation, and in Jewish religion, there are several ways to read the Bible, let’s say, and if you progress on this ladder, you finally get a level where words are actually things, even letters. So, when we read the universe, we can find the same – everything that we see around us manifesting language, not a representative but a real presentation. A direct presentation. So, that would be one way to look at language – as directly presenting what exists. Language and existence so rt of are equivalent.
Now, a second way to look at it, which is more familiar to us, is what I would call maybe naive empiricism. In this sense, empiricists would say, “Words are not direct presentations of an object. There’s a relationship between a word and an object: a relationship of representation.” So, I have a word in my mind, or a concept, or a signifier, and that signifier sort of points to the outer world and says, “Yeah, this is what I mean.” So, a tree would actually mean a tree, so it actually points to a tree. So, there was a relationship between concepts, words, signifiers and objects, but it’s a relationship of representation.
Now, the final field I want to present today – and this is the field that Lacan was really working hard on – is the field that is called semiotics. And that’s a form of linguistics, which sort of started showing its face in the last century, and major figures in this field would be Charles Pierce, Roman Jakobson and Ferdinand de Saussure, which all of these Lacan has specifically associated himself with. Now, according to semiotics, the first thing that we need to remember is that there is no relationship between concepts, words and things. There is no relationship; there is no correlation; there isn’t even a relationship of representation between these two. According to semiotics, both the word and the thing are psychological elements in our minds, okay?
So, you see how we’re stepping back from metaphysics; we’re stepping back from the existence of things; we are now in the field of languages as (to) what creates reality, right? And accordingly, there is no link between a word and an object, and what we do have is a link between what this so-called sound-image and what we could say is meaning, or let’s say concept here. Okay, so a sound-image would be just, let’s say, a chunk of phonemes or sounds, and this would have a relationship to concepts. There is a famous drawing: signified and signifier and sort of like there’s a relationship there.
The idea is that the signifier and the signified have, let’s say, an arbitrary relationship. The fact that I use the word “mutton”, and in English, it means the meat of a sheep, right, but in French, it’s the meat of a sheep and, if I’m not mistaken, it also means a sheep. So, this same sound-image does not have a necessary relationship with the concept or the meaning that is manifest when we use it. It’s arbitrary, and it changes, right? There is a weak link between the two.
Now, something very interesting about this, I assume, is the fact they claim that meaning in general is not a signifier and a signified, let’s say – not like, let’s say, the word “cat” and the concept “cat”. Meaning is engendered by relationships between signifiers, and more than that, it’s a differential relationship between signifiers. So, it’s not that I have this concept “cat” or this word “cat”, and there is this concept “cat” in my mind or something like that. It is many, many signifiers: let’s say, fur; let’s say, clean or annoying etc etc, which interact in some sense, and eventually create meaning. So, through the differential relationship between signifiers, we have meaning for us.
So, if this is a signifier and the signified, now we need to understand that the phallus is a signifier, right? Now, that’s very important to understand because if we think that the phallus is signified, then we need to look for it somewhere, right? It would have a meaning, but then, Lacan said it is a signifier but not only just a regular signifier but an empty signifier, which means it is a signifier with no signified. So, how is this possible? And this is a bit strange, right, when we think about the phallus as such a deliberated concept; everybody is talking about it, let’s say, in psychoanalysis at least, and Lacan was saying, that’s an empty signifier, right?
So, how do we understand the signifier that has no meaning, but on the other hand, Lacan explicitly said, it begs designates (or “designated”?) meaning effects in general. So, it has no meaning, but it sort of says, you know, if we simplify it, says there is meaning going on here somewhere, right? So, it’s not a specific meaning – it’s not “cat”, let’s say, it’s among signifiers; among the field of signifiers, meaning happens.
Now, an interesting example to sort of wrap our minds around this is to think about the chain of signifiers. Think about this chain, like we’re thinking about the signifiers like there is a first signifier, then some more signifiers, etc etc; that’s the chain of signifiers, and when they interact, we sort of have meaning, right? When different signifiers interact, they create meaning; they create the signified, right?
Now, the question is: what happens with the first signifier? So, when we have a thousand signifiers, we can create many, many signified; there are many meanings. But when happens when we have the first? Any ideas? Just off the top of your head, like how would the first signifier? What would be its meaning? (That’s an excellent answer.) So, the only thing that the first signifier can signify is its relationship to the rest of the chain, right? So, there is no meaning that can be engendered other than the fact that through this relationship, through this initial relationship to the chain of signifiers, meaning is constituted. We can start speaking, or the world can start to manifest because, you know, the world, if our conscious reality is signified, this means “hello, reality”, like “hello world”, right? So that’s how it happens, according to this way we look at signifiers.
Again, it’s important to remember that a lot of concepts in the Lacanian teaching are much more intricate than we think they are. For instance, the first signifier that has a completely different signifier, and the Lacanian signifier – we call it S1 – and it’s different than the phallus. We won’t say it is the phallus, right? But we do need to think of the phallus as an empty signifier, not in the sense that it doesn’t exist; it exists as a signifier but it is empty because the only thing that it can designate is – here we go, that’s the rest of the chain – yeah, right? So that’s a terrific question again because you are taking us to the field of math, and Lacan is doing that exactly because this question is asking: is it zero? And a great question to ask ourselves is: where does counting start? Right? Do we start counting by zero? Do we start with one? Do we start with two? Three is already too much, right? But when does the actual counting start? I don’t think there is a definite answer here. It’s true, yeah. Well, if we have time, we will even connect that to what Lacan calls actuation to feminine and masculine desire, right? It’s sort of the answer to this question – it gets different answers when we look at it from a feminine or masculine perspective according to psychoanalysis, we are talking about sexuation is something different, but let’s just talk about set theory. If we talk about a certain version of set theory, how do we count according to set theory? There’s a thing that is called an empty set, right? And an empty set can be counted or not? So, an empty set is empty, and when I write it like this, I don’t even count it. I don’t count it as one empty set. But if I include it as a set, then I count it as one. So this is number one, when I count an empty set for the first time, when I include an empty set in a set, right? This is sort of a transition. So where does counting start from including the empty set in a set or from the empty set itself? How do I count to? I count the set with the empty set and another empty set. That would be two, right? So, this guy, which – I don’t know – like in our reading group, somebody remarked that it really resembles this letter P, which represents the phallus. This guy, this empty guy, if we don’t count it in the series; actually it’s completely empty. So this guy is very important; it appears in all the numbers. When I count from one to million, it will always appear there, but it will not appear as a set; it will appear right here as the beginning, let’s say, as the first signifier, which is always there. So the phallus is always there; that’s obvious, right?
Well, it’s always there in our construction of reality. And that’s the big deal about the phallus according to Lacan, that it is the first signifier; it is like it’s a signifier that if we have the chain of signifiers, and let’s say the signified which is always sliding beneath it; it’s because the relationship between the signifier and the signified – they’re not constant. They’re not rooted in nature, you know, like some people would believe that a word is given by God; it’s necessarily related to the objects in the world. It’s not an accident that a tree is called a tree. There are a lot of games in Hebrew you can play with words and the numbers; they’re worth (as shown in the auto-generated subtitles), and you can add them up – there’s some interesting games you can do with that. But here in semiotics, you would say no, there is no concrete relationship between the signifier and the signified, and the phallus is that nail that sort of like it nails the signifier and the signified; it makes sure that we won’t go crazy, you know, that we won’t lose the meaning of the world. So, it’s very important, right? We’ll come back to the phallus in a second because I think it’s an interesting metaphor.
Now, in order to understand the phallus in … Lacan really diverts the discussion in the article of the signification of the phallus to this sort of conceptualisation, we need to sort of think of the first moments of language, which is the same as saying the first moments of existence, and in this domain, we are talking about what Lacan designates in the words: need, demand and desire, which is something we have always also done some work in our group.
So let’s think about it – it is sort of a story; it is a metaphorical story that we’re gonna tell right now about the first moments of a baby in the world – a human baby, not a fish baby or a cow baby because it is completely different from them. When a baby is born, and let’s say any human born into this world has what we can define as instinctual needs. These are needs which are crucial for the survival of the organism, right? For instance, food, sleep… I don’t know. Well. We will get to love in a second, right. I would agree in some sense, but let’s keep that and be more organismic level – that’s the level of the body, but it’s sort of a mythical body, you know, because when we talk about the body, the body has arms, legs, it’s high, it’s short – these are already signifiers. You see, these are already signifiers which colour the body. When I talk about the body in this sense, I’m sort of mythically talking about the body as this sum of excitations or whatever that is – I can’t really wrap my mind around it without resorting to language, right, but you sort of like this primordial mass of what scientists call “cells”, which is also language as well, so it’s something even previous – that’s very mythical, it’s… I don’t know. Nobody knows. So there’s this body, and it has needs, let’s say, and a baby unfortunately is born in the world when it’s not ready to pacify its own needs; it’s kind of a silly like a pack of meat; a baby doesn’t do a lot. If a baby is hungry, if someone won’t feed the baby, that’s not gonna really help her out; it’s gonna die, right? So the only way that a baby can pacify its needs is by making an appeal to the caretaker, right? How does a baby appeal to the caretaker? It screams, cries, right, or in another sense, it uses language. So a cry would already be a signifier – it signifies something, right? So we can say that we add here another dimension, so if this is the dimension of need, this is where language comes in and takes the need and sort of tells us something about the need to the caretaker. Lacan calls this a “demand”. So a demand is an articulated need or is an attempt to articulate a need. It’s when language sort of interferes in the very nice and terrific way that, let’s say, nature just works, language interferes, it’s crucial without this interference, there will not be any life, yeah, but when it interferes, something gets a little screwed up. But anyway, the baby uses a demand in order to say something about this need, so it cries, and it means “I’m hungry”, okay, or it cries again; it means – I don’t know – I won’t change things; I need a change of a diaper, etc etc.
So again, I’m talking about this point where the need intersects with the demand, where demand articulates a need that has to be satisfied. But what Lacan argues is that when a baby cries, it doesn’t only cry in order to pacify a need, so there’s something more than this in a demand, and this has to do with the presence and absence of the caretaker, right? So like you said, demand is not only demand to pacify a need, it’s also a demand for love. Now love would be here; this would be the place where we would define as that: demand for love because it has nothing to do with need – it’s not a biological, bodily, let’s say, need. It’s something that happens the moment that language enters into our domain. When language enters, it tells us something about the need, but it also expresses something else. You can see that babies sometimes cry and they don’t really need food. They just need their daddy or mommy to come into the room, right, and that would sort of make them stop crying because they’ve expressed the demand for love and not the demand to satisfy a need. Okay, are we here? I’m repeating these concepts, but they just represent the same thing that we are drawing here, okay. So, on one side, there is where a demand is more than a need, and on the other side, there is where need is more than a demand. Any ideas – when a need is more – what does this mean? We delivered that to some extent, you know, in a group. Something in my need for, let’s say, nourishment is not completely captured by language, right? Something from this very instinctual need gains no designation in language. Language is unable to deal with it. There is some part of it, there is something about this very internal thing – when I try to express it, I lose it.
A simple example: You ask me who am I? You know, I tell you, “okay, I’m Leon.” That’s not… it doesn’t really grasp everything which is a meaning, let’s say, at least according to my fantasies, right? So I’m saying, “oh, I’m this guy that’s making a lecture right here right now”, but still, that’s not my essence, let’s say, my substance. Let’s say I can keep on talking, but it will never be it, right? There is something that’s always missed out. Language is not perfect. That is something that’s really hard to comprehend. We feel that language will create order in the world… with language we can explain anything, and I mean also scientific language, also physics, let’s say, but language in its essence has a blind spot. There is a very interesting mathematician named (?), who theorised that in Math, every formal system, every coherent formal system, always has a blind spot, and it’s a fact of language also here. Something from the dimension of need is not grasped by language. I am left with something that my cry does not express.
Now, this is a very interesting metaphysical figure, right? Because let’s say everything we can describe, everything we can say something about is here in language, right? And you ask me, okay what is not in language, what is that thing that was never in language. I can’t really tell you anything that I will say will miss out. That’s the whole idea, right? It is exactly the point where language misses out inherently, right? So who has an interesting solution to that or just a notion about that? This part of a need is what is primally repressed, okay? This is a very interesting concept – there is a repression you probably heard about. Repression is a mechanism that Freud had specifically attributed to neuroses. It’s a way where I can live in a world which is bearable without me constantly having to deal with unbearable things…. Or very simplistically, we could say when an idea or an effect, which corresponds to this idea, sort of doesn’t really fit with my ego, like what would be pleasurable to me, I repress it. It goes to the unconscious; it stays there, right? That’s repression.
Primal repression is something else. Primal repression is a constitutive mechanism. Repression is something that happens always all the time, but primal repression starts the story. It’s the first negation. Now there’s an interesting way to look at it, and in order to sort of grasp it, we need to differentiate between two concepts: one is a lack and the other is a loss. A loss is – let’s say I had this marker and I lost it, so a loss necessarily entails the existence of an object, which precedes its disappearance, or negation, let’s say, if we call it very simplistically. So, that would be a loss: an object was there and now it’s gone. We can say repression is sort of like this kind of a loss, yeah. We lose something from consciousness, but primal repression has nothing to do with loss. It has to do with lack. Lack is – let’s say a void which we can assume was always there. There was no object before. It’s a lack that was perpetually lacking forever. Okay? Primal repression is the first indication of lack. So it is a lack; it is known that something wasn’t there because again, we cannot express what was here – there’s no way that this gained existence in psychic reality because psychic reality has to go through language. Existence – reality – you know, we’re talking about semiotics here. The things, the objects, let’s say, they’re not there in the world per se that they’re the signified, which is engendered by a play of signifiers, so it’s all happening here, so this thing… So, what Freud was saying that we have to necessarily assume that this happened. We have to necessarily assume that something in the realm of need was not captured by language, right? And we necessarily assume that it was never there in the first place from the perspective of language. So, the only thing we can assume is that here, there is a lack. Freud said it’s a primal repression. This seems it is sort of like an active mechanism, right? And we can say this is the first action or act that the subject takes according to psychoanalysis. I will give an example and I will go back to Freud because this is a good question. For Lacan gives the example of a robber who comes to a person with a gun, and he says “Your money or your life?” And this is a choice, let’s say, you can choose your money or your life. But if we look at it closer, we see that it’s not really a choice between two things. It’s not that I can choose either money or life because if I choose money, I lose money and life. So it’s sort of like a very strange logical disjunction because usually a disjunction means either A or B, or the two of them, etc. But this is a stunt disjunction that says “Oh, your money or your life – you can only choose life”, but when you choose life, it is necessarily engendered with a lack. Now when we think about it is cannot be thought as something that we had at some point and we lost the moment where life comes into existence, it is engendered with a loss. We can call it money, but we can also call it the primally repressed. We can also call it the primal lost object. So this would be a primally repressed sum of excitations, like we said, like this body is like a sum of excitations. Some of it never got into language, and the first moment was sort of like negated, and all we have in language is sort of like a lack. That’s all we have there. Yeah.
Freud related primal repression to the division between the conscious and the unconscious, if we go back to Freud because he said this repression functions by pushing an idea to the unconscious, we have to necessarily assume that such a division is created at some point. He said we cannot just assume that there is a division and then repression functions. We have to create this division. Primal repression is what creates this division, according to Freud. Yeah, but we digress a bit, but just to clarify this idea. Now, in order to sort of get this like lost object here, what was primally repressed because this thing sort of haunts us. Okay, in a second, I will demonstrate. We can look at it as like what Buddha said about desire, and we are getting to desire in a second. Buddha said that it doesn’t matter what you do; if you desire something, you can either get it and then desire will sort of grow for another thing, or you can desire something and never get it. Second option is suffering, right? You desire and you never get what you want or what you desire. The first option is also suffering because you kept perpetually desire forever, never truly ending this sort of progression. We can say that the primally repressed object is exactly that thing which never stops bothering us. Right? There is never a way to fill that lack because there was never money in the first place. There was nothing there in the first place, so we can never get it; it doesn’t natter how much we try, and we never get that first thing. Okay? Any question until now?
[43:40 minutes]
Okay, yeah. I think I get what you’re saying, and you’re right. This is a story, and obviously it is much more intricate than that. So let’s clarify something. Yeah, when we think about language, and when I’m saying language, you know, people think about words or concepts like even the concept of – I don’t know – milk, or the concept of love – let’s say – these are sort of linguistic elements, but when I am talking about language in this sense, I am not talking specifically about words. It can be anything which has a signified, right, which signifies something. So, when Lacan said that the baby cries, it is true the cry is sort of like a demonstration, right? But even in the womb before being born, or even before starting to – let’s say – suck the milk like babies do, in the womb the baby is already exposed to language, right? Languages, whatever the mother speaks, or what it hears from the outside, or the way that these internal stimulations in its/his/her body interact, and at this moment, there is already an appeal to language. Now, when we say language in this sense, we don’t mean languages like the actual cry for the mother – “I’m crying; I want milk” – but like you said, like movements – there is already an articulation of the body. There is a way to say – this movement interacts with this sensation – there is already an act of representation on a very low level without the use of concepts. Now, when we say that the baby appeals to the mother, we also say that the baby appeals to the other, so in essence we are saying that these interactions, these movements, are never done in sort of like a secluded world where only the baby exists, but they are done using – let’s say – signs which are adopted with the assumption that they mean something for someone. Yeah, there’s something that these movements actually make sense, okay, and we will be talking about a very very very low level, right.
Well, afterwards, this complexifies. Afterwards, the baby – let’s say – makes a cry, and then the mother tells him, “oh, you’re tired”, or “oh, you want me to come”, right? She sort of tells him what is this, right, she gives him words or descriptions to sort of say what is this part which is more than the need; what is this part in your – let’s say – your interaction with the world or these feelings that you relate… we’ll be climbing in for a second… if you relate to the bad mother, to the bad press (as shown in the auto-generated subtitles) or the good press – these are very like the pre-Oedipal, like sort of concept, so the mother tells her, “Okay, so this means that”. That’s a higher level of acquisition of language, right? But when we talk about it, we talk about the very very very first moments of subjectivity in the world. This can happen in the womb, right? So, already like an assumption that something means that these minute – let’s say – ways that the baby controls the environment or its body means something for someone, right? That is the assumption – when we use signs, we necessarily assume that they mean something for someone.
[Audience speaking 48:30]
Yea, something is uncomfortable. Let’s carry on with that and we’ll do… Something is uncomfortable – that is the point. So, let’s say there is a – we’re getting to this in one second – when we get to do like Lacan’s interpretation of the Oedipus, but let’s say there is a mythical state, where the baby is one; there is no division; all the needs are necessarily pacified immediately, like in – Lacan said this very weird state in the womb, which is totally hypothetical because even in the womb, the baby experiences discomfort, right, but let’s say there is a mythical state preceding primal repression, preceding the appeal to the other, preceding the use of language, where everything just functions, right? This is like heaven – I don’t know – Nirvana. But at the first moment, that happens already in the womb that a baby feels a certain discomfort in excitation, which does not fall into place. This has to mean something; this is already a division. This is already me and something alien. Even the first moments it’s only me; at this moment there is me and the other, right? Something is there which excites me and doesn’t really sit with this – let’s say – mythical complete and whole image of myself or like state, right? In this first moment is already a split, right? Okay, so we’ll deliver that later, yeah? Yes.
[50:20 Audience speaking]
Well, definitely, we would say that the demand for love is unconditional because there is no way to actually pacify it, but the baby learns from its history what is that, and we see that we demand different things from the people that we love, and we can say that at this point in the baby’s life, it sort of learns some things about this – what is this love that I seek, right? So yeah, he gains – the mother says, “Oh, so you want me to cuddle you”. Maybe, right?
[Audience speaking 51:00]
Absolutely, yeah. Right. This is like the place and language which we sort of preserve for whatever belong to mother and I wanted more than these needs that she pacified for me, right? This is the place we preserve in language for that. But guys, again, if we stay on the level of the demand for love, we get to a very pathological form, right? People that demand the love of their partners – really demand – “give it to me” – and how can we actually give that? What is this love that we seek? We seek that place in the other, which is capable of loving or desiring, so we desire that; we demand that place in you that gives love. How can we pacify that? Maybe we can send flowers to our loved one. This is my love. But that’s not enough, right? Demand for love is not pacified with that, so you move in together. This is my love. But that’s not enough. So, we would say that a relationship that is based on a demand for love and doesn’t go to the level of fantasy, which I will draw right here in a second, is kind of a hard relationship. It’s hard. We all went through it, right? Some of us even got out of it or progressed or, how Hegel said, we use that Aufheben sublimation, right?
So, I’m gonna draw another circle right here, which some of you might be surprised. So, this circle I would define as the place of desire, right? Now, a desire is in Aufheben in two senses according to Lacan, it’s from both sides – both from the side of demand and from the side of need, so a desire what we would also situate here the object of desire is engendered with these two qualities of these two – let’s say – subtracted aspects of our encounter with language. From the side of demand and demand for love, desire would gain its unconditional character. Also, there is nothing specific which can make the desire sort of stop forever, right? Let’s say – and it is only a hypothetical saying and you hear that sometimes when you read Zizek, he said, the worst thing that can happen to a person is to find the object of its/his/her desire, right? It is a catastrophe. It’s impossible. The only – let’s say – subject that has the object of desire in their pocket would be a psychotic, according to Lacan. So, when Zizek said that, he said, yeah, it’s destructive because it means you are psychotic, which sometimes is a problem. But for neurotics, the object of desire is never in our pockets. We constantly complain, “Oh my god, I just can’t find rest… doesn’t matter how much I try… doesn’t matter how many women or men I date…” It doesn’t stop, right? So desire gains this unconditional character of the demand for love, so there is nothing specific which desire can point to, and on the other hand, it gains from whatever is primally repressed – this lost object, which constantly haunts us because it was forever lost, perpetually lost, lacking, like we said, it gains its – let’s say – incessant character. The fact that what I would hear it’s insatiable, right? There is no way to make it stop.
So, desire gains these characteristics and manifests right here as the third circle in our diagram. And in this sense, we have three lacks represented in this diagram, right? We have the lost object – whatever was primally repressed – that’s a lack, right? We have a lack in language – whatever language cannot articulate in the dimension of need – that’s a lack right here. And then, we have a third lack, which is the place or the site of the object of desire. It is sort of the demarcation of the object of desire. That’s how we use desire. We lean on it. There is a place at least; there is a place to desire. To desire safety, even. So, let’s say a better relationship would sort of lean towards here. We always demand love, but then maybe we should work together on a shared fantasy, right? That would be a good relationship, I think.
Now, back to the phallus because we’ve been blabbering about just a second. Back to the phallus, and then we’ll have some more questions. The phallus is exactly the thing that nails these three together. Okay, so it is – let’s say – it is that aspect in language, which is right here – it nails them all together. It’s like a nail. I would even venture to sort of like draw this right here. You know, why not? The phallus is the nail that nails all these three together. And I’ll give you like a metaphor that are sort of like thought of, so I felt the phallus would be a non-existing nail, which fixes an empty picture frame to a wall that is not there. Okay, so we’re talking about the lack, right? So, in this sense, reality – our psychic reality – existence is an empty picture frame which is fixed with a non-existing nail to a wall that is not there. Imaginative, sort of like, yeah? The phallus is that nail; it sticks out – that’s a very important thing to remember – it sticks out, thus holding the structure together, okay? So let’s do a small break for a question, and then we’ll continue.
[Audience speaking 58:00]
I would say, and we will see this right now, the phallus is there as lack in all these senses… The phallus is not nothing; it has to be something, or actually it would be a bit better to say it is not nothing, yeah… Well, we have a simple answer for that. It’s a signifier. It’s a unique signifier. The question is how to draw these circles? It’s a terrific question, and this is what Lacan refers to as the Borromean knot, yeah. I sort of used it here; Lacan doesn’t use it here. I sort of used it here sort of to play with your imagination. It’s an interesting use, but I mean, in a second we will draw it again, but I mean, what stands here – it’s a great question, and sometimes it’s the Object A… which can be translated as the object cause of desire. So it’s a very interesting question. Eventually in Seminar 23, we don’t have a nail holding them in. We have this sort of what Lacan defines as a sinthome. It’s not a symptom. It’s an inventive. It’s terrifically fascinating, and I think we’ll briefly talk about it in the last five minutes of this lecture, okay, just by implication even. Okay, yeah, let’s do a couple of quick questions.
[audience speaking 1:01:45]
The nail is the phallus; the picture frame would be a psychic reality, which is a frame for the object of desire. That is only where the object of desire can appear. Think about the picture. Think about going to the museum, like think about looking at the picture – something is there in the frame. It is framed, and it again gets its place and then we have the wall. The wall would mean, yeah, we would say the wall is sort of the limit – our limitations – whatever the picture cannot say anything about that, or let’s say, or at least in classical art; that’s where contemporary art goes beyond, but let’s say the picture tells us something about the picture beyond this – the wall – it’s sort of like it is where it is hung. There is nowhere else to hang it. That is sort of it limits the capacity of our reality. There is something in reality which is – you know, it doesn’t matter how much we fantasise or use language in inventive ways. This is a limit; there’s a limit. Death is a limit, right? So the wall would be death, maybe, yeah. Continue? Yeah, okay.
So, now we ventured to Seminar 4 which is called the object relations, which I think is one of the only seminars that doesn’t have like a full English translation, even other underground ones, but it has some … text translated if you are interested. And in this seminar, Lacan takes whatever he wrote in the signification of the phallus, and if I’m not mistaken, that was a year before, and in the seminar, he sort of progresses it to his interpretation of the Oedipus complex. So what we have is this progression between need, demand and desire is incorporated to Freud’s Oedipus complex, so let’s do it.
What Lacan does is he takes the ternary domain of the Oedipus complex, and you remember who the stars are there, right? It’s obviously the mother, the child and the father, and he adds the phallus as a fourth term, so now it’s not three. It’s four. And even more interestingly, it manifests in all of these domains as a representative or a signifier of lack. Here it would be a real lack; here it would be an imaginary lack and a symbolic lack. Now, for those of you who are not familiar with these terms, these are the terms that are widely used by Lacan from a certain stage – we call them the registers, right? These are the three registers: real, symbolic and imaginary. But I won’t go deeply into this theory. But let’s say, according to Lacan, there are three. So, the Oedipus complex is a story, so let’s start telling this story, okay.
This story begins with what we described earlier as the mythical pre-Oedipal stage/state – a stage where there is no division in the world/universe/existence – there is only oneness. It is kind of hard to grasp because any word has already entailed a division, like any thought, any concept already entails the division, but let’s hypothesise about this – like – amazing stage where there is no division; the child is immediately satisfied, always anything that sort of surges up in terms of bodily excitement is immediately pacified and directly pacified, so there is no need to actually address even the universe – everything just works out. We say there is a constant presence of the mother, and again I’m saying mother; I’m not implying that all caretakers are mothers, but again in the Oedipal terms, we would say that there are two actors playing as caretakers and – Freud calls – the mother and father. Of course we can talk about a father and father in gender terms etc etc, but let’s keep it in classical Freudian terms, so there is a constant presence and connection to the mother. So this stage – the mythical stage of the oneness or unity is purely hypothetical. We just have to assume that this stage existed before – because there is a state of division after – so we sort of assume logically that if there is a mechanism or a procedure which creates a division, this “hello, let there be light” we assume that before that was sort of like no division, okay? It’s just a logical assumption.
Now, the first moment the Oedipus complex begins, let’s say, is initiated is the moment where the real phallus shows its face. I don’t know if it has a face, but it shows itself. So this is the beginning of the Oedipus, so before that, we are talking about pre-Oedipal – sort of like, you know, it’s kind of hard to even deliberate that, but we sort of assume that stage, and then the mythical stage is broken off, right? This unity is not united anymore. Something is cut out. Something is carved out, dividing the child and the mother, so we can say that if the – let’s say – state of unity is like a perfect sphere/circle, everything is there right in this stage, we have sort of something which is cut out and divides the child from the mother. Again, where do we start counting – one or two? This is the same idea. So, we start with the child and the mother, and this is actually a stage where the mother just doesn’t answer all the needs of the child immediately. Yeah, it already happened in the womb, like there’re some things which happened in the body, which are just not very pleasant and they are not pacified immediately, so in that stage, there’s already a division, already a distancing, right? We can say that this is the moment where the child is hungry and the mother doesn’t come again, we are using this example which is kind of problematic, but maybe it will help us to grasp it. The child is hungry, the mother is not there. So what is introduced here is the absence of the mother, right? If in the mythical stage, there is a constant presence of the mother, in this stage, absence is introduced – the absence of the mother on the dimension of need. Now, when the child has needs and it is not pacified in the sense it is frustrated. This is what Lacan defines as primordial frustration. Primordial frustration relates to – let’s say – the body of the mother – let’s say the mother has this body which is there sometimes, and sometimes not, and it marks the body of the mother with a lack. Now, we define this lack as a “real lack”. It is a lack which is engendered in the real. Now, think about primal repression for a second – we talk about it just ten minutes ago, we said it is a lack which was never included in language. It was never there in the first place. That would be a description of this kind of a lack, right? It’s not a lack that we can sort of fill out in the sense that we yearn. It’s a lack that was constituted as lack. So, here we can mark the phallus as/with our marker as a P and sort of like relating it to the mother. So, on this stage, the lack is attributed to the mother itself. Something is lacking there in the body of the mother.
Now, if we read Freud – we go back to Freud – this has to do with Freud’s argument that the phallus initially lacks on the body of the mother. Now, I am not talking implicitly; I’m just talking explicitly. The mother just doesn’t have the penis according to Freud, and that’s very very anxiety-provoking for the child, for the – let’s say – male child at least in that sense, and what Lacan is saying is that when we are talking about the real lack of the phallus, we can relate that to Freud’s theory in that sense. But again here, and remember our discussion about need, and this is the first lack – the lack on the side of need what is primally repressed, okay? So we have this real phallus’ first appearance.
After this stage, I’m gonna just write…. So, the imaginary phallus is introduced, and this is the phallus introduced as an imaginary lack, meaning in the sense of image, let’s say, something which is sort of like a Gestalt function, yeah? It is not a sentence. It is not a word. It is sort of something which is just grasped and comprehended as an image. At this stage, the baby attempts to make sense of this lack: why is mother lacking? Why is she not here? What does she have that is so interesting for her that she is not with me? What is that thing? Again, this is the question “What is the phallus?” Right? So, the child is asking, “what is lacking on the side of mother and what does mother desire beyond the child?” So, these are the questions which represent the appearance of the imaginary phallus, and what the baby attempts to do is sort of fill this lack, fill it in, but on this level, it is filled up with what Lacan defines as a sequence of images, okay? You have to think about like a certain stage where we don’t really – we can’t really explain what’s going on, but there are sort of like these images which are internalised and related to the lack of the side of the father. Now, these images have to do on the one side with different objects that the baby associates with the mother’s desire beyond him, right? Whatever the baby sort of associates to the mother’s desire – what she wants beyond him in the world, that’s on once (or one side); on the other side, it is also related to anxiety-provoking images, which have to do with the father’s prohibition. Again, we are talking about the Oedipus complex, and according to Freudian terminology, this lack is engendered initially by the father’s prohibition. Something the father says “no”. It creates a cut, right? Something in the relationship between the child and the mother cannot exist, and Freud talks about the prohibition of incest, right, that is the thing that father just does not approve of. In the sense the imaginary phallus materialises in the psyche or in psychic reality by a sequence of images, which on the one side represents the desirable objects which draw mother away from the baby, and on the other side represents his – let’s say – aggressive identification or aggressive tendency toward the father as the one that created this gap in the first place, right? So, in this sense, this stage is the very classical Oedipal stage where the child wants the mother but hates the father, wants to kill him; this is classical Oedipus complex, right? This is where the child is situated in this stage, and the general question is: how can I be this for her in the sense of replacing father or in the sense of just finding whatever she wants beyond me and being that – I want to be her object; I want to be the object of my mother’s desire. So this would be the quest, or the imaginary quest at this point.
[1:15:20 audience speaking]
It is not equally true, but yes, the question is: what is it, and “how can I be it?” is asked, but then, the Oedipus complex gets a different resolution, so we will talk about that a bit in the last couple of minutes, okay? But definitely it is not equal; there is a difference – there is a sexual difference, and it also manifests here, but due to lack of time, we won’t really delve into that. But right here, I am sort of relating the phallus to the child. Why? Because the child constantly wants to be in its place – to be in its place as what the mother desires or whatever the father is giving her, so he wants to be your object; he wants to be the phallus, so this would be what we called an imaginary identification with the phallus. The child concocts this series of images, this sequence of images, and he tries to take its place. That is me, yeah? I am a good boy; that’s why you should love me, right? But unfortunately, there is an impasse because it doesn’t matter how much the child tries to narcissistically identiy with the image of the phallus, sort of makes it itself, it can never really fill in this real gap, and this is in several senses. First, because we said that this gap is unfulfillable. That is just a logical sense. Second, we say that in the Oedipus, incest is prohibited; there is no way to go beyond that, right? And if we want to look at it on the even more real sense, the child’s – let’s say – real phallus, let’s say, that still does not solve this problem of this initial… gap, so the child is sort of like, okay, again, this is only a story. No child is sort of like, “okay, so I want mom and I want to kill dad, but then my imaginary identification with both these objects which I sort of related them doesn’t work”. No, it’s not like that, but we’re talking about a structure.
So, at this point, an impasse arises. Imaginary identification does not provide a substitute for whatever was initially lost, and a child turns into the final – let’s say – the final is a representation of the Oedipus in what we would define as the symbolic phallus. You can notice that at this stage of Lacan’s teaching the symbology is very important. It is sort of like this is the way to solve the Oedipus. We go there. So, if you can’t beat them, join them, right? That is what is going on on this stage, and the child says, “no, I will not identify with the phallus as an object”. By the way, a lot of people are still doing it today; they just don’t give up. They are still looking to identify with the image of the phallus, of having it or being it, right, really really looking hard to do that.
But let’s say the baby that is going to overcome the Oedipus complex, right, he says, “no, I’m not gonna identify with the phallus as an object. I will identify with the father as the bearer of the phallus.” You see the difference? I will draw it here. So I’m adding this third circle again, and now I’m putting the phallus on the side of the father. So, I am not identifying with this object that I think, that I imagine, is situated there and in the place of the real lack. I identify with the position from which this phallus is situated, okay, in the sense of asking ourselves questions, like “Who am I?” I would say this would be my imaginary identification, my imaginary idea of myself. I am this person. I like doing that, and I enjoy these kinds of people. But then, when we look at symbolic identification, we’re not looking at what I think I am. We are sort of asking “from where do I imagine I am observed when say that I am like that?” Right? So, it is not the object; it is from where the object is engendered, and as we said, the only place for the object of desire to be engendered is in language, is in fantasy, in an articulated fantasy. Now, the position of the father is the bearer of the phallus, or the phallus-bearing father, is in an authoritative position. What we accept is an authority. Think about this in Oedipal terms. We accept the authority of the prohibition of the father. This is in Freudian and Oedipal terms. In Lacanian terms, we are talking about the authority of the law in a couple of senses, in the same sense as we can sort of think about the other; some of them like language. We are talking about the authority of language in the mediation of our enjoyment, right? That is one. The other is in society and culture; we sort of accept the way the world is compiled according to our social norms. We accept the prohibition of incest – that would be a good example because the prohibition of incest is not strictly a linguistic law, right? So, the child accepts the authority of the father, thus getting rid of this unbearable anxiety that had turned them to constantly try to identify with the image of the father’s, and gains access to several things which are very great.
First of all, he gains access to symbolic reality, to reality which is mediated through language. He gains access to mediated enjoyment. It is not this unbearable excitation; it is sort of framed – he can gain satisfaction through language, and he gains access to the dimension of desire, which lies beyond demand and need, beyond the demand for love. This is what Lacan relates to the name of the father, if you’ve heard of this – this is sort of what is accepted or inscribed in psychic reality in order to gain access to these dimensions here in the same drawing, the same diagram that we’ve seen just a second ago. Again, this is the Borromean – not of this diagram. This would be the symbolic, the real and the imaginary. This time, we are defining it according to the dimension of lack the phallus represents. So, mother would be at where the real lack is situated. The child would try to put himself in the place of the imaginary lack, and the father would introduce the lack in the symbolic – the place of the object of desire, right? Okay, very quickly, we will go over what is called sexuation, and what it has to do with the phallus because if we read “the signification of the phallus”, you would see that Lacan defines the function of the phallus as the knotting, as tying something together. He said it sits on side of this sinthome/symptom, and this is what we have here, sort of like how the sinthome manifests, and on the other side is sexuation – the way we come into the world as a masculine or feminine subject.
Now, to your question – why call it phallus? Why call it feminine? Why call it masculine? Right? Lacan is a Freudian (student), so he is relying on Freudian teaching. He said to his students at some point you might call yourself Lacanian, but I am a Freudian. So, when the context takes these models and concepts from Freud – the Oedipus complex – he has a choice. He can sort of like change the terminology and like draw this – just say real, imaginary and symbolic, and say “Hey, this is my theory”, right? But then, it would be kind of like stealing something from another person and sort of saying “oh this is a new theory by itself”, right? But what Lacan was doing is relying on the Freudian models and keeping whatever Freud has provided in these models, but giving them a further interpretation. So again, the phallus is not the penis here; it is a signifier, and it means a variety of things, right? It sort of like relies on Freud and opens it up.
In the same sense, sexuation talks about sexual difference, but not talks about sexual difference in the sense of sex, meaning – I don’t know – whatever the biological meaning of that is, or in terms of gender – how I define myself as a man or woman; not even in the sense of object preference, so you could like boys, you could like girls, you could like nor boys nor girls, it doesn’t matter – we’re still talking about the sexual difference between two types of subjects, and they are called feminine and masculine because it is all based on what we are talking about right now – what the Oedipal complex and the way the boy or the girl is situated there. What is the question… which question is asked in that story. So, sexuation – as I said is not sex, not gender, not object preference – it is how desire is structured; how this subjective desire is structured, and just very briefly stating – it is structured in two ways. It could be both of them are questions regarding the phallus.
The first question would be a question of having. What does daddy have that he gives mommy and then I sort of miss out on something? Like what does he have that makes mommy give him what I want so much. This is a question of having, and I think like the best way to sort of like simplistically think about these social psychological concepts is going to the most obscene representations in Hollywood or other realms, but to think about men, for instance, and their quest for power or for beautiful cars, great suits, etc. It is sort of by doing that, they sort of say “I have something… I have the phallus”. That’s one way to do it, and we could say that’s the way dad did it, right – adopting the authority of the law in order to find a substitute, so for boys, the substitute for this lack of the phallus would be having something. Well, it doesn’t have to be cars, but it can be having something, so we would say that if you are a man or a woman or whatever way you articulate yourself in the sense of gender, if your desire is a desire that functions in this direction of having something, if whatever makes you wake up in the morning is the question “How can I have this thing which I originally lack and sort of try to fill in?”, then we would say you would be categorised or articulated as a masculine subject. I don’t know which one of you is masculine. I cannot know by looking at you, yeah? It’s a question of desire. It sort of directs the analysis… in different ways for men and women in this sense.
Now, the question for the feminine subject would be not a question of having but a question of being, which is a more metaphysical question, I think, and the question is “What is mommy, or what mommy is that makes daddy give her what was originally taken from me?”, if we’re talking about the girl originally castrated from the get-go. So, what does mom… what is mom? And this is a different question and again, if we go to Hollywood again and we go to…. what is this magical woman that is the phallus, and you know it is not necessarily a woman with a lot of money or big cars or a lot of power – just a woman in the red dress or a woman not wearing even anything; it’s sort of like it’s a mystery, yeah? It’s not something that you can have; it is something that is inherently interior to you which makes you into it, right? So that would be a different question.
[Audience speaking 1:29:30]
So, again, seminar 20 is a great place to look for answers for that, but we can say that masculine desire has one way to function – having something in relation to somebody that has the object, so we need to have something in order to get the object from somebody that is internalised. Feminine desire, according to Lacan, has two dimensions, but it is not limited to masculine desire. It can be masculine. Feminine subjects can enjoy, can desire in a masculine way; of course they have access to it like all humans. That’s why Freud said that the only libido is masculine libido, right? Everybody has access to that, but according to Lacan, the woman is not all limited by that.
There is another form of desire, which we could just briefly say is – let’s say – much harder to gain; it’s an utterly inventive form of desire, meaning it is utterly singular. So we can say very simplistically that a feminine subject would have two trajectories – the ready-made one like men, which would be… like being a man (who is) powerful – having cars, having suits etc, or on the other side, can be being a mother, right? That would be like ready-made solutions, or the very singular and utterly inventive one.
In seminar 23, Lacan gave the example of James Joyce, which he claimed uses language in an utterly inventive way. He doesn’t use language like regular writers do; he invents a new way of enjoyment. So, Lacan would say that feminine subjects are open to that as well. Notice that Joyce was probably a man, yeah, but still we say that his enjoyment, his desire was functioning in this way.
So, this was a general brief sweep-through several perspectives on the phallus that we did today. We sort of jump between seminars. I would just conclude – if we go back to the joke about Freud that we started with. There is another joke or just a comical conception of the phallus – that the phallus is an organ that can be raised by the mere thought, so that makes him very special, but on the other hand, one has no real control over it, so there is sort of like a contradiction in this figure itself. Now, Saint Augustus claimed that this is punishment for – let’s say – the audacity of man and his attempt to master the world, and I think what we have sort of underlined today (is) that we can relax a little bit about that, and just understand that this contradiction on this whole thing, which is the phallus, is mere grammar, according to Lacan, okay, and that’s what we have tried to represent today, and thank you. I think we are done for today, and you can stay for questions. Thanks.
[Applause]
Real Rest is the Best 