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→The Maternal Phallus
=====The Maternal Phallus=====
If desire here is a process of distortion, a force at work in between signifiers, how can we speak about an object of desire? It would seem, on the contrary, as if desire did not have any object. Lacan replies that the object is of a very particular kind: an ''absent one''. It is not any absent object but, for Lacan at this moment in his work, a very precise one: ''the maternal phallus''. Freud and his followers, despite many disagreements, had always stressed the centrality of the [[castration complex]]. The key is less the possession by the [[subject]] of a [[phallus]], but where the [[mother]] has one or not. (The phallus is not the same thing as the penis: it is the penis plus the idea of [[lack]].) (if you think that you might lose your penis and that other people do not have this organ, the idea of loss will become linked to the organ in question. It will never be a penis again. In Freudian theory it will be a ''penis plus the idea of its absence''. Hence what one searches for in the [[mother]] cannot be seen: how can one see something which is not there?
=====The Missing Phallus=====
The neurotic wants, in Lacan's terms, to be the phallus for the mother. The child is searching for some object, but it is a lost one, as the intervention of the father in the Oedipus complex prevents the child from assimilating itself with the object of the mother's demand. The intervention of the father distances the child from the mother, it gives the child possibilities of leaving the universe of the mother. And ''it situates the phallus as something lost, forever out of reach'', it says "No" both to the child and to the mother.
(As something missing, the phallic object is best represented by a veil of something which covers or conceals. How else can a lack be represented, after all, than by the image of a screen which points to something beyond itself? Later on in his work, Lacan would modify this conception. We will discuss it shortly, but it is important first to fill in some of the detail of this picture of the Oedipus and castration complexes.)
=====The Oedipus Complex...=====
The child is at the mercy of the mother at the start of life, dependent on her in all senses of the word, and unable to understand the rationale of her behavior. However marvellous or cruel the mother may be, the same question will pose itself for the child, a question which concerns him or her to the quick: ''what does she want?'' (Why does she leave the room right now? Why does she push the bottle into my mouth now? Why does she hold me so tight or so lightly today? Why does she allow my sister to go to bed so much later than me?)
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