The following is the original, unaltered text of a lecture that I delivered in German on 9 May, 1958, at the Max-Planck Institute, Munich, where Professor Paul Matussek had invited me to speak.

If one has any notion of the state of mind then prevalent in even the least unaware circles, one will appreciate the effect that my use of such terms as, for example, “the other scene,” which I was the first to extract from Freud’s work, must have had.

If “deferred action” (Nachtrag), to rescue another of these terms from the facility into which they have since fallen, renders this effort impracticable, it should be known that they were unheard of at that time.

We know that the unconscious castration complex has the function of a knot:

(1)   in the dynamic structuring of symptoms in the analytic sense of the term, that is to say, in that which is analyzable in the neuroses, perversions, and psychoses;

(2)   in a regulation of the development that gives its ratio to this first role; namely, the installation in the subject of an unconscious position without which he would be unable to identify himself with the ideal type of his sex, or to respond without grave risk to the needs of his partner in the sexual relation, or even to accept in a satisfactory way the needs of the child who may be produced by this relation.

     There is an antinomy, here, that is internal to the assumption by man (Mensch) of his sex: why must he assume the attributes of hat sex only through a threat—the threat, indeed, of their privation? In “Civilization and its Discontents” Freud, as we know, went so far as to suggest a disturbance of human sexuality, not of a contingent, but of an essential kind, and one of his last articles concerns the irreducibility in any finite (endliche) analysis of the sequellae resulting from the castration complex in the masculine unconscious and from penisneid in the unconscious of women.

     This is not the only aporia, but it is the first that the Freudian experience and the metapsychology that resulted from it introduced into our experience of man. It (1303) (1303) is insoluble by any reduction to biological givens: the very necessity of the myth subjacent to the structuring of the Oedipus complex demonstrates this sufficiently.

     It would be mere trickery to invoke in this case some hereditary amnesic trait, not only because such a trait is in itself debatable, but because it leaves the problem unsolved: namely, what is the link between the murder of the father and the pact of the primordial law, if it is included in that law that castration should be the punishment for incest?

     It is only on the basis of the clinical facts that any discussion can be fruitful. These facts reveal a relation of the subject to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes, and which, by this very fact, makes any interpretation of this relation especially difficult in the case of women. This problem may be treated under the following four headings:

(1)   from this “why,” the little girl considers herself, if only momentarily, as castrated, in the sense of deprived of the phallus, by someone, in the first instance by her mother, an important point, and then by her father, but in such a way that one must recognize in it a transference in the analytic sense of the term;

(2)   from this “why,” in a more primordial sense, the mother is considered, by both sexes, as possessing the phallus, as the phallic mother

(3)   from this “why,” correlatively, the signification of castration in fact takes on its (clinically manifest) full weight as far as the formation of symptoms is concerned, only on the basis of its discovery as castration of the mother;

(4)   these three problems lead, finally, to the question of the reason, in development, for the phallic stage. We know that in this term Freud specifies the first genital maturation: on the one hand, it would seem to be characterized by the imaginary dominance of the phallic attribute and by masturbatory jouissance and, on the other, it localizes this jouissance for the woman in the clitoris, which is thus raised to the function of the phallus. It therefore seems to exclude in both sexes, until the end of this stage, that is, to the decline of the Oedipal stage, all instinctual mapping of the vagina as locus of genital penetration.

     This ignorance is suspiciously like meconnaissance in the technical sense of the term—all the more so in that it is sometimes quite false. Does this not bear out the fable in which Longus shows us the initiation of Daphnis and Chloe subordinated to the explanations of an old woman?

     Thus certain authors have been led to regard the phallic stage as the effect of a repression, and the function assumed in it by the phallic object as a symptom. The difficulty begins when one asks, what symptom? Phobia, says one, perversion, (1304) (1304) says another, both, says a third. It seems in the last case that nothing more can be said: not that interesting transmutations of the object of a phobia into a fetish do not occur, but if they are interesting it is precisely on account of the difference of their place in the structure. It would be pointless to demand of these authors that they formulate this difference from the perspectives currently in favour, that is to say, in terms of the object relation. Indeed, there is no other reference on the subject than the approximate notion of part-object, which—unfortunately, in view of the convenient uses to which it is being put in our time, has never been subjected to criticism since Karl Abraham introduced it.

     The fact remains that the now abandoned discussion of the phallic stage to be found in the surviving texts of the years 1928-32, is refreshing for the psychoanalysis consequent on its American transplantation adds a note of nostalgia.

     Merely to summarize the debate would be to distort the authentic diversity of the positions taken up by a Helene Deutsch, a Karen Horney, and an Ernet Jones, to mention only the most eminent.

     The series of three articles devoted by Jones to the subject are especially fruitful—if only for the development of the notion of aphanisis a term that he himself had coined. For, in positing so correctly the problem of the relation between castration and desire, he demonstrates his inability to recognize what he nevertheless grasped so clearly that the term that earlier provided us with the key to it seems to emerge from his very failure.

     Particularly amusing is the way in which he manages to extract from a letter by Freud himself a position that is strictly contrary to it: an excellent model in a difficult genre.

     Yet the matter refuses to rest there, Jones appearing to contradict his own case for a re-establishment of the equality of natural rights (does he not win the day with the Biblical “God created them man and woman” with which his plea concludes?). In fact, what has he gained in normalizing the function of the phallus as a part-object if he ahs to invoke its presence in the mother’s body as an internal object, which term is a function of the phantasies revealed Melanie Klein, and if he cannot separate himself from Klein’s view that these phantasies originate as far back as in early childhood, during Oedipal formation?

     It might be a good idea to re-examine the question by asking what cold have necessitated for Freud the evident paradox of his position. For one has to admit that he was better guided than anyone in his recognition of the order of unconscious phenomena, of which he was the inventor, and that, failing an adequate articulation of the nature of these phenomena, his followers were doomed to lose their way to a greater or lesser degree. (1305)

(1305)  It is on the basis of the following bet—which I lay down as the principle of a commentary of Freud’s work that I have pursued during the past seven years—that I have been led to certain results: essentially, to promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to that of the signified, in modern linguistic analysis. Freud could not take this notion, which postdates him, into account, but I would claim that Freud’s discovery stands out precisely because, although it set out from a domain in which one could not expect to recognize its reign, it could not fail to anticipate its formulas. Conversely, it is Freud’s discovery that gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications: namely, that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified.

     This passion of the signifier now becomes a new dimension of the human condition in that it is not only man who speaks, but that in man and through man it speaks (ca parle), that his nature is woven by effects in which is to be fond the structure of language, of which he becomes the material, and that therefore there resounds in him, beyond what could be conceived of by a psychology of ideas, the relation of speech.

     In this sense one can say that the consequences of the discovery of the unconscious have not yet been so much as glimpsed in theory, although its effects have been felt in praxis to a greater degree than perhaps we are aware of, if only in the form of effects of retreat.

     It should be made clear that this advocacy of man’s relation to the signifier as such has nothing to do with a “culturalis” position in the ordinary sense of the term, the poison in which Karen Horney, for example, was anticipated in the dispute concerning the phallus by a position described by Freud himself as a feminist one. It is not a question of the relation between man and language as a social phenomenon, there being no question even of something resembling the ideological psychogenesis with which we are familiar, and which is not superseded by peremptory recourse to the quite metaphysical notion, which lurks beneath its question-begging appeal to the concrete, conveyed so pitifully by the term “affect.”

     It is a question of rediscovering in the laws hat govern that other scene (ein andere Schauplatz), which Freud, on the subject of dreams, designates as being that of the unconscious, the effects that discovered at the level of the chain of materially unstable elements that constitutes language effects determined by the double play of combination and substitution in the signifier, according to the two aspects that generate the signified, metonymy and metaphor; determining effects for the institution of the subject. From this test, a topology, in the mathematical sense of the term, (1306) (1306) appears, without which one soon realizes that is impossible simply to note the structure of a symptom in the analytic sense of the term.

     It speaks in the Other, I say, designating by the Other the very locus evoked by the recourse to speech in any relation in which the Other intervenes. If it speaks in the Other, whether or not the subject hears it with his ear, it is because it is there that the subject, by means of a logic anterior to any awakening of the signified, finds its signifying place. The discovery of what it articulates in that place, that is to say, in the unconscious, enables us to grasp at the price of what splitting (Spaltung) it has thus been constituted.

     The Phallus reveals its function here. In Freudian doctrine, the phallus is not a phantasy, if by that we mean an imaginary effect. Nor is it as such an object (part-, internal, good, bad, etc.) in the sense that this term tends to accentuate the reality pertaining in a relation. It is even less the organ, penis or clitoris, that it symbolizes. And it is not without reason that Freud used the reference to the simulacrum that it represented for the Ancients.

     For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intra-subjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. For it is the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signified, in that the signifier conditions them by its presence as a signifier.

     Let us now examine the effects of this presence. In the first instance, they proceed from a deviation of man’s needs from the fact that the speaks, in the sense that in so far as his needs are subjected to demand, they return to him alienated. This is not the effect of his real dependence (one should not expect to find here the parasitic conception represented by the notion of dependence in the theory of neurosis), but rather the turning into signifying form as such, from the fact that it is form the locus of the Other that its message is emitted.

     That which is thus alienated in needs constitutes an Urverdrangung (primal repression), an inability, it is supposed, to be articulated in demand, but it re-appears in something it gives rise to that resents itself in man as desire (das Begehren). The phenomenology that emerges from analytic experience is certainly of a kind to demonstrate in desire the paradoxical, deviant erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need. This fact has been too often affirmed not to have been always obvious to moralists worthy of the name. The Freudianism of earlier days seemed to own its status to this fat. Paradoxically, however, psychoanalysis is to be found at the head of an ever-present obscurantism that is still more boring when it denies the fact in an ideal of theoretical and practical reduction of desire to need.

     Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls (1307) (1307) for. It is demand of a presence of an absence—which is what is manifested in the primordial relation to the mother, pregnant with that Other to be situated within the needs hat it can satisfy. Demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the “privilege” of satisfying needs, that it is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied. This privilege of the Other thus outlines the radical form of the gift of that which the Other does not have, namely, its love.

     In this way, demand annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of everything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love, and the very satisfactions that it obtains for need are reduced (sich erniedrigt) to the level of being no more than the crushing of the demand for love (all of which is perfectly apparent in the psychology of child-rearing, to which our analyst-nurses are so attached).

     It is necessary, then, that the particularity thus abolished should reappear beyond demand. It does, in fact, reappear there, but preserving the structure contained in the unconditional element of the demand for love. By a reversal that is not simply a negation of the negation, the power of pure loss emerges form the residue of an obliteration. For the unconditional element of demand, desire substitutes the “absolute” condition: this condition unties the knot of that element in the proof of love that is resistant to the satisfaction of a need. Thus desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results form the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung).

     One can see how the sexual relation occupies this closed field of desire, in which it will play out its fate. This is because it is the field made for the production of the enigma that this relation arouses in the subject by doubly “signifying” it to him: the return of the demand that it gives rise to, as a demand on the subject of the need—an ambiguity made present on to the Other in question in the proof of love demanded. The gap in this enigma betrays what determines it, namely, to put it in the simplest possible way, that for both partners in the relation, both the subject and the Other, it is stand for the cause of desire.

     This truth lies at the heart of all the distortions that have appeared in the field of psychoanalysis on the subject of the sexual life. It also constitutes the condition of the happiness of the subject: and to disguise the gap it creates by leaving it to the virtue of the “genital” to resolve it through the maturation of tenderness (that is to say, solely by recourse to the Other as reality), however well intentioned, is fraudulent nonetheless. It has to be said here that the French analysts, with their hypocritical notion of genital oblativity, opened the way to the moralizing tendency, which, to the accompaniment of its Salvationist choirs, is now to be found everywhere.

     In any case, man cannot aim at being whole (the “total personality” is another of the deviant premises of modern psychotherapy), while ever the play of (1308) (1308) displacement and condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks his relation as a subject to the signifier.

     The phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire.

     It can be said that this signifier is chosen because it is the most tangible element in the real of sexual copulation, and also the most symbolic in the literal (typographical) sense of the term, since it is equivalent there to the (logical) copula. It might also be said that, by virtue of its turgidity, it is the image of the vital flow as it is transmitted in generation.

     All these propositions merely conceal the fact that it can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised (aufgehoben) to the function of signifier.

     The phallus is the signifier of this Aufhebung itself, which it inaugurates (initiates) by its disappearance. That is why the demon of Aidws (Scham, shame ) arises at the very moment when, in the ancient mysteries, the phallus is unveiled (cf. the famous painting in the Villa de Pompei).

     It then becomes the bar which, at the hands of this demon, strikes the signified, marking it as the bastard offspring of this signifying concatenation.

     Thus a condition of complementarity is produced in the establishment of the subject by the signifier—which explains the Spaltung in the subject and the movement of intervention in which that “splitting” is completed.

     Namely:

(1)   that the subject designates his being only by barring everything he signifies, as it appears in the fact that he wants to be loved for himself, a mirage that cannot be dismissed as merely grammatical (since it abolishes discourse);

(2)   that the living part of hat being in the urverdrangt (primally repressed finds its signifier by receiving the mark of the Verdrangung (repression of the phallus (by virtue of which the unconscious is language).

     The phallus as signifier gives the ratio of desire (in the sense in which the term is used in music in the “mean and extreme ratio’ of harmonic division).

     I shall also be using the phallus as an algorithm, so if I am to help you to grasp this use of the term I shall have to rely on the echoes of the experience that we share—otherwise, my account of the problem could go on indefinitely.

     The fact that the phallus is a signifier means that it is in the place of the Other that the subject has access to it. But since this signifier is only veiled, as ratio of the Other’s desire, it is this desire of the Other as such that the subject must recognize, that is to say, the other in so far as he is himself a subject divided by the (1309) (1309)signifying Spaltung.

     The emergences that appear in psychological genesis confirm this signifying function of the phallus.

     Thus, to begin with, the Kleinian fact that the child apprehends from the outset that the mother “contains” the phallus may be formulated more correctly.

     But it is in the dialectic of the demand for love and the test of desire that development is ordered.

     The demand for love can only suffer from a desire whose signifier is alien to it. If the desire of the mother is the phallus, the child wishes to be the phallus in order to satisfy that desire. Thus the division immanent in desire is already felt to be experienced in the desire of the Other, in that it is already opposed to the fact that the subject is content to present to the Other what in reality he may have that corresponds to this phallus, for what he has is worth no more than what he does not have, as far as his demand for love is concerned because that demand requires that he be the phallus.

     Clinical experience has shown us that this test of the desire of the Other is decisive not in the sense that the subject learns by it whether or not the has a real phallus, but in the sense that he learns that the mother does not have it. This is the moment of the experience without which no symptomatic consequence (phobia) or structural consequence (Penisneid) relating to the castration complex can take effect. Here is signed the conjunction of desire, in that the phallic signifier is its mark, with the threat or nostalgia of lacking it.

     Of course, its future depends on the law introduced by the father into this sequence.

     But one may, simply by reference to the function of the phallus, indicate the structures that will govern the relations between the sexes.

     Let us say that these relations will turn around a “to be” and a “to have,” which, by referring to a signifier, the phallus, have the opposed effect, on the one hand, of giving reality to the subject in this signifier, and, on the other, of derealizing the relations to be signified.

     This is brought about by the intervention of a “to seem” tat replaces the “to have,” in order to protect it on the one side, and to mask its lack in the other, and which ahs the effect of projection in their entirety the ideal or typical manifestations of the behaviour of each sex, including the act of copulation itself, into the comedy.

     These ideals take on new vigour from the demand that they are capable of satisfying, which is always a demand for love, with its complement of the reduction of desire to demand.

     Paradoxical as this formulation may seem, I am saying that it is in order to be the phallus, that it to say, the signifier of the desire of the Other, that a woman (1309) (1309) will reject an essential part of femininity, namely, all her attributes in the masquerade. It is fro that which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved. But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love. Perhaps it should not be forgotten that the organ that assumes this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish. But the result for the woman remains that an experience of love, which, as such (cf. above0, deprives her ideally of that which the object gives, and a desire which finds its signifier in this object, converge on the same object. That is why one can observe that a lack in the satisfaction proper to sexual need, in other words, frigidity, is relatively well tolerated in women, whereas the Verdrangung (repression) inherent in desire is less present in women than in men.

     In the case of men, on the other hand, the dialectic of demand and desire engenders the effects—and one must once more admire the sureness with which Freud situated them at the precise articulations on which they depended—of a specific depreciation (Erniedrigung) of love.

     If, in effect, the man finds satisfaction for his demand for love in the relation with the woman, in as much has the signifier of the phallus constitutes her as giving in love what she does not have—conversely, his own desire for the phallus will make its signifier emerge in its persistent divergence towards “another woman” who may signify this phallus in various ways, either as a virgin or as a prostitute. There results from this a centrifugal tendency of the genital drive in love life, which makes impotence much more difficult to bear for him, while the Verdrangung inherent in desire is more important.

     Yet it should not be thought that the sort of infidelity that would appear to be constitutive of the male function is proper to it. For if one looks more closely, the same redoubling is to be found in the woman, except that the Other of Love as such, that is to say, in so far as the is deprived of what he gives, finds it difficult to see himself in the retreat in which he is substituted for the being of the very man whose attributes she cherishes.

     One might add here that male homosexuality, in accordance with the phallic mark that constitutes desire, is constituted on the side of desire, while female homosexuality, on the other hand, as observation shows, is orientated on a disappointment that reinforces the side of the demand for love. These remarks should really be examined in greater detail, form the point of view of a return to the function of the mask in so far s it dominates the identifications in which refusals of demand are resolved.

     The fact the femininity finds its refuge in this mask, by virtue of the fact of the Verdrangung inherent in the phallic mark of desire, has the curious (1310) (1310)consequence of making virile display in the human being itself seem feminine.

     Correlatively, one can glimpse the reason for a characteristic that had never before been elucidated, and which shows once again the depth of Freud’s intuition: namely, why he advances the view that there is only one libido, his text showing that he conceives it as masculine in nature. The function of the phallic signifier touches here on its most profound relation that in which the Ancients embodied the Novs and the Aoyos. (1310)