Below is an extended extract from Oedipus and the Paternal Metaphor by Ana Žerjav in the philosophy journal called Filozofski vestnik
This article was published in 2010
It begins:
In Freud’s theory the Oedipus complex is the core of human sexual development.
It arises in early childhood and, ideally speaking (that was Freud’s idea), comes to its end in puberty as a passage from the autoerotic sexual drive to a choice of the sexual object and the primacy of genital sexuality.
In this sense the Oedipus complex has a structural role for human sexuality, since its decline coincides with adulthood and the identification of a human being either as a man or a woman, which also coincides with a certain object choice, a choice of sexual partner.
For Freud, there is no third sex. Which is the thesis that Lacan reaffirms as well. There are only, contrary to Freud’s idealized theory, the leftovers, something that can not be inscribed into this genetic scheme.
But two of Freud’s discoveries already directly contradict this supposedly ideal development of human sexuality: first, the problem of female sexuality: how does a girl pass from the clitoris, i.e. a phallus dominated sexuality, to the vagina as the proper female sexual organ, and how does she pass from the father to another object choice (there is, in Freud’s theory, a necessary fantasmatic left-over in female sexuality: she wants to give birth to her father’s children); and second, the problem of partial drives in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, which, more or less, contradicts everything about linear sexual development.
In other words: every phase in this development can go wrong, becomes inversed, or the subject just can not overcome it. So that in the end the picture that we get is a proposal of a certain path that has so many branches and offshoots that one just loses the general and normative idea of the aim of genital sexuality. If there is a genitality, it is always overwhelmed by a paradoxical mixture of different libidinal fluxes.
[…] in short, a boy is first confronted with the Oedipus complex, he has tender feelings for his mother and aggressive, rivalrous, and competitive feelings towards his father. It is nevertheless a bit more complicated, since the boy is fond of his father at the same time, but the general idea is nevertheless that a boy, being in this Oedipal disposition, is confronted with a castration complex: the boy renounces the Oedipus complex in order to keep his sex. What follows is an identification with his father as the holder of the phallus, and, simultaneously, a renouncement of the incestuous object, the mother.
It is the father, and not the son, who has a phallus for the mother, who lacks one, so that the son renounces his seductions towards the mother and identifies with the subject of the same sex, i.e. the father. This is also the birth of the superego. We can see here that the phallus has to be lost if it is to be re-found, which is a trace that Lacan will insist on.
On the contrary, for the girl, the castration complex introduces the Oedipus complex, she accepts her castration as an accomplished fact (and because of that she is not subjected to the superego), and turns towards the father as the holder of the phallus.
This is the so called Penisneid, which has, in Freud, a biological basis and can very rarely be overcome. The solution that remains for a woman is to pass from this love for her father to the desire to give birth to his children. This is the well-known unconscious equation of the phallus and child.
The same obstacle holds true for the submission of the son to his father as the holder of the phallus, which implies a certain feminisation of the son towards the father. This is also where Freud encounters the biological rock of castration that presents a final obstacle to the end of analysis: an embittered woman (the castration is effectuated) and a frustrated man (the castration as a threat). Even if psychoanalysis provides the subject with the possibility of a different answer, it remains difficult to overcome this biological scale. On the contrary, for Lacan it is evident that this impasse remains addressed to the Other, that it is a certain form of demand that can be overcome in analysis.
Let us turn now to Lacan and see how he reinterprets the Freudian Oedipus, which, by the way, also has crucial consequences for the conceptualization of the end of analysis, although I will not go into this further here. Lacan, from the very beginning, clearly distinguishes between the father as a person, as an individual in the family context, and the symbolic function that he incarnates. From the very beginning, i.e. since 1953, he speaks of three fathers: the real father, the symbolic father, and the imaginary father.
For now, let us just say that this tripartition allows Lacan to separate the father as a signifier from the father as a meaning and as a concrete human being. These three aspects of the father in Lacan never overlap, they might, but it is no pre-condition that what he usually refers to as the father implies all three aspects. What he calls the paternal metaphor is a symbolic operation that he started to develop in the seminar on Psychosis, in 1955–56, and extended subsequently in the seminar The Object Relation, from 1956–57, where he addresses the case of little Hans and his forging of the signifier “horse” as a substitute for a failed paternal metaphor that takes place in his phobia.
Then follow some basic developments in the seminar The Formations of the Unconscious from 1957–58, and he finally sums up his developments, basically from the seminar on Psychosis, in his paper On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis, written in December 1957/January 1958 and published in 1959. In the fifties Lacan was concerned with the question of the father from a symbolic perspective. His paternal metaphor is an attempt to show how the Freudian Oedipus complex works in terms of structure, not as an imaginary and affects-based relation between a child and his parents, but as a symbolic structure which has an ontological value, since it is a metaphor that produces a field of reality for the speaking being:
In the paternal metaphor Lacan combined the linguistic procedure with what Freud called the Oedipus complex, which is for Lacan a symbolic operation of the substitution of two signifiers: the signifier of the mother (the basic pair of her presence and absence in front of a child), and the Name-of-the-Father as a signifier that replaces this initial maternal signifier in the symbolic.
Fort Da
This actually relates to Freud’s description that he gave of the observation of his grandson, who was playing with a reel of cotton on a thread, pronouncing Fort (away) when he threw it into the unseen, and Da (here) when he pulled it back into the field of the visible. This phonemic pair (Fort-Da) is a minimal symbolic difference, a first signifier that takes place in an attempt to symbolically inscribe the absence of the real object, namely the mother.
Lacan, in his paternal metaphor, inscribes the cause of this capricious appearance and disappearance of the mother as an x, something unknown for the child, or, as he also puts it, “the signified for the subject”. And it is precisely that signified for the subject which is an enigma that has to be named by the Name-of-the-Father. In other words, the father, by naming the desire of the mother, names exactly the cause of her desire, as far as this anonymous cause makes her appear and disappear without specific reason.
The Name-of-the-Father is thus not a signifier father as such, one amongst all the other signifiers, but the signifier that makes possible the symbolic order itself, it redoubles the symbolic as a first encounter of the subject with the mother’s desire (this is what is at stake in Lacan’s scheme R, in his paper On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis). It is thus the signifier that separates the child from the capricious desire of the mother and restores a symbolic pact with the father. The phallus in the paternal metaphor is a signified of the totality of the effects of what can be signified.
In the seminar The Formations of the Unconscious he describes three phases of Oedipus:
- First phase where the child, no matter what sex, wants to be a phallus to capture the desire of the mother (the cause of her come-and-go). To want to be the mother’s phallus is a common trait for both biological sexes, it is a symbolic position that a child occupies in the mother’s desire and often also a common feature in the male perversion, as well as in neurosis.
- Second phase is characterised by the prohibition of incest, during which the child has to be removed from that ideal position of the phallus that the mother is lacking. This prohibition results from the intervention of the symbolic father, which does not refer only to a child, but to the mother as well, which means that a child apprehends the father as castrating himself and the mother.
- Third phase, finally, the real father intervenes, the father as the holder of the phallus, as the one who has it (which means the one that the child supposes has it), the one who uses it and is, for this reason, preferred by the mother.
In short, we could say that the paternal metaphor plays the role of the third factor that intervenes in the dual mother-child relationship and makes it clear to the child that he or she is not everything that the mother lacks. It introduces a fundamental gap (the original repression) that can only be pursued by means of a signifier. The enjoyment is now the fact of speech itself and the objects of satisfaction must pass through language, if they are to be capable of bringing satisfaction. This is why Lacan later on stated that phallic enjoyment is outside-the-body (hors-corps), it is framed by a fantasy that provides a way to gain satisfaction by means of the object of desire.