Amanda Holmes 
(Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien)




The Thing About Symbolism: Contextualizing Lacan’s Theory of the Phallus


In the fifth year of his seminar, Lacan lays out his own version of the Oedipus complex in three moments: the first moment is one of the child’s imaginary identification with the object of the mother’s desire, the second moment is one of the father’s intervention as a prohibitor of this initial relation, and finally, the third moment marks  the father’s assumption of his metaphorical position as locus of the law, which sets up an ego-ideal for the child and allows him to assume his own place in the Symbolic. At the crux of each of these three moments of the Oedipus complex Lacan insists on a dynamic conception of the phallus, a conception which marks a significant departure from the Freudian theory of his time. This paper will contextualize Lacan’s conception of the phallus as a response to the theoretical work of Lacan’s contemporaries, including Ernest Jones, Charles Rycroft, and Gisela Pankow. By treating Lacan’s theory of the phallus as an important intervention into the psychoanalytic debates about symbolism in the ego’s formation and the role of the phallus therein, this paper will demonstrate the necessity of Lacan’s structuralist reading of Freud. It is precisely in Lacan’s structuralist revision of the Oedipus complex that he guards against normative and moralizing psychoanalysis on the one hand and against a naturalizing biologism on the other. At stake in Lacan’s response to these thinkers, the import of Lacan’s psychoanalytic diatribe in Seminar V, is nothing other than the philosophical dimension of psychoanalysis taken up in the form of a question about the object in its conceptual transition from illusory object to signifying element, setting the stage for the objet a.