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Edelman considers The Maltese Falcon of John Huston and Freud's “true anxiety dream” discussed in The Interpretation of Dreams. He sees the figure of the falcon as representing the privilege of the phallus, a privilege which is precisely called into question through its multiplication exposing the falcon/phallus as a plastic simulacrum, “such stuff as dreams are made on.” In symbolic discourse, signifiers refer only to other signifiers. The phallus, God, is always invisible, the Thing that refers to no object and that has no qualitative presence.
Freud awoke from his anxiety dream, and grew calm only when he saw his mother's face, the primal referent of formal identity, including the formal identity of the phallus as the visible form or figure of the ego. Castration anxiety is the fear of being separated from a highly valued object, and in its earliest form is the primal anxiety of birth, of separation from the mother. Gay male sexuality acquires its phobic meaning for the dominant heterosexual culture as the displaced referent within the logic of reference. If the phallus takes form as the materialization of anal pulsions, those whom the order of meaning construes as reactivating the alternative logic of the anus and its alternative libidinal reality must in turn be wasted by a symbolic order, misrepresenting itself as the order of the representation of the meaning of reality itself.