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In a study of the Lacan seminar on “The Object-Relation” as well as the case study by Freud of “Little Hans,” the Lacanian signifier, like the penis, is considered in its many sorts of meaning, depending on its removability and its relation to other elements of signification. While Freud places the emphasis on the threat of castration, Lacan emphasizes the traumatic effects of the mother/child separation. For Lacan, mother is the object of the work of symbolization, unplugged from her too immediate and too threatening reality, changed into a mere element of a set, losing her absolute power. The eventual displacement through privileged organic zones does not end the jealously guarded pleasure men find in their own femininity, the primordial femininity of the small boy as the boy of his mother. Both Freud and Lacan have been embarrassed by the homosexual component of the negative oedipus complex, the love addressed to the father which can be even more anxiety-provoking than rivalry with him. Without this unconscious reciprocity of the love linking father and child, there could be no transfer of the penis into the signifying order. Sadomasochism is considered as the penis's femininity being offered to the ministrations of a father who is the owner of a phallus that can be transmitted through contact from one sex organ to another, from one body to another. The reciprocal love between the boy and his father allows him to move into the further phase of the oedipus in which the penis finds its way back to the female as the object of grown-up men's desires, without considering the female genitals excessively as a risk.