The Configurations of Sexual Difference Across Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary Dimensions

Before the child knows sexual difference as the anatomical difference between the sexes, the child knows or recognizes the lack in the mother's desire for something that the father is perceived as having. The anatomical discovery of the difference between the sexes (“show me yours and I will show you mine”) will be placed within this symbolic context. Thus, more than a penis and before it is a penis, the phallus is a signifier of a lack within the mother's desire. Within Lacanian theory, the symbolic and imaginary significance of the phallus have ascendancy over its anatomical function.

If it is true, as Lacan says, that it is the subject's relationship to the phallus that determines sexual position, then it is also true that within Lacanian theory, the significance of the presence and absence of the phallus is a multilayered dialectic across the three registers of experience. The phallus is the signifier of the desire of the Other, of what the mother desires from the father. For Lacan the phallic function is equivalent to the function of castration defined as a symbolic lack of an imaginary object. Thus, the imaginary phallus is the contextual object that in the Oedipal crucible is construed as what the father has which the mother wants. The imaginary phallus, as such, does not exist because the symbolic phallus is a missing phallus and castration as a symbolic act bears not on the penis as a real organ, but on the imaginary phallus. For Lacan, symbolic castration refers more to a fact of the structure rather than to a biological fact or to an imaginary or traumatic threat. From a Lacanian perspective, the old psychoanalytic interpretation of castration as representing the biological or constitutional inferiority of women appears as a dated fiction or imaginary construction. The concept of castration is not the bad thing that in the West we have come to associate with a rejection of femininity. The concept of castration as a biological form of inferiorit