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Dianne Elise avers that a man's personality is prone to be organized in terms of “the citadel complex.” My response to her paper focuses mainly on two issues. The first is a lack of consistency and rigor in the use of a few specific words, like penetration and enjoyment, which are used in ways that some readers might find insufficiently grounded in context. Such free-wheeling expression results in questionable assumptions about the theoretical equivalence of various experiences and about how an experience and some expression of it are aligned.
The second issue is Elise's unconventional appropriation of Lacanian theory. The development of gender identity is a function of the establishment of an unconscious representation of “the father,” which Lacan called “the names of the father.” A child constitutes this signifier by realizing at some point that his mother's behavior toward him is modified by another object. Understanding that a person of such vast importance exists—and that one is subject to the contingencies of that person's wishes—arises from inferences about the mother's interest in this new object and the object's interest in the mother far more readily than it does from observations of the conduct of actual people.