ABSTRACT
This chapter provides to make a partial list of the symbolic world in which Paul Celan's grew up. The biographical information presented here about Celan is based primarily on conversations with people who grew up with him or lived near him. Celan was an only child, brought up in an authoritarian manner. He was therefore a sad child, his childish spontaneity constrained by "suitable behaviour" and gaiety repressed. The child enters the world not as a subject, but as an object of love or hate, wanted or rejected—yet always as an object. The significance of castration is separation between the mother and her object—in other words, the Oedipus complex. Jacques Lacan called the shift in the position of the child in relation to the other, and the entrance of a third factor into the system, the "paternal metaphor". The signifier's effectiveness depends mainly on the credibility of the individual personifying the phallic signifier.
