ABSTRACT
Lacan, like Freud, was arguably involved in exposing, diagnosing and treating the ills done to both women and men as individuals by the phallic and other illusions bred by patriarchy. Feminists, by contrast, are concerned with collectively exposing and combatting its social ills. Deploring the phallocentrism of psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud’s notorious penis-envy theory of women’s psychology, some argue that the solution to the problems posed women, at least, by idealising, and envying men as phallus, lies in developing an alternative, non-phallocentric, woman-centred theory. This is the stance adopted by the French psychoanalyst and feminist, Luce Irigaray. Irigaray symbolises women’s already existing recognition of their separateness from each other, and of their divided loves in terms of the two lips of the labia. She counters in terms of this gynocentric image, derived from women’s biology, Lacan’s phallocentric ‘master discourse’.
