ABSTRACT
Freud’s discovery that gives to the signifier/signified opposition the full extent of its implications: namely, that the signifier has an active function in determining certain effects in which the signifiable appears as submitting to its mark, by becoming through that passion the signified. For the phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function, in the intrasubjective economy of the analysis, lifts the veil perhaps from the function it performed in the mysteries. The phallus as signifier gives the ratio of desire (in the sense in which the term is used in music in the ‘mean and extreme ratio’ of harmonic division). The emergences that appear in psychological genesis confirm this signifying function of the phallus. Thus a condition of complementarity is produced in the establishment of the subject by the signifier – which explains the Spaltung in the subject and the movement of intervention in which that ‘splitting’ is completed.
