ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with a discussion of the complementary role of the phallus, as demonstrated in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power” by the dream of the witty butcher’s wife (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams). It demonstrates the thesis of the phallus as veiled by the imaginary and symbolic identifications and its copulatory role in the dialectic of desire between the subject and the Other.
It shows how both the imaginary and the symbolic identifications are determined by the hysteric’s question of desire as lack, and not jouissance, confirming Lacan’s thesis that the unconscious desire in hysteria and all forms of neurosis is the identification with the phallus, “to be the phallus”.
The chapter then differentiates the two lacks designated by the phallus, which correlate to the two effects of language: the barred subject of the lack in being and desire, and the effect of demand on need which produces the drives, lack in jouissance. These are denoted by -φ and capital Φ, respectively, and designate the imaginary function of castration and the signifier of the jouissance “impossible to negativise”.
It therefore concludes that although the phallus is not written per se, the phallic register is included in the graph and even completed by the signifier of jouissance, and, although implicit, reverberates on both the imaginary and symbolic identifications.
It ends with the question of the status of the Name-of-the-Father in the graph: Is it still valid, according to Lacan’s first hypothesis, that the Name-of-the-Father holds the entire symbolic system together, and without it, there is no phallic signification?
