About the phallic mother

fantasy, concept, function

Abstract

This paper is a mental drill, and presents a way to read Freud in our days, by articulating Freudian thoughts into a warp which belongs in 1989. Far from Freudian positivism and supported still by its findings, my paper proposes a
new formulation of his phylogenetic insistence, the primal phantasies, into an operating structure where oedipal aspects underlie the contents of all four phantasies. Thus, this is  an attempt lo disarticulate the genetist version which has prevailed among Freud’s
readers. My work traces the elements contributed by Freud to understand castration as the counter-face of the oedipal aspirations that are displayed throughout childhood and where Freudian proposals in terms of Stages (active-passive, phallic-castrated,
masculine-feminine), Theories (infantile sexual theories) and Phantasies (Primal Phantasies)- are the significant presence of an oedipal organization around castration as its main axis. This is supported by Freud in so far as the mechanism of disavowal is
described as a constitutive element of childhood. Long before our being able lo speak of the Oedipus Cornplex, disavowal, as a counterface of castration, is evidenced over the first years of childhood (imaginary and symbolic level of castration). The contribution of Lacan, the three registers he conceived and supplied to psychoanalysis, allows us to think and size, once again, these Freudian notions. This paper also suggests that the stregth of such disavowal, which speaks of the “reality” of castration, enhances the operating intensity of another phantasm: the phallic mother phantasy. The paper stresses the constitutive {structuring) aspect of this “function” of a mother, which should allow the “embodiment” of the pharitasm and lead to its resolution. There is a consistency of time and space within the scope of this phallic mother phantasy which “performs” its function within an oedipal framework. And the paper further emphasizes that castration mainly acts around the vicissitudes of the phallus of the mother, where the father’s function acquires symbolic effectiveness. There is another proposal, that the events defined by Freud as the entrance” to an ‘exit” from an oedipal situation (in girls and little boys) would bear to a particular moment devoted to the symbolic recordation of sex diferences, to the most effective repression of phantasies of incest, a reorganization of the oedipal warp under the light of castration (disappearance of the phallic mother phantasy). It is, consequently, a need in children’s development, implying an efficient motherly function, where there is room for the necessary narcissistic compliance, which would
lead lo the display and settlement of limitations lo wish phantasies. Finally, the paper includes several comments on the Aufhebung, which grant further consistency to the fact that it is not possible to repress a structural event  or to cause it to disappear. Wishes may be represse, but oedipal features “remain” as a structure and are “cancelled” in their incestuous aspect (Hegelian sense of the term, makedismakeremake)