This missing thing can be cloaked in religious, mystic orpsychoanalytical terms, accordingto the latter the missing thing is the portion of the universe whichwas cut off from the perceiving subject the moment he/she became one in earlychildhood: "What', asks Freud, 'does the woman (the little girl) want?' All answers to the question, including 'the mother' are false: she simplywants.
The phallus - with its status as potentiallyabsent - comes to standin
for the necessarymissing object ofdesire at the level of sexual
division. (p24)" The deeper causes summarized on the surface bya 'longingfor apenis', go
even beyond the 'longing for a SimonedeBeauvoir, 'Le deuxime sexe 1' (Bulgarian edition)
5', Sofia 1996 14'Feminine Sexuality: Jaques Lacan
and the ecole freudienne', 1985, W.W. Norton and Pantheon Books, Juliet Mitchell breast'
- "A primordially split subject necessitates an originallylost object... Even the tribal child,
breastfedwell beyond infancy, is unsatisfied: pain and lackofsatisfaction are the points, the triggers
that evokedesire. (p25)" it is longing forwhat waslostwhen the individual divided at a
certain point in his/herpersonalhistory, from the world, when the
'piece' became divided from
the 'whole', illustrated intensely at the moment of separation, bya terrible feeling of
lackand discomfort.
The Freudian concepts of "castration anxiety" and"penis envy" are problematic
not only to feminists, but to the
majority of the humans aware of them. The idea that everyone
dreadslosing a penis, or mourns a peniswhich
never existed and envies the existing penises of the other
sex, sounds preposterous to mostpeople, aswell as decidedlylimiting. I also
imagined for a long time these to be quaint concepts, perhaps applicable to
middle class neurotics from1905 Vienna, but absurd whenapplied to modern hifi
space age urban hyperspeed
information highway civilization.
Compared to the more hip andobscure authors like
Jung and Groff, Freud was shallow. As time went though, I had to admit to myself, that it is I
who was shallow, and to what an astounding extent the mechanisms recorded
and analyzed by dr Freud then and there are still in work here and now, easilyobservable as
longas the observer does not recoil in denial. The term itself - 'penis envy'sounds
ugly, yet I believe it tobe a name forquite real and quite fundamental
mechanisms, so let uskeep these mechanisms, but find a name
for them, which does not set off denial reactions.
Our male civilization is phallus oriented, and the penis does symbolize the masculine power, so instead
of 'penis', we will say 'phallic'. If not all, then at least a gooddeal "
many" humans strive
to have power, instead of not having it, therefore,within the
existing social context, this means a desire to have a slice of the phallus, tobe masculine
players, even if it means having a carone can not afford,or cultivating
vainly muscular arms, wearing 'male' pants and
shoulderpads or phallic shoes.
So by replacing this excretal and downtoearth
term "penis" with the more abstract and cultural "phallus", and the
mean andpetty"envy" with the sociological, motivational and goaldirected
"striving", we now have the new term - "phallic striving" which
I believe can be used to describe the conscious and
unconscious attempts of humans within the patriarchal civilizationto become powerful (and
by existing rules therefore masculine)players instead of being disempoweredobjectsforuse
by others. Both male and female humans can exhibit phallic striving. bothmale and female humans can exhibit a
masculine character structure. Likewise mainly females, but also many males develop
'feminine', 'passive' characters. Also we've seen that deep
fundamental conflicts from the personal past can also be channeled into the whole interplayof penises lost
and found.