Jacques Lacan: Feminism and the Problem of Gender Identity

Abstract

Lacan never tired of repeating that Totem and Taboo (1912) was wrong, and that Oedipus complex was Freud's own neurosis. Lacan offered instead his own theory of paternal metaphor and Oedipal which make use of his innovative concepts of Phallus, Castration, Desire andjouissance.' By recasting Freud's realist picture of Oedipal complex away from both myth and biology, Lacan introduced concept of a which is formed by intervention of a third element into original infant-mother dyad: Law of Name-of-the-father. Moving from realm of Freudian sexual triangle to that of symbolic effect, Lacan leaves scene of incest taboo to dramatists and anthropologists. Sexual identity is not based on biological gender, or any other innate factor, but is learned through dynamics of identification and language. One finds two different systems of meaning within Lacan's epistemology, each complete in its own sphere: one of language, and that of an unconscious discourse. In unconscious system which Lacan calls Other discourse, meaning does not come from substance or essence, but from structural associations and signifying effects. Within this context, not only Oedipal myth, but myth in general is simply the attempt to give epic form to that which operates itself from structure.2 In early 1950s Lacan used word structure to mean that which functions like a language; i.e., by transformations. In same way that speech and lexicon are governed by fundamental laws of language which Roman Jakobson names as metaphor and metonymy, Lacan has depicted an unconscious which transforms its representational networks of imagistic relations through analogous procedures of combination, condensation, substitution and displacement.3 In light of Lacan's structural picture of unconscious, any direct linking of his Oedipal to biology through body configuration, gender, genital experience, or its resolution in genital