Desire

The desire of the penis is surface-bound — it hangs or stands, becomes hard or soft, and is visible. When it desires, it reveals itself. It is an embodiment of action and visibility.
In contrast, the desire of the vagina is hidden, internal, and secret — often a secret even to the woman herself. As long as this desire remains hidden, it retains its allure. When made overtly visible — when exposed — it loses its mystique. This is why a bikini or a mini skirt is often more erotically charged than complete nudity. The concealment becomes a veil of phantasy, and it is this veil that grants it a symbolic, almost phallic power. Once stripped of illusion, it is reduced to a hollow form — like an empty vase, devoid of symbolic weight.

Skyscrapers, like phallic monuments, stretch toward the sky — growing to be seen, to attract the gaze, to become desirable. The ideal construct of "The Man" is grounded in the primary signifier of power: the Phallus. As the signifier of virility and strength, it provides orientation and meaning for masculine identity. It operates as the nucleus of desire, a fusion point toward which masculine essence gravitates. It draws in — magnetic and inscriptive — and cannot be discarded without psychic consequence.

Male desire thus orbits around the phallic ideal — the One — a singular entity that emerges within the field of Universality, the field to which the feminine belongs. Out of this field of everything — the womb, the mother, the void — something emerges: the particular. A man comes out of a woman, the phallus emerges from the universal, and from there the coordinates of symbolic functioning are laid down. It is in this context that religious discourse finds its psychic resonance — in the reverence for the Mother and the Law of the Father.

The Mother stands as the emissary of the universal field — nurturing, enveloping, formative. She enables the subject to become particular, to strive toward the status of the One, like Neo in The Matrix. She is elevated as the gateway to heaven, while the Father is respected as the signifier of already-existing particularity: an authority within the family triad who points upward to the greater symbolic order — God.

Masculine identity, shaped by the phallic signifier, revolves around a stable axis. Feminine identity, however, lacks such a clear particular signifier. As a representative of the universal, the feminine is split in masculine fantasy between two poles: the Holy Mother/Saintly Being and the Whore/Madonna/Sex-doll. Masculinity, by contrast, is structured around one pole — the phallic authority.

When religious discourse glorifies the mother as a sacred passage, it simultaneously elevates the son’s unconscious reverence for a woman who might take her place — a future wife cast in the ideal of the Holy Mother. Hence the unconscious splitting of women into categories: "wife material" and "use-object." A woman who fits the ideal of the Holy Mother becomes eligible to symbolically replace the boy's mother, while others are relegated to the realm of sexual consumption.

This is why men often say, "I can do things to my mistress that I could never do to my wife." The wife stands in the unconscious position of the mother, and due to the incest taboo — and the childhood wishes like "I want to marry my mother" — she becomes sexually restricted. Unconsciously, these early desires for the parent remain alive, structured within the symbolic, yet veiled by repression.

A clinical example can help illustrate this: a woman came into analysis with persistent difficulties in forming lasting relationships. She longed for children, yet found herself unable to conceive the idea of having them with a man. Over time, through sustained analytic work, dreams and associations emerged that revealed an unconscious desire to have a child with her father. As outrageous as this may sound in the realm of everyday rationality, it is psychoanalytically intelligible.

The girl first identifies with her mother — her universe — but then the father appears and becomes an ideal. If development proceeds symbolically, her identification with the father is traversed back onto the mother, enabling the subject to take on a feminine position — one not represented by the phallic signifier but aligned with the universal. Her unconscious desire to give a child to her father mirrored the fantasy of repeating the mother’s role: to create a child for the phallic figure.

Of course, such a wish is culturally forbidden — a direct confrontation with the incest taboo — and is repressed. The desire to possess the phallus through devouring or union is cast into the unconscious, buried beneath layers of guilt and symbolic prohibition. Once this woman could speak her fantasy, trace its structure, and recognize the guilt as fantasmatic — not real — she could begin to choose a man who would symbolically take her father's place. Only then did the pathway to motherhood open.

She transitioned from identification with the Madonna — distant, unattainable — to the Holy Mother, the bearer of the universal field. Through giving birth to a son who carries the phallic signifier, she could partake in the creation of the particular, achieving symbolic participation in what she previously lacked.

Thus, in the unconscious life of man, reverence for the mother is reverence for the field of the universal — that which births the particular through the symbolic intervention of the Father-Son chain.

The visible desire of the penis is a declaration: I possess the phallus. The invisible desire of the vagina represents another logic: I am the phallus. Masculine identity is formed through striving for the symbolic object, while feminine identity revolves around being that object. Both are organized around one central signifier: the Phallus — the symbolic authority and structuring principle of unconscious life. It is the dense core of the Real around which the symbolic and imaginary swirl.

Paradoxically, the phallus is not a presence but a lack — a gap at the heart of being. It is precisely this lack that generates desire, and it is to cover this hole that fantasy emerges. As long as desire sustains the veil, the lack can be desired. But once the veil slips, once we see there is nothing behind it — just lack — desire may falter. Yet, this is the condition of subjectivity: to circle a void, desiring what cannot be possessed, and thereby remaining within the structure of the human.