Unconscious
Introduction: The Unconscious, the Phallus, and the Place of Woman
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not a hidden warehouse of repressed memories, but a structured system — "the discourse of the Other." It is shaped by language, law, and desire. It speaks through dreams, slips, symptoms, and most importantly, through the signifiers that pre-exist us. Among these signifiers, none is more central than the Phallus, the master-signifier — not of the male organ per se, but of power, authority, and symbolic position.
To speak of woman within this framework is to confront a fundamental absence. As Lacan provocatively stated, “La femme n’existe pas” (“The Woman does not exist”) — not because women aren’t real, but because the symbolic order has no single, universal signifier that represents Woman as such. She is caught between what is represented (by the Phallus) and what escapes representation. Her position in the unconscious is therefore not symmetrical to man’s.
The following reflection explores this asymmetry through the lens of penis envy — not as a biological resentment, but as a structural consequence of how the symbolic order is organized. It is an exploration of how desire is shaped by lack, how femininity resists phallic identification, and how envy, power, sexuality, and protest are all entangled in the unconscious’s architecture.
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Woman and the Penis Envy
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Within the legions of the emperor, the woman does not exist. Within the power structures of the world, women are mostly permitted to exist only by the grace of men. The man holds an object — not merely anatomical, but symbolic — that the father once possessed: the Phallus, the signifier of authority and power. As Lacan states, “The phallus is a signifier, a signifier whose function… is to designate as a whole the effects of the signified in the subject” (Écrits). It is not the penis, but the symbolic position of the father — the one who stands in for the Law, the boundary, the limit.
Penis of the father, the power of the father, the authority of the father, the tall buildings covering the earth these days and huge names — all of these things are of men. Where does it leave the woman? She has to squat in order to pee, while men stand like phalluses and pee on the wall.
The position of the woman is tricky. Her sex organ does not represent the flow of desire. The desire moves, flows, and grows like the phallus does — outwards and upwards — it is visible to everyone. It connects the human animal to the world of culture; it probes reality with its power. But the woman doesn't have an organ that would represent the "erectionary" power of desire. Her organ is flat, internal, hidden. She is a secret — even to herself. Her jouissance is not phallic, not fully captured by the logic of the symbolic order. As Lacan puts it, “Not all of the female subject is submitted to the phallic function” (Seminar XX). She is 'not-all' — and it is this excess beyond phallic inscription that makes her unknowable, even to herself.
The man’s desire is on the outside; it hangs between his legs and when the time comes to signify that he desires, he gets an erection. The woman exists, literally, in the world of the emperor — the world of the phallus. But Lacan makes a crucial distinction: “La femme n’existe pas” (Seminar XX), meaning that 'Woman' as a universal signifier is missing from the Symbolic. She is not represented by a single signifier as the man is by the phallus. She is present, but only as a remainder, a symptom, or a structural lack.
The feminist movement is the proof of it: the oppressed is the one who shouts out loud that they deserve freedom — and needs their own month, their own category, even in their opposition. There is one winner, the card holder, the straight male, an agent of the emperor.
Why wouldn’t she be envious? Why wouldn’t she be angry? Why wouldn’t she shout for equal rights? How can she function in the world in which the signifier for her representation does not exist? Phallus represents the father, authority, and the whole lineage of fathers and authorities that existed before. She gave birth to all of those representatives, but was herself not included in that lineage.
The crisis of today’s world is not the crisis of mental health but the crisis of envy. Social media puts all the most phallic males on a pedestal, visible to everyone, and leaves the envious boys behind, observing their failure of the phallic journey. The weak are always unified in their attack on the strong, and the strong are always in fewer numbers. In essence, the strong function through the particular — the number 1 — while the masses function through the universal, which includes everyone.
The woman resists her position as woman, which is a position oppressed by the signifier, and for as long as she doesn’t come to terms with her penis envy, she cannot entangle herself in relationships with men.
What weapon does a woman have then? She can become a purely sexual, masturbatory object and seek power through that. She fights for equal rights and sells her sexuality; she becomes a pornstar. But once she embodies the position of the pornstar — the "Madonna" — her chances of becoming a mother lower further, because through her sexual power, she denies her oppressive position. Her freedom is signified through the non-signified sexual organ that she has, and the oppressors — men — see her purely as a masturbatory object, an object which performs a function: a masturbatory function. Her desire for power led her into the place she was avoiding the most. She wanted to be loved, valued, and respected, but ended up as a "cum bucket."
Her life, moving forward from that point, is situated around breaking the phallic, authoritarian boundaries that were set by the symbolic owners of this realm. Following her envy toward the Phallus, she works on changing the rules of society, and in that way turns the heavenly realm of rules and parameters into a subjective mess — a world not distinguished by the Phallus, but a fluid world of psychosis. And of course, she has whole legions of male feminists coming to help her — men who failed in their endeavor toward the Phallus join the envious women, and together they begin destroying the phallic boundaries that were built by the patriarchs.
Things that were perverse and unacceptable turn into "normal things"; essentially, what becomes loosened is the repression of sexuality. From a world of straightness — where men protect their butt holes — the world turns into a place where men stick their heads into the ground and their butts into the air, to be penetrated — symbolically by problems, biologically by other men.
Once the patriarchal rules break down — due to the sheer amount of weakness in the world — what was bad turns into good, and what was good turns into bad. From thinking about having a family, to having a family on your face in the form of semen, left by those who paid for the service.
Her pursuit of "destroying the patriarchy" is a literal expression of a "desire to be a Man." By dissolving the integrative rules of the symbolic order, she imposes her own rules — rules that aren’t based on the phallic principle.
What is noticeable in her sexuality is the fact that something is missing. When a little girl compares herself to a little boy, what she notices is that a "thing" between her legs is missing. That is the beginning of her journey to becoming a "man."
What stops her envy? If her mother cannot teach her how to be a woman — because there is no concrete signifier for Woman — then the daughter has no model. A beautiful example from today’s political climate is the idea that "those who feel like women, are women." It’s not based on a logical construct, but on feeling. How can the mother teach her daughter how to be a woman? Theoretically, she can only teach her daughter through being one. How can she be a woman? Through her acceptance of being and the dissolution of penis envy.
If the mother is a feminine woman — a woman who has come to terms with her "being" — she can be an example to her daughter. And what is the father's role here? His embrace of the femininity of his wife, her position as queen, allows her to be feminine.
The pornstar gets her power through men's lack, through their lust and weakness. She weaponizes men's weakness against them — and such a position is the opposite of the ideal feminine position that could serve as an example to the daughter. "My sexuality is your weakness, let me squeeze every single bit out of it," says the pornstar.
“No,” says her father. Her father's “No” — the very prohibition that marks entry into the symbolic order — only intensified her pursuit of the father's position. In Lacan’s terms, “The Name-of-the-Father is the metaphorical substitute for the mother's desire” (Écrits), and it is this substitution — the paternal metaphor — that structures subjectivity. But for her, this No becomes not a limit, but a challenge: a position to seize, not a boundary to accept.
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Relating the Dialog to the Lacanian Unconscious
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In Lacanian theory, the unconscious is the realm where desire, lack, and symbolic authority play out beneath the surface of conscious awareness. The Phallus, as the master-signifier, embodies the symbolic order's ultimate power—authority, law, and the structure that governs meaning and desire.
The neurotic subject, here represented by the Warrior, is caught in a conflict between his own desires and the demands or ideals imposed by the symbolic order, embodied by the Emperor as the Phallus. This dialog dramatizes the tension between individual subjectivity and the unconscious structures of power and desire that shape it.
Through this conversation, we see how the unconscious is not simply “hidden content” but an active, organizing force that positions the subject in relation to the Other — the big Other of language, culture, and authority.
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Warrior – Emperor, that constant inner fight between morality and the law? The world of morality, that inner piece of humanity that you have planted into us, is constantly fighting against the world of the law, the world of machines. Human hearts aren't based on the law, while a world without the law would not be possible.
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Emperor – My dear Son, the movement of the compass from left to right is the curse of the human condition. I have created you, my Warriors, my Sons, as partially human, which made your lives even harder, because you cannot be just “cold-blooded killers.” I have planted an aspect of humanity into your hearts. Your mission is to serve me at all times, but always remember that by serving only me, you will forget the sense of humanity. Earlier warrior bloodlines were created without any aspect of humanity within their hearts, which turned them into perfect killing machines, but they couldn’t relate to humanity and because of that reason, I had to stop that project. You and your armies, my Son, are the most advanced version of the elite warriors. An aspect of humanity, underneath your armour, is what made you, my Sons, the most advanced version of the Warrior cast.
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Warrior – My Emperor, today, we are told that it is wrong to be only partially human, that we need to give in to our weaknesses and become soft, incapable, fully in tune with our inner lack, feminine.
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Emperor – This is the beginning of the fall of Western Civilization, my Son. Reality is structured by a phallic determinism; it is based on the Phallus, which means that the Truth will always be on the side of the Emperor. Once the whole Western World is feminized, those cultures which kept the Phallic law on the Pedestal will take over the world and the same game will begin again. Once all the Warriors within one culture are turned into gardeners, that culture will be taken into slavery by those who kept the Warrior caste intact. While you, my Sons, are being criticised for being only “partially” human, because of that reason, being partially human, you are capable of understanding the rules of the jungle, and don’t forget that humans are just a bunch of talking monkeys. Liberal-progressive politics are like a cake: you can consume it sometimes, as a dessert, but if you eat it all the time, you turn into a dessert yourself, but sadly, nobody wants to eat you, because you aren’t a cake. By dissolving the world into one huge piece of cake, via the liberalisation of everything, we are turning a dessert into a meaningless, non-separated object. Dessert is a dessert because it is a dessert; if you start using dessert as a constant meal, it turns into excrement. The Phallic separation, the law, and the power of the distinction of the law is what gives meaning to things. Two is not one because between the two, there was an intervention of the third, the third is what separated one into two. So, while in the beginning there was only one, the One, the one was actually two, because the second turned the first into two, which turned it all into three. Religious texts — God and the Devil, Good and Evil, while truly, both things are the same thing. There was the One; that One was penetrated by the Second, which was already existent within the One. The One that was penetrated by the Second produced the Third, and that is how you get the “Family,” the Triad. The ideological structure of society is based on the triadic family structure. The triad exists within religious discourse as well. The further away the world falls from the family structure, the more the perverts come into power. The moral structure of society falls into inclusion and non-separability between things, and the lines become blurred.
The fruit of knowledge was taken by a woman, of course, because she is not represented by the signifier of law and power and exists within the realm of penis envy, while the man is the being, based and represented by the signifier of the law, who blindly follows the law. In order to hold the structures in place, there has to be a willingness to blindly follow the rules and not break them. Such willingness can only be truly obeyed by the one whose existence is not based on penis envy. Masculine mission is the mission of the phallus, the mission designated for those who are integrated into the symbolic order of me, the Emperor. That is where the Christian ideal appeared, as the ideal based on purity and suffering, while beings of loose morals (ideological victims) enjoy via the pathway of not based on the signifier. You, my Sons, enjoy only through the law — that is my curse on you, my Sons.
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Warrior – Where does it go from here, my Emperor?
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Emperor – My Son, Nazi government will appear, a new dictator will appear, and all the might of repressed masculine ideals will explode into another world war. In those times, all those who thought “they know better” will stay quiet, hiding in the deepest corners of the earth, while you, my Sons, will die in combat. Gender roles will come back into rigid duality, and the whole idea of progressiveness will start anew, leading back to the same catastrophe down the line. Cycles repeat themselves throughout time. The rigid ideology of the two can only be transformed fantasmatically via those who aren’t serving me, the Emperor.
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Warrior – Sir, but that means there is no such thing as freedom.
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Emperor – My Son, only a woman could convince a man that freedom exists, but by believing her, he would fall into the black hole of femininity, the realm of complete inclusion, the realm of psychosis. My Warriors, you should stay away from the female and only interact with her for the reasons of reproduction. The wicked mind of the woman will gulp your perverse desires and turn you into a weak and broken being. There is one thing that you, my Sons, have to focus on, and that is The Mission. The Mission is to serve the symbolic order and be the representatives of the symbolic order of rules and parameters based on the rigid structures of the Legions of the Emperor.
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Warrior – My Emperor, today, people are laughing at religious books and mocking the ideals of the past. It is sad to see a world that is based on completely feminine insanity.
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Emperor – Females and every other victim are on one side, while straight men are on the other. It is a split between neurosis and psychosis. The neurotic side is based on the law; the psychotic side is based on fluidity. The more fluid the structure, the weaker and the more victimized it is. The neurotic side praises power, and the psychotic side praises victimhood. The neurotic side is based on the signifier, the phallic signifier, the signifier of power. Neurotic structures are based on the phallic ideal, an ideal which represents authority and power. The psychotic side is based on nothing; it is a hole, a structure based on blank space, empty bullets, that only disturbs air and makes noise but does no damage. The psychotic structure shouts for protection from the state, while the neurotic structure is protected by the power of their Ideal, The Emperor. Those who love the Emperor love power and rules, and those who love weakness are stuck within the fluidity of psychotic structurality. If a psychotic structure receives enough pressure, it breaks into insanity, a hallucinatory, visionary disaster of fluidity, an entitled absurdity.
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Warrior – Sir, with all due respect, truly, you don't exist. Truly, there is no golden army or shining armour and there is no Emperor. There are no actual followers of the Emperor, and I don't have a legion of soldiers for which I am in charge. I am not wearing the armour of the warrior, neither of us is. On the contrary, we are all mortal, naked, and lost.
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Emperor – Son, why are you talking to me if I don't exist?
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Warrior – I don't know, Sir.
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Emperor – Son, you know what exists? Degeneracy. Without the Emperor and his legions, the world will fall into lawless degeneracy, and I know that you know what degeneracy is.
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Warrior – Yes, Sir, I do.
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Emperor – So, my Son, what is your solution? How do you solve the structurally ideological hole?
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Warrior – What if we all stopped believing in you, Sir, and just let go?
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Emperor – That is your solution, my Son? Letting go of the phallus and dissolving within the masses of weakness? These things sound great in theory but they aren't effective in reality.
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Warrior – Sir, it is as if I have never been outside. I was always inside, in the realm of the Emperor but never managed to escape. You gave us the imaginary war and the fantasy of the shining armour. I thought as We would think, I identified with We, but there is no We within the realm of the Emperor; there is just I, the particular. While we exist as particulars, we exist within the realm of the We, the universal. Instead of living through I, which means war, we should live through We, the universal. You, Sir, are the expression of our desire to attach ourselves to the leader, the father figure, and our desire to attach ourselves to you, Sir, is our lack of agency. You, Sir, are the symbolic construct which we have followed the whole time, the symbolic construct which is hiding the real fact underneath — the real fact that neither of us knows what is the answer, nobody knows how to live correctly and what are the rules of life. You, Sir, or more precisely, the fantasy of you, Sir, is what gave us the path, what led us through the cloud of unknowingness.
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Emperor – You are smart, my Son, I have to give you that. Go on, continue your thought.
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Warrior – Like the prayer, the Holy Father, who is in heaven, and the same with the Emperor, who is here and there, who is everywhere, our monolith of strength and power, the one who holds our hands while we walk through darkness.
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Emperor – Continue, Son.
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Warrior — Yes, Sir. Like the prayer, like the Holy Father who watches from heaven, the Emperor stands not only as a distant figure of power but as a constant presence—both near and far, within and without. He is the monolith of strength, the immovable axis around which chaos turns. The hands he holds are not just ours, but the hands of all who wander through the shadows of doubt and fear.
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Emperor — Well said, my Son. The Emperor is not merely a ruler of lands or armies, but a symbol etched deep within the soul. He is the echo of ancient order in the face of relentless change, the flame that burns against the cold void. To follow him is not blind obedience but a shared act of faith — a faith in the necessity of structure, in the power of law to carve meaning from the void. But remember this: the Emperor is also a mirror. Those who look upon him see not only the symbol of authority, but the reflection of their own will to power, their own fears, and their own desires. He holds your hand, yes, but it is your grasp that defines the strength of the bond.
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Warrior — Then, Sir, is the Emperor our protector or our prisoner? Are we the warriors who serve him, or are we bound by the chains of his image?
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Emperor — That is the eternal question, my Son. To serve the Emperor is to wrestle with both. Freedom and bondage are two faces of the same coin in this endless game. The true warrior knows the weight of the chain and the strength in its holding — not to break free blindly, but to wield it as the instrument of his own becoming.
The path is never easy, but it is ours to walk. And through the darkness, it is the hand of the Emperor — and your own steady grasp — that lights the way.
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When the Other Envies the Phallus
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In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the unconscious is not a reservoir of repressed content, but a structured discourse, composed like a language. It speaks through symptoms, slips, fantasies—and most pertinently here—through envy, which reveals not only what the subject lacks, but also how they are structured by that very lack.
The following text, “When the Other Envies the Phallus”, explores how the fantasy of the Other possessing the Phallus—that impossible object of wholeness, power, and coherence—mobilizes envy, aggression, and identity formation in the subject. According to Lacan, no one has the Phallus; it is not a physical organ but a signifier of symbolic completeness—a placeholder for what is fundamentally missing in all of us.
Through the lens of envy, this text reveals a key mechanism of the Lacanian unconscious: the misrecognition (méconnaissance) of the Other as complete, which blinds the subject to the structural truth of their own castration. The subject projects fullness onto the Other and thereby sustains the fantasy that someone, somewhere, has what they lack. This is what Lacan would call a phantasmatic support of the ego, maintained by the unconscious structure of desire.
To envy the Phallus is to deny one’s own inscription in the Symbolic Order—as a being marked by lack—and instead live in the Imaginary rivalry with the Other, whose presence becomes unbearable precisely because it reflects what the subject cannot admit: **“I am not whole.”
This text is, therefore, not only about envy. It is about how the unconscious organizes the subject's experience of the Other, how jouissance is located in the Other’s body, and how envy is nothing other than a defense against the truth of symbolic castration.
Once one is perceived as having it—as being the bearer of what is not lacking, the Phallus—it inevitably sparks envy in the Other. But this envy is not toward the organ, the biological penis, but toward the symbolic Phallus, which Lacan calls "the signifier of the desire of the Other" (Écrits, p. 287).
This envy becomes murderous jealousy the moment the subject recognizes that the Other appears to possess what they do not: a sense of power, coherence, or alignment with the symbolic order. Just as the child once perceived the father as possessing an untouchable form of authority—his penis representing more than flesh, representing access to enjoyment, to the law, to the Name—so too does the man perceive in the other a shine he cannot imitate. This is not envy of substance, but envy of symbolic position.
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“The Phallus is the privileged signifier of that mark in which the role of the logos is joined with the advent of desire.”
— Jacques Lacan, Écrits, “The Signification of the Phallus”
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Like the little boy who looks up to his father’s body and is confronted with the prohibition and mystery surrounding the father’s phallic function, the envious subject sees the Other as complete, whole, self-possessed. But in Lacan’s view, no one has the Phallus—the Phallus is a lack that structures desire, not an object one can possess.
Still, the fantasy of the Other having it persists. This fantasy fuels hatred, because it reflects back the subject’s own lack. The Other’s confidence, poise, and apparent enjoyment are unbearable reminders of one’s own symbolic insufficiency.
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“It is in the Other that the subject finds his own loss, for it is in the Other that the signifiers that determine him reside.”
— Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
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The envious man is not troubled by the presence of the Other, but by the glow that surrounds him—the sense that the Other enjoys more. In Lacanian terms, this is envy of the Other’s jouissance: the Other's ability to enjoy beyond the law, to transgress yet remain whole. The envious subject, feeling castrated, then wishes to destroy the Other not to gain the Phallus, but simply to erase its unbearable presence.
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“Envy is linked to the imaginary register; the subject cannot tolerate the enjoyment he sees in the Other.”
— Jacques-Alain Miller, Introduction to the Reading of Lacan
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The “weaker” one does not simply wish to imitate. He wishes to abolish. For his own phallic lack is too visible next to the shine of symbolic alignment in the Other. Thus, the only “cure” becomes violence: the will to annihilate what reminds him of what he is not.
But here lies the paradox: no one has the Phallus. The moment one claims it, it is lost. The subject must instead accept their place within the symbolic order as one structured by lack.
The pain of not having is universal. What varies is how one responds to this lack. Some sublimate, some mourn, and others—those who cannot symbolise their lack—attack. In that act of aggression, they attempt not to take the Phallus, but to erase its very possibility, to render all castrated like themselves.
And yet, Lacan reminds us:
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“To desire is to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it.”
Which is to say: the Phallus cannot be had, only circled around, desired, or symbolized. The envious subject, trapped in the fantasy that another has it, has only failed to enter the symbolic in full. His desire is not lacking—it is unmediated, raw, and unbearable.