Contrasting to Freud where he is quite phallo-centric in that he relates most of his ideas to the phallus, Lacan too describes the Oedipus Complex and castration as it’s not just to do with the presence or absence of the phallus, but that it is something to do with what is missing which leads him into discussing the desire, lack and the meaning of the symbolic phallus as a relationship between the mother, child, imaginary phallus as well as the name of the father in his didactic diagram ‘Schema R’ (cite). The imaginary phallus is the mother’s desire so far she seems to have it that the child tries to embody. So the child identifies with the imaginary phallus and tries to become the object of satisfaction of the mother. This is why the actual …show more content…
The curious case ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis’, (Freud, S (1918[1914]) or more familiar the ‘Wolfman’ is one of Freud’s most famous case histories. In short, the Freud attempted to figure out why for the Wolfman (Serguei) the wolves represented a great deal of anxiety and how the wolves represented his fear of his father or particularly his sexuality and his desire of being sexually satisfied by his father. Freud’s revolutionary theory of infantile sexuality specifically the Oedipus complex and the presumed inadequate castration has manifested themselves in the Wolfman when he was a young boy deviating him from the so called ‘’normal’’ sexuality. Freud began his analysis by getting general idea of his life up until age 4 when the dream about the wolves caused an anxiety in him. He came to Freud due to his ‘’compulsive loving’’, his desire which is to have sex with different women who are lower status than him, mostly being servants and prostitutes. He told Freud how he was just scared of the wolf and couldn’t remember much due to our infantile sexual development being subject to the ‘infantile amnesia’, or otherwise repressed, not letting the infantile sexual memories come through. It was discovered that the wolves on the trees in his dream represented more than just one signifier. His sister played a big role in developing the anxiety. When Wolfman was three, his sister had seduced him, asking him to show their genitals and grabbing his phallus which put him in the passive sexual position. She had to him while that Nanya had done this to many people. Because his sister was not a suitable sexual object, he began to seduce Nanya, in which she told him children who did this gets ‘a wound’ in their genitals, causing castration threat. Wolfman gave up genital masturbation which suggested that he is on the pathway to ‘’normal’’ sexuality, but he regressed back to pregenital phase (Anal) which