Phallic Woman

The "phallic woman" is a concept Lacan invokes in Seminar IV to name the fantasmatic figure of a mother who possesses the phallus — an imaginary construction through which the subject attempts to resolve the structural problem posed by maternal desire and castration. Rather than accepting the mother as lacking (castrated), the subject's psychic economy can produce a doubled, compensatory image: a maternal figure who is not subordinated to the lack but who is the phallus, or who holds it in undivided completeness. This doubling of the maternal figure — one mother who lacks, one who does not — is precisely the structure Lacan locates at the hinge between the fetish-resolution of Little Hans and the fantasy material of Leonardo da Vinci's childhood screen-memory.

Crucially, the phallic woman is not a real person or even a simple imaginary fantasy image in the colloquial sense; she is a structural position within the field of desire and identification. As the fantasmatic resolution to the threat of castration, she functions analogously to the fetish: she veils the lack in the (m)Other by substituting a figure of imaginary phallic completeness. This figure thus mediates the child's encounter with maternal desire — the question of what the mother wants — by positing an Other who wants nothing because she already has everything. In the Leonardo case, Lacan reads the screen-memory of fellatio as encoding precisely this fantasy of a mother who gives the breast as the phallus, a fusion of oral satisfaction and phallic identification that structures Leonardo's subsequent identificatory and libidinal life.

In jacques-lacan-seminar-4, the concept of the phallic woman appears at the theoretical crossroads of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. It is most directly an extension of the fetish structure: just as the fetish veils castration by freezing a screen-memory that preserves the pre-castration image of phallic wholeness, the phallic woman functions as the fantasmatic complement to this operation — she is the figure whose imaginary completeness the fetish protects. The concept also draws on identification: the phallic woman is not merely an external image but a position with which the subject (as in the Leonardo case, through maternal identification) can identify, collapsing the distinction between having and being the phallus. This aligns with the distinction between imaginary and symbolic identification — here it is firmly imaginary, an identification with the Ideal Ego as phallic completeness, i(a).

The concept further organizes the logic of desire and fantasy in their early Lacanian articulation. Desire here is structured by the question of what the mother wants — the original enigma of the Other's desire — and the phallic woman is the fantasy answer that forecloses that question: she wants nothing because she is complete. This is precisely what the fantasy formula ($◇a) would later systematize: the phallic woman represents the fantasmatic covering of the lack in the Other, the imaginary solution to what will eventually be theorized as the non-existence of the sexual relationship. Situated between the clinical case of Little Hans (fetishistic resolution via the phobia's symbolic permutations) and Leonardo (identificatory and screen-memory resolution), the phallic woman concept marks the moment in Seminar IV where Lacan begins to differentiate the structural positions available to subjects confronting maternal desire and castration.

Seminar IV · The Object RelationJacques Lacan · 1956 (p.411)

I think that it's in the direction of the notion of the phallic woman that we need to look.

The phrase "in the direction of" is theoretically loaded: Lacan does not assert the phallic woman as a finished concept but marks it as the orientation or vector of inquiry, signaling that it names a structural problem — the maternal figure's imaginary phallic completeness — rather than a resolved answer. The word "notion" similarly holds the concept at the level of the barely-theorized, a conceptual pivot point rather than a formalized term, precisely at the seam between the fetish-resolution of Hans and the identificatory logic of Leonardo.