Preoedipal Phase

The preoedipal phase, as Lacan deploys the notion in Evans's dictionary entry, names the structural configuration that precedes and conditions the Oedipus complex proper. It is constituted as an imaginary triangle composed of three elements: the mother, the child, and the phallus. This is not yet the triangulation of the Oedipus complex—where the third term is the symbolic father intervening through the Name-of-the-Father—but a pre-symbolic or imaginarily organised triangularity in which the phallus circulates as an imaginary object between mother and child. The child is thus not yet a fully split, symbolically castrated subject; rather, it occupies a position defined by the imaginary logic of having or not having, being or not being, the phallus that the mother is presumed to desire.

This makes the preoedipal phase a pivotal staging post in Lacan's account of how the phallus ascends from being a real organ (the penis) to an imaginary object to, finally, the privileged signifier of desire in the symbolic order. In this intermediate, imaginary register, the phallus is not yet the master signifier that organises the sexed subject's relation to the Other; it is instead the object that mediates the dyadic (yet already triadic) mother–child relation, making lack and desire structurally operative before the paternal metaphor has fully intervened. The preoedipal phase is therefore the imaginary precondition for symbolic castration: it is the scene in which the logic of phallic lack is first staged, even if it has not yet been formalised by the law of the signifier.

This concept appears in evans-dylan-an-introductory-dictionary-of-lacanian-psychoanalysis-taylor-francis as part of a broader exposition of the phallus across Lacan's three registers. Within that argument, the preoedipal phase functions as the imaginary precursor to the full Oedipus complex: it is the moment at which the phallus first becomes operative, but only as an imaginary object circulating in a pre-symbolic dyad-plus-one, not yet as the symbolic signifier of the Other's desire. It is therefore an extension and specification of both the Imaginary register and the Oedipus Complex as canonical concepts. The concept belongs to the Imaginary register—as that register is defined by specular relations, ego-formation, and the dyadic a–a' axis—insofar as the preoedipal triangle is governed by imaginary logic (the phallus as an object to be possessed or bestowed) rather than by symbolic law.

In relation to Castration, the preoedipal phase marks the structurally prior moment: castration as a symbolic operation (the intervention of the paternal signifier that installs lack and sets desire in motion) can only occur against the background of this imaginary triangulation, where the phallus has already been established as the object around which mother and child orient themselves. In relation to Anxiety and Fantasy, the preoedipal phase supplies the raw material—the proximity and threatened withdrawal of the imaginary phallus—that will later be formalised as the objet a, the cause of desire, and around which both anxiety and fantasy are structured. The preoedipal phase is thus neither fully pre-structural nor already fully symbolic: it is the imaginary hinge on which the transition to symbolic subjectivity turns.

An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian PsychoanalysisDylan Evans · 1996 (page unknown)

The phallus is one of the three elements in the imaginary triangle that constitutes the PREOEDIPAL PHASE. It is an imaginary object which circulates between the other two elements, the mother and the child.

The phrase "imaginary triangle" is theoretically loaded because it introduces triangularity—and hence a structural third term—within what is conventionally called a dyadic, pre-symbolic stage, anticipating the full Oedipal triangulation while insisting that even here the phallus is already operative, not as symbolic signifier but as an "imaginary object which circulates": the circulation itself signals that lack and desire are already in play, structured by the imaginary logic of exchange before the Name-of-the-Father has intervened.