Lacan’s stated goal was to effect a ‘return’ to what he called the real Freud, the Freud who wrote such works as "Fetishism" and "The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence" towards the very end of his career in 1939. Lacan was of the view that Freud’s Anglo-American heirs (the so-called ‘Ego-Psychologists’), the dominant school of thought within the field of Psychoanalysis and consisting of such notable names as Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann and Erik Erikson, had gravely misrepresented Freud’s views by misinterpreting the importance especially of the views expressed in his works Beyond the Pleasure Principle and The Ego and the Id. For the Ego-Psychologists, the latter in particular emphasised the necessary dominance of the Ego (the conscious part of our psyche) over the Id (the unconscious part of our psyche which, because it is a repository of repressed desires, is synonymous with the so-called ‘pleasure principle’) and the ultimate accommodation of the psyche to the so-called ‘reality principle.’ They interpreted Freud’s famous statement ‘wo es war, soll Ich werden’ (‘where id was there ego shall be’) as an emphasis on the necessity of the process of repression and the mastery of the ego over the Id for the formation of a balanced and, thus, healthy psyche. They favoured an interpretation of Freud's project which stressed the necessity for the subject to accommodate him/herself to the primordial loss of the (M)Other and, thus, acceptance of the ‘reality principle.’ For the Ego-Psychologists, the ego performs three important functions: firstly, to consciously register the external reality empirically apprehended by the subject's physical senses, secondly, to rationally master the pleasure principle with which the unconscious is synonymous in the light of the moral imperatives embodied by the super-ego, and thirdly, to form an ego via an identification with particular traits belonging to one’s parents.

Lacan interpreted Freud’s statement in precisely the opposite sense. He was of the view that as his life drew to a close, Freud substantially rethought his earlier views and emphasised in essays such as "Fetishism" the continual subversion of the ego by the id and, thus, the undermining of the ‘reality principle’ by the ‘pleasure principle.’ Lacan translated Freud's phrase not as 'where Id was, there shall ego be' but as ‘I [ego] must come to the place where that [id] was.’ Lacan saw himself in this regard as merely pursuing one of the most important implications of the Freudian project: the decentering of the rational and fully self-aware Cartesian subject, the so-called ‘cogito’ (a term derived from Descartes’s celebrated conclusion: cogito ergo sum--I think therefore I am). Lacan claimed that Freud had merely recognised that man’s defining feature was not his ability to think (his consciousness) but the desires which innately moved his being but which he was forced to repress (the price of civilisation). Freud, Lacan argued, substituted ‘desidero’ (‘I want’) for the Cartesian ‘cogito’ (‘I think’), ‘homo desiderans’ (‘desiring man’) for ‘homo cogitans’ (‘thinking man’).

Here, Freud offers one of his most succinct overviews of the process by which children develop cognitively and, more particularly, the psyche is split. Freud's manner of constantly revisiting his earlier research in order to reconsider it in the light of more recently acquired clinical evidence makes it difficult to proffer a definitive account of his theories. There are, for example, great differences between his earlier, rather heterosexist formulations of the Oedipus complex (as articulated in The Interpretation of Dreams) and the versions thereof which he elaborated towards the end of his life (e.g. in "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex"). What I present below is based on the later conclusions to which Freud came. Moreover, for reasons of time and space, my focus is limited here to the psychic maturation of the masculine subject. As a result, I will leave aside for the most part in what follows Freud's controversial conclusions about the formation of femininity, a view that has been the subject of much critical debate, not least among feminists. I would only say in this regard that no matter how disputable or contentious Freud's conclusions with respect to the nature of femininity may be, much of his other research remains invaluable not least to an understanding of the constitution of masculinity.

Within the Freudian scheme of things, the earliest and perhaps most important determinant of human existence consists in the fact that the infant's libidinal relation to the mother’s breast (from whose initially rarely-absent body it initially knows no distinction) is inevitably and increasingly interrupted by the latter's necessary absences. At this early stage, the infant has no cognitive functions to speak of as a result of which it relates to the external world solely through its senses (hence, Freud’s emphasis on its libido or pleasure-seeking drive.) Infantile consciousness is henceforth subject, in the wake of this primordial loss, to an overwhelming sense of lack or loss which it will attempt to counter in a variety of ways as it matures both mentally and physically. It is in this way that the infant is first confronted with the conflict between the Pleasure and the Reality principles which will henceforth structure his existence as a human being, to wit, the conflict between his instinctual drives and the desire to gratify them, on the one hand, and, on the other, the realisation that he cannot always get what he wants when he wants it.

Freud's later understanding of the infamous castration complex is perhaps most succinctly articulated in his essay "The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex." Here, he argues that after passing through the oral and the anal stages of his physical and psychical maturation, the male child eventually reaches the phallic phase. This is the period during which his genital organ, the penis, takes centre stage within his own consciousness. At this stage, the child stands in an Oedipal relation to his parents and is faced with two "possibilities of satisfaction" (318) with regard to his libido: either by assuming the active masculine role of the father and seeking intercourse with the mother (the real father thus becomes a hindrance to be removed) or by assuming the passive feminine role of the mother in a desire to be copulated with by the father (whence the superfluous role of the mother). Freud came to the view that any given adult sexual practice is only normal in so far that it meets certain social criteria of behaviour. Heterosexuality itself is, he would argue, ultimately the function of repression. That is, according to Freud, we repress our inherent bisexuality in order to limit our sexual attraction to only the opposite sex. See Jonathan Dollimore's Sexual Dissidence for a fuller exposition of the 'repression thesis' of psychoanalysis. The child's masturbation, so frequent at this stage, is a "genital discharge of the sexual excitation belonging to the complex" (318) which, as such, elicits parental disapproval: "More or less plainly, more or less brutally, a threat is pronounced that this part which he values so highly will be taken away from him" (316) by, significantly, the father. What ultimately confirms the threat of castration is the "sight of the female genitals" (318) which also rudely destroys his presumption of sexual homogeneity, to wit, his illusion that everyone possesses the penis.

The male child's acceptance of the personal possibility of castration makes an "end of both possible ways of obtaining satisfaction from the Oedipus complex" (318) since both the masculine and the feminine roles entail the loss of the penis. The former involves castration as punishment, the latter as a precondition. As Freud puts it, if the "satisfaction of love in the field of the Oedipal complex is to cost the child his penis, a conflict is bound to arise between his narcissistic interest in that part of his body and the libidinal cathexis of his parental objects" (318). The first triumphs and the child's ego turns away from (i.e represses) its Oedipal longings. (Freud argues in another essay entitled "Fetishism" that one way which the male infant devises to deal with the horror afforded by the prospect of castration is by the substitution of a so-called fetish-object for the sight of the female genitalia. The child denies the ‘lack’ or loss which the vagina signifies (he views it as a mutilated penis) and remembers the last object glimpsed before the sight of the offending organ: e.g. a skirt or stocking. This is the source of a man’s sexual attraction to such objects in adult life.

As a result of the foregoing, the masculine subject is henceforth radically split, that is, his psyche is divided between conscious and unconscious portions. Many philosophers contend in this regard that Freudian Psychoanalysis has been one of the most important means by which the so-called Cartesian subject (named after Descartes whose view that to exist was synonymous with rational thought or consciousness [‘I think, therefore I am’] was an extremely influential in modern Western thought) has been ‘decentered.’ The repressed sexual libido (which cannot be consciously acknowledged) forms the unconscious and the socially-derived prohibition against incest is internalised by the ego to form the nucleus of the super-ego. The latter henceforth becomes the repository of the wider community's moral values and, as such, the censor of both the ego's conscious thoughts and actions and its recall of unconscious activity. For Freud, in brief, the castration complex introduces the sexed (but, importantly, still ungendered) and the inherently polymorphously perverse (or bisexual) male child to the 'fact' that people are distinguished on the basis of the possession (or not) of a penis. It socialises the pleasure-seeking, gratification-dominated infant by introducing it to the prohibitive law of culture. Henceforth, it will possess a gendered identity whose sexual drives are oriented towards the opposite sex.

Here, Freud goes into greater detail into the two poles of human existence which tear humans asunder: the reality and pleasure principles. The Pleasure principle consists in that process by which a path is found leading to the relaxation of an unpleasant state of tension, that is, the avoidance of pain or the production of pleasure. This principle predominates in psychic life. The pleasure principle, under the demands of the ego for the sake of self-preservation amid the difficulties of the external world, is replaced by the reality principle: "Under the influence of the instinct of the ego for self-preservation it is replaced by the ‘reality-principle,’ which without giving up the intention of ultimately attaining pleasure yet demands and enforces the postponement of satisfaction . . . and the temporary endurance of `pain' on the long and circuitous road to pleasure" (142-3).

Freud goes on to describe the famous ‘Fort/Da’ game of his eighteen month old grandson whom he spent months observing. The child would fling away from him any objects he could lay his hands on. "He accompanied this by an expression of interest and gratification, emitting a loud long-drawn-out `o-o-o-oh'" (145) which meant in Freud's opinion "‘go away’ (fort)" (145). The child used all his toys to "play ‘being gone’ (forstein) with them" (145). The child would also take a wooden reel with a string wound around it not to drag it behind, but to throw it over the side of the cot (accompanied by ‘o-o-o-oh’) and then to pull it back "greeting its reappearance with a joyful ‘Da’ (there)" (146). The meaning of the game is connected, Freud speculated, with the "child's remarkable cultural achievement--the forgoing of the satisfaction of an instinct--as a result of which he could let his mother go away without making any fuss. He made it right with himself, so to speak, by dramatising the same disappearance and return with the objects he had at hand" (146). The departure of the mother cannot be a pleasurable experience for the child but the "departure must be played as the necessary prelude to the joyful return" (146) which is the true meaning of the game. Any cultural or symbolic activity, from this perspective, operates in this way: it is a manifestation of the reality-principle in that it uses the symbolic repetition of real events as a way of anticipating the return of deferred pleasure (the denial or deferral of pleasure is an inevitable fact in the world, it is a reality that one must face up to). The child repeats a disagreeable feeling in play only because the repetition is bound up with a pleasure gain later of a different but more direct kind. By repeating reality in their games, children give themselves the opportunity of mastering real situations.

Indeed, it is "that repression of instinct upon which what is most valuable in human culture is built" (163). Culture and civilisation as a whole are based on the repression of instinct. The repressed instinct never ceases to strive after its complete satisfaction, all substitutions and sublimations only partly gratifying and resolving the tension. Out of the

excess of the satisfaction demanded over that found is born the driving momentum which allows of no abiding in any situation presented to it. . . . The path in the other direction, back to complete satisfaction, is as a rule barred by the resistances that maintain the repressions, and thus there remains nothing for it but to proceed in the other, still unobstructed direction, that of development, without, however, any prospect of being able to bring the process to a conclusion or to attain the goal. (163)

Freud proposes a theory of aesthetics that would explain the cathartic impulses of the imitative arts in the light of this: the most painful impressions (for example, of tragedy) are experienced as being very enjoyable precisely because they provide a means of mastering reality.

It was here that Freud first offered the new model of the psyche which is formed according to the process outlined above and which was designed to replace his earlier model thereof which consisted in a conscious part, a pre-conscious part, and an unconscious part. Now, Freud posits that the psyche consists in what he terms the Ego (Latin for ‘I,’ the conscious portion of our psyche), the Super-Ego (our conscience), and the Id (Latin for ‘it,’ the unconscious portion of our psyche).

Freud defines the Ego as the Perception-Consciousness system within the psyche. The ego is that part of the psyche "which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world acting through the Pcpt-Cs" (215). Its task is to bring "the influence of the external world to bear upon the id and its tendencies" (215) and "to substitute the reality-principle for the pleasure-principle which reigns supreme in the id. In the ego perception plays the part which in the id devolves upon instinct. The ego represents what we call reason and sanity, in contrast to the id which contains the passions" (15). In "its relation to the id it is like a man upon horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse" (215) by means of borrowed strength.

If a large part of the Ego derives from its intercourse with the external world (hence Freud’s definition of it in part as the conscious perception system), a large part is also derived from the process of identification in which the infant engages as a substitute for the loss of the primary love-object the (M)Other. This constituent of the ego Freud terms the ego-ideal. The most important identification at the origin of the ego-ideal is the identification with the father. The male child at a very early stage develops an object-cathexis for the mother and identifies with the father. When the feelings for the mother intensify and the father comes to be perceived as more of a threat, this gives rise to the Oedipus complex. The identification with the father takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of the father in order to take his place with the mother. Henceforth, the attitude towards the father is ambivalent in this sense. The passing of the Oedipal complex (through the castration complex) consolidates the masculinity of the male child via an intensified identification with the father that is simultaneous with the abandonment of the mother as love-object.

Freud goes on to argue that the bisexual nature of human beings complicates this seemingly straightforward and rather heterosexist formulation of the process by which the child develops cognitively: the boy, for example, does not merely have an ambivalent attitude towards the father and an affectionate object-relation towards his mother but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude towards the father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards the mother. The broad general outcome of the sexual phase governed by the Oedipal complex is the "forming of a precipitate in the ego, consisting of these two identifications in some way combined together" (221) and which stands in contrast to the other constituents of the ego in the form of an ego-ideal. The ego ideal is not merely the deposit left by the earliest object-choices of the id, it also represents an energetic reaction against these choices. It is both affirmation (you ought to be like your father/mother) and prohibition (you should not be like your father/mother). The higher nature of man consists in the ego-ideal which is the "representative of our relation to our parents" (222).

Here, Freud is interested in why the object-choice of some persons is determined by a fetish. In other words, why are some men sexually obsessed, for example, with women’s shoes. The reason for this is that no "male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of the female genitals" (201). For Freud, the "fetish is a penis-substitute" (199), to be precise for the "woman's (mother's) phallus which the little boy once believed in and does not wish to forego" (199). The boy refuses to accept the fact that a woman has no penis: "for if a woman can be castrated then his own penis is in danger; and against that there rebels part of his narcissism which Nature has providentially attached to this particular organ" (199). What is involved here is a process of denial: the perception of loss persists but a "very energetic action has been exerted to keep up the denial of it" (199). There is a conflict between an "unwelcome perception" (200) and the "opposite wish" (200), abutting in a "compromise . . . constructed . . . in the realm of unconscious modes of thought--by the primary processes. In the world of psychical reality the woman still has a penis in spite of all, but this penis is no longer the same as it once was. Something else has taken its place" (200). The "horror of castration sets up a sort of permanent memorial to itself by creating this substitute" (200). The fetish "remains a token of triumph over the threat of castration and a safeguard against it" (200). However, the fetish is the "vehicle both of denying and of asseverating the fact of castration" (203). Indeed, like the denial and recognition of castration, tender and hostile treatment of the fetish is mixed in unequal degrees. For example, the impulse to cut off a lock of hair is an impulse to execute the castration which they deny.

The organs or objects selected as a substitute for the penis do not always act as a symbol thereof. When the "fetish comes to life, so to speak, some process has been suddenly interrupted . . . interest has been held up at a certain point--what is possibly the last impression before the uncanny traumatic one is preserved as a fetish" (201). For example, the foot or shoe is preserved as a fetish because of the circumstances involving a little boy peering up the woman's skirt, etc.

For Freud, fetishism is important in other respects. He had earlier theorised that the difference between neurosis and psychoanalysis consisted in the fact that "in neurosis the ego suppresses part of the id out of allegiance to reality, whereas in psychosis it lets itself be carried away by the id and detached from a part of reality" (202). Here, he acknowledges that some part of reality can be denied, as is the case with fetishism, without ‘losing it all.’ For example, in the case of the son who refused to acknowledge the fact of his father's death, it was "only one current of their mental processes that had not acknowledged the father's death; there was another which was fully aware of the fact; the one which was consistent with reality stood alongside the one which accorded with a wish" (202) whereas in psychosis the true idea which accorded with reality would have been absent.

Where there is a conflict within the child between instinctual demands (the pleasure principle) and the reality principle, the child faces a choice between satisfying the instinctual demand and acknowledging the danger that such satisfaction represents. "On the one hand, with the help of certain mechanisms he rejects reality and refuses to accept any prohibition; on the other hand, in the same breath he recognises the danger of reality, takes over the fear of that danger as a symptom and tries subsequently to divest himself of the fear" (373). The result is a "rift in the ego which never heals but which increases as time goes on. The two contrary reactions to the conflict persist as the centre-point of a split in the ego" (373) in a way that contradicts any notion of the "synthetic nature of the workings of the ego . . . The synthetic function of the ego is . . . subject to particular conditions and is liable to a whole series of disturbances" (373).

For example, a boy who indulges in masturbation may be threatened with castration. The sight of the female genitalia in conjunction with the threat provides for the boy a "dreaded confirmation" (374) and makes him feel that he too could face the same fate. Usually, the boy either faces up to the reality and obeys the prohibition (i.e. he surrenders the satisfaction of the instinct) or he creates a "substitute for the penis which is missed in women, that is to say, a fetish" (374). "So long as he was not obliged to acknowledge that women have lost their penis, there was no need for him to believe the threat that has been made against him . . . so he could proceed with his masturbation undisturbed" (374). Unlike in the case of psychosis, the boy "did not simply contradict his perceptions and hallucinate a penis where there is none to be seen; he transferred the importance of the penis to another part of the body, a procedure in which he was assisted by the mechanism of repression" (375). The boy continues with his masturbation as if he has no fear while developing a symptom that reveals that he nevertheless does recognise the danger. For example, after being threatened with castration by one's father, simultaneously with the creation of the fetish, the boy may develop a fear of the father punishing him, which may, via a regression to an earlier oral stage, assume the form of a fear of being eaten by the father.