The Body Beyond Castration: A Legacy of Lacan

This text proposes the idea that, Lacan, with his most well-known phrase, “A woman does not exist,” redefines a clinical approach to the feminine that diverges from the solutions proposed by Freud’s Oedipus complex. Lacan’s clinical perspective on the difference between the sexes, most fully articulated in his Seminar XX, is a clinic in which men and women seek their sexual position based on an alterity that never transforms into complementarity. Thus, men and women never fully complete themselves sexually in the presence of the other sex. It is a logic distinct from the one that makes men and women beings where there is a pure virile element correlated to the phallus on one planet and a pure feminine element correlated to castration on the other. We are all, regardless of biological sex, affected by what escapes the binary of phallus/castration. This way, the misconception that men are from Mars and women are from Venus is dismantled. We are all Martians in the face of an inaccessible Venus.