Why is it that both Freud and Lacan adopt only the boy’s point of view? Is it simply an effect of their ignorance and lack of interest in the specificities of female morphology and sexuality—an effect of their misogyny? Or is it motivated by a desire to represent female sexuality and anatomy according to its cur- rent-day social position? And why is it that the mother’s status must shift from phallic to castrated? The phallic mother must be understood as a fantasy, as the (boy’s) fantasy of omnipotence and omniscience. She is represented by psychoanalytic theory as sexually neutral, insofar as the questions of sexual difference and sexual specificity make no sense for the pre-Oedipal child. Freud implies that the child (boy) bestows on the mother the attributes he acknowledges m himself,idealizing them in the process. It is for this reason, apparently, that Freud describes her as phallic. But given that even the boy is not yet aware of his own position as phallic, it is not simply that the boy accords the mother a genital organ like his own (although this seems confirmed by the case of Little Hans 119111); children of both sexes, he claims, attribute to the mother a position in which she holds the power of life and death. The phallic mother is the fantasy of the mother who is able to grant the child everything, to be its object of desire. And, in turn, the child of either sex desires to be the mother’s object of desire. But if Freud simply means that the mother is construed as all-powerful, it is not clear why he describes her as phallic. This description is hardly a sexually neutral characterization of her position, and if Freud wanted to insist on her sexually indifferent status, she could just as readily and much less contentiously be described as all-powerful. Something more is at stake here. It is only on condition that the mother’s all-powerful phallic status is transferred to the (symbolic) father that the child is able to abandon its intensive attachment to her and turn instead to the father. He is the heir to her phallic position, and it is not clear where the child’s idea of his (castrating, all-powerful) position comes from, if not on loan from the mother. The child’s resolution—or lack of it—of the Oedipus complex, his or her position as masculine or feminine, depends on the way in which this transference of status is effected, and particularly on the alignment of maleness with the powerful and femaleness with the powerless positions that results from this transfer. In short, the condition under which patriarchy is psychically produced is the constitution of women’s bodies as lacking.(Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz)