Phallocentrism

Phallocentrism is the assumption that the phallus is the central element both in sexual development, and in the ordering of the social world.

The term was coined in 1927 by Ernest Jones, as part of his debate with Freud over the role of the phallic stage in childhood development, when he argued that “men analysts have been led to adopt an unduly phallo-centric view”. Drawing on the earlier arguments of Karen Horney, Jones in a series of articles maintained the position that women were not disappointed creatures driven by penis envy, but that contrariwise such an analytic belief was itself a theoretical defence against castration anxiety. Freud however remained unmoved in his opposition to the Horney/Jones thesis, and his was the predominant psychoanalytic position thereafter, though some like Janet Malcolm would modify his position to the effect that “Freud's concept, of course, is...a description of phallocentrism, not a recommendation of it”.

Jacques Lacan added a linguistic turn to the debate with his article “The Signification of the Phallus” (1958/65), arguing that the phallus was not a part-object, an imaginary object, or a physical organ, but rather “the signifier intended to designate as a whole the effects of the signifier...this signifying function of the phallus”.

Jacques Derrida influentially challenged his thesis as phallocentric, and the charge was taken up enthusiastically by second-wave feminism, extending the focus of their protest from Lacan to Freud, psychoanalysis, and male thinking as a whole: the way that “The phallus, centre of meaning, became man's identity with himself...a masculine symbolic”.

However complications quickly arose within feminism over the issue. Some French feminists, seeing phallocentrism and feminism as two sides of the same coin, sought to make a postphallicist breakthrough. Others, like the English feminist Jaqueline Rose – while accepting that “Lacan was implicated in the phallocentrism he described” - nevertheless considered his analysis as important for an understanding of how women were constituted as a split subject in society.

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