57 We have seen that the signifier (and first of all the "privileged," "unparalleled" signifier, the phallus) is not, in its place, in its letter, "to admit partition." And no more is it (a separate, but convergent demand) to be treated as part object, subject like any other to the chain of substitutes. This is the axial demand, the most insistent plea, if not the most apparent criterion in Lacan's sexual theory. It is very significant that this is what motivates the objection to Jones in the "quarrel" over phallocentrism and female sexuality. One of the "deviations" from psychoanalysis has consisted of "reducing" the phallus "to the role of part object." This "profound mystification" (Ecrits (E), p. 198) sent Jones over to the side of the ''feminists" only to the extent that he could not separate himself from another suspect legatee, Klein this time, and her "hesitant" work (Ecrits (E), p. 197), her "lack of precision" (Ecrits (F), p. 778). All of this ("but . . . but . . .") in order to exclude the "analytically unthinkable," the analytically thinkable being limited to Freud's good faith which could not be mistaken, given that "he was better guided than anyone in his recognition of the order of unconscious phenomena, of which he was the inventor" (Ecrits (E), p. 184). Thus: "In effect, this schema [schema R] enables us to show the relations that refer not to pre-Oedipal stages, which are not of course non-existent, but which are analytically unthinkable (as is sufficiently apparent in the hesitant, but guided work of Melanie Klein), but to the pregenital stages in so far as they are ordered in the retroaction of the Oedipus complex." "On the Possible Treatment of Psychosis," Ecrits (E), p. 197; trans. mod. "In fact, what has he gained in normalizing the function of the phallus as a part-object if he has to invoke its presence in the mother's body as an internal object, which term is a function of the phantasies revealed by Melanie Klein, and if he cannot separate himself from Klein's view that these phantasies originate as far back as in early childhood, during Oedipal formation?
"It might be a good idea to re-examine the question by asking what could have necessitated for Freud the evident paradox of his position. For one has to admit that he was better guided than anyone in his recognition of the order of unconscious phenomena, of which he was the inventor, and that, failing an adequate articulation of the nature of these phenomena, his followers were doomed to lose their way to a greater or lesser degree.
"It is on the basis of the following bet--which I lay down as the principle of a commentary of Freud's work that I have pursued during the past seven years--that I have been led to certain results: essentially, to promulgate as necessary to any articulation of analytic phenomena the notion of the signifier, as opposed to that of the signified, in modern linguistic analysis." "The Signification of the Phallus," in Ecrits (E), pp. 284- 285. My italics; follow what is guided .
"We must retain the fact that Jones, in his address to the Vienna Society, which seems to have scorched the earth for any contributions since, already found nothing more to produce than his pure and simple solidarity with Kleinian concepts in the perfect brutality in which their author presents them, that is, the lack of precision in which Melanie Klein keeps herself,--including the more original Oedipal fantasies in the maternal body--, from their provenance in the reality supposed by the Name-of-the-Father." Propos directifs pour un Congrès sur la sexualité feminine , in Ecrits ( F), pp. 728-729.