 In relation to the immediately preceding, Lacan’s Oedipal father is an Other with both Symbolic and Real faces. On the Symbolic side, the paternal figure represents the answer to the question, “What does the maternal Other want?” In Lacan’s terminology, the child’s alighting upon the paternal third party in the family romance of the Oedipal social triangle as the solution to the puzzle of the maternal figure’s enigmatic intentionality amounts to “the desire of the mother,” as an unknown, being replaced by “the paternal metaphor.” Directly connected to this, Lacan (re)defines the phallus (which is not the penis) as the structural function of whatever “x” the child hypothesizes the paternal figure possesses making him the focus of the maternal figure’s desire, that is, the possession enabling the father to domesticate and control the mother’s otherwise unpredictable desire. Also at the level of the Symbolic, the paternal function involves bringing to bear within the child’s familial sphere the disciplinary and prohibitory features of the family’s enveloping symbolic order as their socio-linguistic milieu (this entails such impositions as weaning, toilet training, exogamy, and “castration” in the Freudian-Lacanian sense—see  2.4.1  below). As for Real Otherness here, this would be the version of the paternal figure mythically portrayed by Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913), namely, the tyrannical, enjoying-without-restraints “primal father” (Urvater) of the savage fraternal horde, the exception to the otherwise universal law of (symbolic) castration. This Real Urvater arguably is a fantasy-construct generated in and by the Oedipus complex, with the child imagining an obscene, dark, jouissance-saturated underbelly behind the Symbolic façade of paternal authority and its rules.