  Here we arrive at the phallocentrism, if not the patriarchalism, of Lacan's thought, the central role of the phallus in his thinking about subjectivity and sexual difference. According to Lacan, the phallus instates the signifier into the subject regardless of any “anatomical distinction between the sexes” (Lacan 2006 [1970], 576). The phallus, in other words, is responsible for the child's passage from immersion in perceptual immediacy to a representational domain in which the world takes on meaning. It is this claim that de-biologizes Freud, since it articulates the function of the phallus apart from any particular bodily attributes. Lacan insists that the phallus is a signifier, not an image or bodily organ, and that in relation to it all are castrated. The father's No effectively says to the child ‘you are not the object of the mother's desire’ or ‘you are not her phallus, the thing that fulfills her.’ As such, it also conveys the message that the child too is lacking or desiring. Although Lacan distinguishes between a ‘seeming to be’ which characterizes femininity, in the attempt to be the phallus that one is not (to be the object of desire), from a ‘seeming to have’ which characterizes masculinity in the attempt to have the phallus that one does not have (to possess the object of desire), he still maintains that everyone is lacking the phallus in some way, either in the mode of not being it or in the mode of not having it. Nonetheless, while Lacan centers human experience not on the supposed biological fixity of anatomical distinctions, but on a representational economy, the phallus retains its associations with masculinity and remains the focal point of sexual identity.