The phallus is a term which originally derives from Freud’s psychoanalytic concept of the Phallic Stage and his occasional use of the word to distinguish the symbolic phallus seen in religious and domestic objects from classical antiquity from the biological organ. Prudery later led to a preference for the word “phallus” to “penis” in some translations of Freud, especially in France where in the late 1950s the term became prominent in cultural theory through the pyschoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan and was then taken up by emergent French feminism. In his paper “La Signification du Phallus” [“The Signification of the Phallus”], first read at the Max-Planck Institute, Munich, 9th May 1958, Lacan proposes that the phallus is not the organ to which it might be thought to…

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Citation: Clark, Robert. "The Phallic". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 01 November 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=857, accessed 23 November 2024.]