What is the maternal signifier? The very first concept that the newborn baby forms is that of the mother: she exists as a signified even before the baby is able to articulate anything more complex than a cry. The concept of 'Mother' is the baby's first mental act of symbolisation [sic]; this concept comprises comfort symbolised in the ideation of a person.
But Mother is not always there. Faced with her absence, the baby performs its first act of repression: the maternal signifier is thus the first signifier that is repressed. Upon her return, the signifier is retrieved: and thus is formed the baby's leaky new unconscious. From the one signifier, with which the baby has such a passionate relationship, arise many concepts—comfort, loss, regaining ... and the beginnings of many hypotheses. The first hypothesis ... is that of the permanence of objects: via the mother's disappearances and reappearances, the baby comes to understand that objects persist even when not within its view. But this creates further questions: 'Where is she when she's not with me? Why does she go away?' These questions are there in proto-conceptual form.... The 'obvious' answer arrives in the form of the father....
Father occupies a place in the child's world as the single biggest distraction for Mummy and therefore the single greatest rival to itself.... These are great themes of power for the child and form the basis for the construction of many infant hypotheses....
'Father has something I haven't got.' But equally, sometimes Mother is with the baby, who might then quite naturally think 'Whatever it is, maybe I have it too.' The baby has now hypothesised the existence of 'the thing that satisfies Mother', or in Lacanian terms: the object of the Mother's desire....
The idea (signified) of the object of the mother's desire is an object that can fill 'the lack in the other'. Lacan named that object the Phallus. The word denotes its imaginary quality: a phallus is never a 'penis' but a representation or image of potency.... It is an imagined perfect object....
When the mother explains her absence, she does so by means of a metaphor in which she 'blames' it on her submission to rules (Law) and not as an effect of her desire: all her excuses are metaphors, from the infant's point of view—'It's time to sleep—Mummy and Daddy must have their dinner now ...' or 'I have to go, Mummy must go to work ...' To the child, 'must have their dinner now' or 'work' is an excuse veiling an incontrovertible truth: 'Mummy is seeking some other source of satisfaction than me, i.e. the Phallus.' It must be pointed out that at this stage, the Phallus exists as an idea—a signified—but one to which no definite signifier has been firmly attached.... It is represented enough to be fitted into a signifier chain such as 'She's gone for thingamajig again.'
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Source: Lionel Bailly, Lacan (Oxford, England: Oneworld Publications, 2009), 74-77.
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