The Phenomenal Phallus and the Existential Womb

Existential therapy does not use the phallus to attempt to explain human behaviour. In a nutshell, existential therapists work with the premise that our activity and our competition is driven not by the phallus, but through fear of death. Our competition is driven by fear of loneliness and isolation. Our anxieties are driven by fear of responsibility. What we do and create are not acts of phallic competition, but are to cloak our essential aloneness, particularly at the moment of death: the pervasiveness of oblivion. We are terrified by the apparent meaninglessness of living, and in order to escape its futility, we act to endlessly clothe ourselves with a veil of meaning.

In fact, by replacing the phallus with the womb as the sublimating force, existential therapy and psychoanalytic theory might be made to dovetail.

We are always terrified of death, but there is one way to cheat death – birth. Our existential fear is not solely that we are frightened of death, but we are frightened of the prospect of not living on, of not giving birth. In this way the womb becomes an existential signifier for cheating death. Women have one, men don’t. The phallus is not an existential signifier: it is a phenomenal signifier. It signifies the phenomenon of creation, it is a tool of the phenomenal. A man can cope with the phenomenal through phallic discourses. But existentially, a man must somehow cope with the lack of womb. This lack of womb is an existential lack: the inability to cheat death, the absence of this uterine escape hatch.

Men are required for procreation, but their role is strangely distant and ‘hands-off’. In failing, at a deep and meaningful level, to acknowledge their true role in the collective escape from death, men become the architects of our world, attributing time for all activities they may need (As in this passage from Ecclesiastes, which may be discussed as a man-driven sublimation of the birth instinct, in a forthcoming post). All evidence of what Freudians attribute to phallic envy is in fact the manifestation of man’s attempt to defeat death in lieu of not having a womb. Of course they fail, as they can only recourse to use the phenomenal phallus, manifested in activity and ego, to approach the existential fear of birth (and its complement and counterpart death), manifested in the womb.