penis In 1672, the anatomist Regnier de Graaf declared, ‘the names of this organ … are almost too many to count, and more are invented every day by after-dinner speakers and by men with time on their hands and a penchant for venery as well as by lascivious poets.’ Things have not changed much since the seventeenth century; a recent survey of American college students pinpointed 144 alternative names for the penis among men and 50 among women. The word ‘penis’ is probably derived from the verb pendere, meaning ‘to hang’, but hundreds of euphemisms have arisen for reasons of propriety and comedy. The most traditional English-language synonyms include yard, phallus, and manhood.

The penis is undoubtedly the centre of much linguistic, artistic, scientific, and erotic atten-tion because of its association with procreation, sexual pleasure, and prowess. An anatomically complicated and versatile organ, the penis, as De Graaf noted, ‘consists of diverse parts which nevertheless all skilfully cooperate in making it able to stretch and relax.’ This changeable nature is key: ‘It would be unseemly and disgusting and it would totally impede one's conduct of worldly affairs to be like the Satyrs and have a penis always erect. On the other hand to have one always loose and floppy would incommode successful conduct of the affairs of Venus.’ Much medical attention has been paid to the latter problem, namely impotence. Partly via research into impotency, we now know that erection derives from a complex system involving multiple psychological and physiological factors. The proximate cause of erection is an increase of blood supply to the spongy tissues of the penis.

Decorative codpieces and mythological tales have long encased the ‘male organ’. Perhaps the best known penis-centred tale is that of Osiris, the unlucky Egyptian god who had his body chopped into parts and scattered about. Isis, Osiris's wife and sister, managed to locate all except the penis. Ever since, stories have abounded of penises which seem to enjoy virtually independent existences and wills.

Phallic worship has often centred around disembodied penises. Some native Peruvian peoples, for example, worship and seek strength from the ‘phallus tree’, the branches of which look like penises. Phallic worship generally speaks to issues of fertility (agricultural and human) and power. Thus, while testicles have been represented as the loci of maleness, the penis has also traditionally and cross-culturally signified virility and power. (What else but an attribution of power to the penis could explain the continuing fascination with the posthumously disembodied and preserved penis of Napolean Bonaparte? Having passed through at least nine sets of hands since Bonaparte's death, the emperor's penis now allegedly belongs to an American urologist.)

While the power of a penis — real or representative — has frequently been judged by the penis' size, Aristotle assumed that too large a member would actually render a man relatively infertile: ‘Those who have a very big penis are less fertile than those with an average-sized one, because cold semen is sterile and what has to travel any great distance gets cold.’ By contrast, today we find in Western popular culture a virtual obsession with penis size because of the equation of penile mass with prowess. In the US, a fast-rising number of men are seeking ‘penile augmentation’ surgeries designed to make their penises look longer or be wider. These procedures, which include tissue grafts and injections of fat, are not widely tested or approved and come with serious risks. Some men instead follow the ‘low-tech’ techniques of the sadhus, Indian ascetics who stretch their penises through the use of hanging weights.

Ornamentation of the penis is common in many cultures and involves lengthening, piercing, dressing, and tattooing. These cosmetic alterations often carry spiritual significance. At one time, the practice of circumcision (removal of the foreskin) was confined mostly to Jewish males, but early in this century, Western physicians became convinced that a circumcized penis is a healthier penis. (Infections may occur less often in circumcized penises, and penile cancer, although in any case very rare, is virtually unknown in circumcized penises.) The rate of circumcisions consequently soared. Lately, the number of male circumcisions done for ‘medical’ reasons has tapered off, as the foreskin's perceived value has again risen.

In spite of folk tales that a man's penis size can be guessed by the size of his nose or feet, penis size does not correlate with these other measurements, nor is post-puberty penis size easily predictable from pre-puberty size. Size may be considered critical, and boys born with a condition known as micropenis are sometimes raised as girls — but definitions of micropenis vary. With respect to general appearance, boys may be born with hypospadias, in which the urethral opening is on the underside of the penis rather than on the very tip of the ‘head’ or ‘glans’, but this is not often severe enough to require correction. So, while relatively strict criteria of penile normality may be held in Western popular culture, in fact penile anatomy varies considerably. Minor variations are common and do not require surgical attention.

The present-day criteria for penile ‘normality’ arose in part from the conviction among male psychoanalysts that the penis is critical in the development of male and female identities. Thus, while Sigmund Freud attributed a necessary ‘penis envy’ to women, his successor Jacques Lacan posited a multidimensional ‘phallus’. Lacan's ‘phallus’ refers to representations of the penis; the phallus becomes a ‘privileged signifier’ taking precedence over all others. Pre-modern anatomists often likened the male penis to the female vagina, but it is in fact homologous to the clitoris.

Alice Dreger

PHALLUS

The term "phallus" designates the representation of an erect penis, which plays a key role both intra- and inter-subjectively. Freud barely distinguished between the fantasized phallus and the anatomical penis. He called the period between three and five years of age the "phallic stage." At this stage, infants of both sexes are dominated by the question of who possesses a penis and the related issue of its masturbatory jouissance (gratification), which is clitoral in the case of girls. Up to this point, the mother is imagined as having a penis, and the discovery that she lacks a penis, after an initial denial, precipitates the castration complex.

Jacques Lacan chose to use the term "phallus" for the imaginary and symbolic representation of the penis in order to better distinguish the role of the penis in the fantasy life of both sexes from its anatomical role. Freud's famous "symbolic equation" of breast, feces, penis, and baby (1916-1917a [1915-1917], 1918b, 1924d) already implied this distinction between the real penis and its phallic representations.

According to Lacan, the phallus at the outset represents what else the mother desires is in addition to the baby. Thus, a pre-oedipal triangle of mother, phallus, and infant arises. At first the infant tries to be the phallus for the mother until the moment of a crucial transformation when the child, after identifying the phallus as a static image of completeness and sufficiency, sees it as representing the mother's desire, and thus her lack. From then on, the phallus takes the form of something missing (-') within any imaginary, and hence libidinal, frame of reference. Thus the phallus comes to signify desire, Lacan says.

The intermittence of its erection, its ability to fade (compare Ernest Jones's concept of aphanisis), and even the fact that half of all humans do not have it have made the erect penis eminently suited to symbolize the crucial issues of being (subject) and having (object) in both sexes. The penis constitutes the key element in the asymmetrical division that, according to Roman Jakobson, characterizes any symbolic system.

When the phallus takes on the role of signifier, this implies that the subject grasps it in the Other, the locus of the set of signifiers that determines the subject. There it signifies the Other's desire, which is to say that the Other is marked by her own incompleteness. From then on, the phallus signifies the Other's submission to the laws of symbolic exchange, and such incompleteness frees up in the subject her own jouissance.

In his seminar on female sexuality (1998), Lacan further specified what he meant by the term "phallic jouissance." He used the phallic signifier (Φ) in writing his "formulas of sexuation," which posit that every human being has to be on one side or the other of the sexual divide. A woman always has something of the phallus (she is not entirely castrated), and the man is only supposed to "have" the phallus when he fantasizes his castration. In Lacan's symbolic notation, the phallus takes on the formal role of a supplement, which adds to the castration complex the fact that "there is no sexual relation," as Lacan said, referring to the impossibility of writing an equation of the relationship between the sexes.

Bernard Penot

See also: Castration complex; Castration of the subject; Dark continent; Desire of the subject; Eros; Female sexuality; Feminism and psychoanalysis; Imaginary identification/symbolic identification; Jouissance (enjoyment); L and R schemas; Look/gaze; Monism; Mother goddess; Name of the Father; Optical schema; Perversion; Psychoses, chronic and delusional; Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic father; Sexual differences; Sexuation, formulas of; Symbolic, the (Lacan); Symptom/sinthome; Topology; Want of being/lack of being.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1916-1917a [1915-1917]). Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. SE, 15-16.

——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.

——. (1924d). The dissolution of the Oedipus complex. SE, 19: 171-179.

Lacan, Jacques. (1998). On feminine sexuality: The limits of love and knowledge (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1972-1973.)

——. (2002). The signification of the phallus. In his Écrits: A selection (Bruce Fink, Trans.). New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1958.)

penis The male reproductive organ of mammals (and also of some birds and reptiles) used to introduce sperm into the female reproductive tract to ensure internal fertilization. It contains a duct (the urethra) through which the sperms pass. The penis becomes erect during precopulatory activity, either by filling with blood or haemolymph or by the action of muscles, and can be inserted into the vagina (or cloaca). In mammals the urine also leaves the body through the penis.

pe·nis / ˈpēnis/ • n. (pl. -nis·es or -nes / -nēz/ ) the male genital organ of higher vertebrates, carrying the duct for the transfer of sperm during copulation. In humans and most other mammals, it consists largely of erectile tissue and serves also for the elimination of urine. ∎ Zool. a type of male copulatory organ present in some invertebrates, such as gastropod mollusks.

phal·lus / ˈfaləs/ • n. (pl. phal·li / ˈfalī/ or phal·lus·es ) a penis, esp. when erect (typically used with reference to male potency or dominance). ∎  an image or representation of an erect penis, typically symbolizing fertility or potency. DERIVATIVES: phal·li·cism / -ˌsizəm/ n. phal·lism / ˈfalizəm/ n.

penis (pee-nis) n. the male organ that carries the urethra, through which urine and semen are discharged (see illustration). Most of the organ is composed of erectile tissue (corpus cavernosum and corpus spongiosum), which becomes filled with blood under conditions of sexual excitement so that the penis is erected. See also glans, prepuce.
—penile adj.

Phallus (order Phallales) A genus of fungi in which the spore-bearing tissue is raised above ground on the tip of a stalk-like structure growing from the under ground ‘egg’ stage. There are many species. See also STINKHORN.

penis Male reproductive organ. It contains the urethra, the channel through which urine and semen pass to the exterior, and erectile tissue that, when engorged with blood, causes the penis to become erect. See also sexual intercourse

phallus a penis, especially when erect (typically used with reference to male potency or dominance); an image or representation of an erect penis, typically symbolizing fertility or potency.

phallus (fal-ŭs) n. the embryonic penis, before the urethral duct has reached its final state of development.

penis XVII. — L. pēnis tail, usu. male copulatory organ, rel. to Gr. pēos, Skr. pása-.

phallus XVII. — late L. — G. phallós.
So phallic XVIII.

penis see reproductive system .

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