Castration (n.) is the refusal of jouissance so that the subject can enter into the symbolic and jouissance can be reached again on the inverted ladder of the law of desire.
Castration (n.) for Schreber went from object of horror to "reasonable compromise" to irrevocable choice to the redemption of the world — the imaginary filling a gap the symbolic metaphor left open.
Castration (n.) when refused is first of all refused for the Other: what one cannot bear is the castration of the mother.
Castration (n.) is what happened to Oedipus: not that the scales fell from his eyes, but that his eyes fell from him like scales — he became castration itself.
Castration (n.) is what is transmitted from father to son — the inheritance that brings the son to the function of the father.
Castration (n.) is not a fantasy but a real operation introduced into the sexual relation by the incidence of a signifier, no matter which.
Castration (n.) is being deprived of woman — of woman as she would be realized in a suitably congruent signifier.
Castration (n.) is the one joke that is not funny.
Castration (n.) that the Wolf Man refused all access to the symbolic came back as a childhood hallucination: a finger cut almost off, and not a word to his nurse.
Castration (n.) is the one trail down which both boy and girl must pass, whatever their different roads into Oedipus.
Castration (n.) stayed at the center of Freud's theory from first to last; the phallus holds the central place in both man and woman.
Castration (n.) is the one joke that is not funny — since No Thing is All.
Castration (n.) is what a man discovers at the very moment desire, extracted from the field of the Other, becomes his turn to desire.
Castration (n.) in its symbolic form is the loss of something the subject never possessed: it takes no actual pleasure away but adds a nonexistent X beside which every actual pleasure suddenly seems lacking.