My excuses for the various typos that marr my quotations from Freud's
articles, copied from "The Standard Edition"( 1969) because I was in a hurry and
I don't own a digitalized version in English.
One of these slips looks like an apt neologism, related to
"causal oversimplification" ( I typed "oversimplifiction"), most are relatively
innocuous, but one deserves a correction: "really important things like ...the
discovery that what is essential in dreams is the process of the
dream-word" (i.e., "the dream-work").
In this opportunity, I take the liberty to introduce slight
corrections to my concluding sentence:
"Since a baby's (and mankind's) first trauma cannot ever be represented by
adequate words, and it's the basic one, related to the anxiety of being
forced into an independent life (the trauma of birth), this
affect will leave an imprint of something "ineffable" and
terrible onto every successive trauma. Freud chose to
represent this situation (related to this nameless imprint)
by having the "phallus" stand as a symbol for that which lies as
the basis of all other catastrophic losses that an individual must
endure."
btw: like sticks, poles, umbrellas, cigars...the penis is simply one
among many other "phallic symbols."