'In a few sentences Marx, who is nonetheless so miserly and reticent where sexuality is concerned, exploded something that will hold Freud and all of psychoanalysis forever captive: (the anthropomorphic representation of sex! [italics]). What we call anthropomorphic representation is just as much the idea that there are two sexes as the idea that there is only one. We know how Freudianism is permeated by this bizarre notion that there is finally only one sex, the masculine, in relation to which the woman, the feminine is defined as a lack, an absence. It could be thought at first that such a hypothesis founds the omnipotence of a male homosexuality. Yet this is not at all the case; what is founded here is rather the statistical aggregate of intersexual loves. For if the woman is defined as a lack in relation to the man, that man in his turn lacks what is lacking in the woman, simply in another fashion: the idea of a single sex necessarily leads to the erection of a phallus as an object on high, which distributes lack as two nonsuperimposable sides and makes the two sexes communicate in a common absence -- castration.
Women, as psychoanalysts or psychoanalyzed, can then rejoice in showing man the way, and in recuperating equality in difference. Whence the irresistably comical nature of the formulas according to which one gains access to desire through castration. But the idea that there are two sexes, after all, is no better. This time, like Melanie Klein , one attempts to define the female sex by means of positive characteristics, even if they be terrifying. At least in this way one avoids phallocentrism, if not anthropomorphism. But this time, far from founding the communication between the two sexes, one founds instead their separation into two homosexual series that remain statistical. And one does not by any means escape castration. It is simply that castration, instead of being the principle of sex conceived as the masculine sex (the great castrated soaring Phallus), becomes the result of sex conceived as the feminine sex (the little hidden absorbed penis). We maintain therefore that castration ( is the basis for the anthropomorphic and molar representation of sexuality [italics]).'
(Anti-Oedipus, p.294-5)