How is it that a mouth or an anus can substitute for a vagina? How is it that a child theorizes that children come into this world through their mothers' anuses? And, this object in my mouth, is it a breast or a penis? One erotic concavity can substitute for another, as can the erotic convexities. Is there any explanation for this madness of substitution, that is not fantastic? The mouth, the anus, the penis, and the vagina are all symbolic organs, at once real and unreal, and overdetermined. Imagination is the source of substitution.

A metaphor is a substitution: "The original mistake in every sentence: metaphor. Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.... Mehaphor is mistake or impropriety; a faux pas, or slip of the tongue; a little madness; petite mal; a little seizure or inspiration." Love's Body. 244. To make a metaphor is to attempt an escape from conceptual confinement. The attempt is always unsuccesful.

In human experience, imagination and conceptuality are fused. The process of abstraction fails to tell the whole story. I have never experienced my fantastic self except in the most intimate of relationships with my body and never have I experienced my body in abstraction; the two of us have been together from the get-go.

This sensory body, the body that I call my own, the one whose boundary is touch, is the real four-dimensional body of my experience. The skin is an interface between inside and outside. Whatever is outside my skin is in the environment. There are openings in the sensory body, conduits connecting inside and outside, passages for incoming and outgoing. The surfaces of these rabbit holes are intensely sensitive to the movement between inside and outside, to sensations of pleasure/pain. The sensation is a product of the friction. The genital pleasure is the pleasure of friction. The mouth and the anus are genital organs. The digestive tract is that labyrinth through which the environment passes. As the sensory body moves through the environment the environment moves through the body, maintaining an interface, and thus a difference.

There is a profound connection between the genital organs and fantasy; fantasy is tied to erotic pleasure, to the sensation of pleasure that arises in the "erotogenic" zones of the sensory body by means of friction. Freud detected, beneath the hysterical symptom, a repressed wish for erotic satisfaction; the symptom is a substitute. Why would the body repress its own desire for pleasure? The answer is fantastic.