Don’t want to be a father? Actually, you don’t know what being a father is. — Excerpt from the translation of Mental Illness

In human experience, the function of "being a father" is completely inconceivable outside the realm of the signifier.

What does it mean to be a father? You are all familiar with those discussions among scholars, whether they are discussing ethics or something else, who are always eager to find out whether the savages knew that when they placed women in this or that place, they also had the so-called scientific concept that "as long as they mate in the right way, women can get pregnant"? These studies seem to be as stupid as it can be, because it is really hard to imagine that even if they are savages, as long as they are human, they still know that they must mate if they want to have offspring. This is not what I want to say. The point is to put the following facts together: mate with a woman, after a period of time, she is "pregnant" in her belly, and then the product she "pregnant" must be expelled. This series of facts in itself cannot construct a concept of "being a father" in any way. I am not talking about the rich cultural meaning behind "being a father" at all. I am talking about "being a father" in the sense of "procreation".

For men, the fact of "being a father" must be "retrospected" to make sense to them. However, if it is only through imagination, men cannot find the meaning of "being a father" at all. He cannot rely on imagination to confirm that the child is "his", just as the child is the mother's. Only when "exchange" in the cultural sense rises to the status of the original signifier and maintains this status stably, can men produce the concept of "being a father" through the effect of "retrospection". This production occurs in the process of "exchange" mentioned above. The subject may know that mating is the real origin of "fertility", but the function of "fertility" as a signifier is another matter.

I have not fully unveiled what I am telling you now, and I will leave the unveiling to the next lecture. In order to fully grasp the meaning of "fertility", both men and women must understand the relationship between "fertility" in the most complete sense and death. Both "fatherhood" and death, the signifiers, were linked to the obsessive-compulsive subject by Freud.

The signifier of “fatherhood” builds a “highway” in sexual relations with women. Without this “highway”, we find ourselves on secondary roads: copulate with a woman, and then the woman becomes pregnant.

All signs show that Schreiber lacks this basic signifier of "being a father". Because of this, he makes mistakes and cannot extricate himself until he thinks he is acting as a woman, and then he piece together his delirium by imagining that he is "pregnant" to realize the function of "being a father".