Ernest Jones, Freud, Sigmund’s biographer, adopted this word, which in Greek means ‘disappearance’, to describe the loss of sexual desire. In Jones’s view, Freud’s theory of castration does not go far enough---it is not the fear of castration that motivates the resolution of the Oedipus complex he argues, but the far greater fear of the loss of desire itself. By this means he sought to find a common denominator in the sexual development of boys and girls that did not centre on the presence or absence of the penis. Lacan, Jacques also uses this term, though not in exactly the same way. For Lacan it means the loss of subjectivity. The projection, Lacan argues, is not afraid of losing desire; on the contrary, losing desire is precisely what they want to achieve. Aphanisis is in this latter regard a mechanism of defence.