Burke’s explanation of the “four master tropes” (especially that of metaphor and metonymy) is useful to understand Lacan’s term the Name of the father/the law of the father. According to Lacan, the father is just a name, a signifier. Regnault sees it primarily as a signifier and only secondarily as a person, a man (in Reading Seminar xi: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 69). Burke mentions the relationship between metaphor (“a device for seeing something in terms of something else” GM 503) and perspective, which he explains in P&C; the two realms “are never identical” (GM 504). According to Lacan, the child encounters the desire of the mother but feels that the mother is obeying the law of the father; therefore, the mother becomes the law of the father as the child “sees the mother in terms of the father", he subsitutes perspective. (And these terms are obviously not identical.) Regnault mentions that Lacan utilizes the Name-of-the-father as a metaphor: “one signifier is substituted for another. But the main signifier to be substituted is the phallus, which represents something missing” (69). It seems that in the Symbolic the father comes to represent the cultural norms and laws: the father is “reduced” to norms and laws. Therefore, Lacan employs metonymy as well: the father enforces cultural rules by threatening to castrate us if we do not obey; he is a symbol of society’s power.