Phallic symbol anything that can be taken as representing the phallus or penis such as a pencil, a church steeple, a cigarette or a snake. The term phallus is used in anthropology and mythology to describe the virtually universal representations of the male organ of generation. The idea of the phallic symbol was taken over into psychoanalysis as an aid to dream interpretation, though pop psychologists and the general public have made much more of it than psychoanalysts ever did. Like other dramatic psychoanalytic ideas it cannot be used in a simple-minded way and its origins must be borne in mind. Perhaps that is why Jung is supposed to have suggested that 'the penis is only a phallic symbol’, and Freud that 'sometimes a cigar is really just a cigar’.
Definition