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THE FUNCTION OF THE FATHER IN THE
CONTEMPORARY FAMILY: Psychoanalytic Notes
Cormac Gallagher,
Cormac Gallagher is a psychoanalyst working in Dublin
or psychoanalysts the neurotic behaviour and character disorders of adult life are ways of continuing to ask vitally important ques- ions that have been left unresolved since childhood. Hence the impor- tance analysis has always accorded to the family structures and events that mark the first interactions between the human offspring and the social world within which he is called to take his place. But contrary to popular belief the teaching of psychoanalysis is not that human beings inevitably repeat the patterns laid down in childhood. It is rather that men and women will be powerfully propelled towards such repeti- tion unless one concrete question is resolved in such a way that the emerging human being can stake out a particular position in regard to the people who accompany him on the first steps of his journey.
What is a father?
'Every new arrival on this planet,' wrote Sigmund Freud in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 'is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis.' This proposition is seen by Jacques Lacan 1 as providing the axis for all authentic psychoanalytic research and practice. But he has given it a new twist and a new vividness for our time by in- sisting that what it amounts to in practice is the task of effectively answering the question: 'What is a Father?' This then for him is the concrete question that must be answered if the stagnated repetition of neurosis is to be avoided and some little freedom and creativity attained. Lacan would go further by arguing that the very emergence of psychoanalysis at the end of the last century is linked precisely with the psychological crisis that arose for all human beings, men and women, with the decline in contemporary society of the largely un- conscious representation of the Father that he calls the 'paternal im- ago'. So that the question of the Father is not addressed solely to the
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individual or the family but to contemporary society as a whole. This essay is not immediately concerned, then, with the practical question of the share that should be taken by the contemporary father in the care and rearing of the children - a question that the economic and social conditions of our time have made increasingly urgent for many women. Nor does it deal directly with the problems faced by the increasing number of single-parent families. It is concerned with the more fundamental question, also made urgent by social and economic conditions, of the specific nature of the paternal function. I would suggest that without some serious attempt to approach this issue the reflections of sociologists, psychologists and theologians are in danger of remaining Utopian and idealistic and of providing little in the way of useful guidance for the parents, educators, and religious and political leaders who determine the shape of our society.
The Anglo-Americanization of Freud
Some preliminary clarifications may be in order here. There have been two traditions at work in psychoanalysis since the death of Freud in 1939, and one of them has been so dominant in English and American writing that it has almost completely obscured the other, which car- ries much more explicitly the message of Freud's revolutionary view of the human condition. By and large the post-Freudian Anglo- Americans have promoted a theory and practice that puts the mother- child bond at the centre of psychological development. Basing themselves largely on the learning theories derived from academic psychology as applied to the observation of children and animals they have argued that the failures of socialization that manifest themselves in adult life as illness or delinquency are caused by an affective frustra- tion arising primarily from the absence, loss or distortion of early mater- nal care.
John Bowlby
The most popular expression of this point of view is probably John Bowlby's 'Child Care and Growth of Love'. Basing himself on studies of children evacuated from large centres of population to avoid bom- bing during the Second World War, Bowlby argued that premature separation from the mother made it imposible for the child to acquire those emotional predispositions that would make him capable of the love and fellow-feeling that are essential for life in society. And he went on to speculate on the inhumanity to be anticipated in adult life from those armies of orphans produced by every war and from those children whose mothers had been forced to abandon the home for the work place.
little and catch some glimpse of what he calls 'the paternal mystery' and gain some appreciation of his reasons for putting it at the centre of his concerns. In the five major case histories of Dora, the Ratman, Little Hans, President Schreber and the Wolfman in which Freud attempted to unravel the intricacies of hysteria and phobia, obsessional neurosis and paranoia, it is always a failure to master the Oedipus complex or to answer the question of the Father that is at the core of the pro- blems that brought these patients to Freud or, in the case of Presi- dent Schreber, to years of enforced psychiatric confinement ending with his death. But to find a starting point we will not turn to these infinitely nuanced case histories to which Lacan constantly refers us as being the indispensable sources for understanding what Freud was trying to communicate. Instead we will use the eye of an Irish artist to help us see that this struggle is relevant to our own society and does not concern only those who master it so incompletely that they are brought with the passing of time to the psychiatrist's chair or the psychonanalyst's couch.
Oedipus in Ireland
In 'My Oedipus Complex', set in Cork at the end of the First World War, Frank O'Connor has made his own contribution to forging the uncreated conscience of our race by sketching an authentically Irish myth in which many Irish men may perhaps find an echo of their own early strug- gles with the question of the Father. I say it is a myth because even though little Larry's father has been away in the war and only intrudes into his life at the age of five, there is always a sense in which the specific type of presence that is associated with the Father is masked from the child in his early years and only emerges with its own par- ticular clarity between the ages of four and six. Clearly, in the com- plete conjugal family that we are taking as the typical family struc- ture expected by our culture, Daddy has always been around and, given the economic and social circumstances of the day, may even have had the principal caring role in the life of the child. But if this is so he is nevertheless seen in terms of the biological needs of the child and plays the role of surrogate mother rather than father.
O'Connor's unpretentious little tale has the merit of vividly illustrating the subjective world into which the Father intrudes. It also shows why this intrusion gives rise to questions which have nothing abstract about them since they concern the very existence of the subject, and it il- lustrates ways of achieving a resolution of sorts of the psychological
crisis to which these questions give rise.
The Imaginary Order
The world which little Larry had constructed on the basis of his ex- clusive relationship with his mother gives the flavour of what Lacan has described as the Imaginary Order. This is the world of the dual relationship that gives rise in the child to the illusion of completeness and omnipotence. The high point of every day was the early morning conference when Larry would climb into the big bed to tell his belov- ed mother his schemes, and to be thawed out by the warmth of her body. True, she imposed some limits on his phantasies. Whenever he pointed out to her the waste of making two beds when they could both sleep in one she insisted that it was healthier for him to sleep in his own room. And there was the little matter of the baby that he and his mother could never agree on. Larry was all for having a new baby - theirs was the only house on the terrace without one. But his Mother insisted that they could not afford one until Father came back from the war. The development of this imaginary world in which the child sees himself as the focus of his Mother's desires and sees her as the all- enveloping and omnipotent object of his, is, of course, an essential phase in the emergence of a properly human sense of identity. Lacan sees as the gateway to this world those moments in the first eighteen months of his life when the child comes to delight in his own image as reflected in the mirror and in the loving gaze of those who care for him - moments that he has made into a key theoretical reference point called the 'Mirror Stage'. A failure to enter this world of the cap- tivating image would leave the child sunk in the miseries of motor incoordination characteristic of the human animal in the early weeks and months after his birth, and leave him with a sense of himself - another Lacanian reference point - as a 'fragmented body' vulnerable to dislocation and death. But in one of his most illuminating case histories Freud has shown how the desire of the Mother for the child, which in its origin draws the child away from his early misery into a sense of life and joy, can, when excessive, become deathbearing and prevent the child from mov- ing beyond this phase of imaginary captivation into the symbolic order- ing of human affairs within which he must eventually find his place. So great was the need of the Mother of Little Hans for her child that she imposed onto the phantasies of her son none of the limits set by Larry's mother. She not only had him in her bed - against the
'Smack your own!' I screamed hysterically. 'Smack your own! Shut up! Shut up!' At this he lost his patience and let fly at me.
Freud would sometimes wonder how he, a serious neurologist and in- vestigator of psychopathology, had found himself writing a new type of monograph that owed more to the genre of the short story than to science. But it was part of his genius to link the banalities of family life to the deepest problems of human existence. Because it is nothing less than a struggle for existence that is crystallized here in this little drama. Will his father and mother be able to say the words and make the gestures that would help Larry to make the inner changes that are necessary if he is to undo the apron strings that bind him to his mother; or will they make that transformation too difficult or even impossible for him and condemn him instead to making an aborted entrance into the Symbolic Order?
The drama surrounding the entry into this order has been anticipated with the naming of the child at his birth, with his weaning from his mother's breast and his toleration of her inevitable absences. And it will surface again with a new intensity in the struggles of adolescence and the challenges of adult life. But for Freud, as for Lacan, these years from four to six when a child usually begins to go to school and be considered to possess the elements of the power to reason are the decisive ones, and they are made decisive because they mark the access to a new type of presence that points to something beyond the maternal and imaginary world.
Desire and the Law
'The true function of the father,' writes L a c a n , '... is fundamentally to unite (and not to set in opposition) a desire and the Law'. Despite the early resentment it causes, his appearance in the life of the child is in its essence, not an intrusion but a revelation of new possibilities of ex- istence. Very briefly, Lacan sees the Father as exercising his function in a two-fold operation, prohibition and promise, which will have as their effect the setting up of two new agencies in the psychology of the child which will thenceforward allow him to proceed with his life in a quite different mode. The purpose of prohibition is to complete the detachment begun with the weaning of the child from his mother, and, more specifically, to repress the sexual desire for the mother which reaches a high point at the age of four or five. Both the sexual desire and its prohibition by the father are what emerge so clearly in Frank O'Connor's story. A correlative but
not symmetrical process must occur in the little girl with regard tc her father, the difference in the two sexes turning on the fact that the object of the boy's desire is the same person from which he was originally weaned, whereas the girl directs her desire towards that new object which is the oedipal father, while also completing her detach- ment from her mother. In both cases the successful completion of the operation of prohibition results in the setting up of an internal agency called the super-ego which essentially represses the sexual images and desires associated with the parent of the opposite sex. This repres- sion releases the energy necessary for the pursuit of a dimension of reality that goes beyond the self-interest of the pre-oedipal years. For the Oedipal crises to be fully mastered, however, the dimension of promise must also be introduced, a promise which allows the child to find a new type of identity beyond that which sustained him in the bipolar relationship with his mother and to see the death of the old imaginary constructions as heralding a new form of life. This pro- mise takes effect through the identification the child assumes with the parent of same sex. What is quite extraordinary in this new type of identification is that it takes for its object not the person who is desired but the person who opposes that desire in the oedipal triangle. It is a process that is quite uniquely human and it results in a sublimation of reality for the child allowing the people in his world to take on a certain affective depth which allows them to be considered as people in their own rights, having their own subjectivity independently of the needs of the child. For both sexes it is the imago, the unconscious image of the Father, that allows this identification and sublimation to take place and it gives rise to the formation of the second crucial subjective agency, that of the ego-ideal. The setting up of the super-ego and the ego-ideal cannot be understood in terms of behaviourist psychology nor in terms of natural biological or emotional evolution. They are brought about through the operation of the paternal function, and the degree to which they come to structure the subjectivity of the individual depends on the concrete way this function is brought into play in the particular family struc- ture in which the child finds himself. Once they have been established the child is well on the way to being able to love and work in a way appropriate to a human being, and is as well fitted as possible to take his chance with the biological and social crises that later childhood, adolescence, maturity and old age will bring. There is an infinite variety of ways in which a good-enough resolu- tion of the oedipal crisis can be achieved, each resulting in the
