The Dead Father

A Psychoanalytic Inquiry

Lila J. Kalinich, Stuart W. Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134058839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What is the significance of the Father in psychoanalysis today?

This book constructs a much needed framework to allow psychoanalysts to consider the difficulties of a generation without a solid anchor in the Father. The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry provides a necessary addition to decades of work on the role of the mother in development. The editors bring together world renowned scholars to discuss current observations in their fields, in terms of the Father's changing but essential functions, both in the lives of the individual and collective. Divided into four parts, chapters focus on:

• The Lost Father
• The Father Embodied
• The Father in Theory
• Father Culture.

Exploring the role of the father in individual psychology, everyday interpersonal and social experience and cultural phenomena writ large, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, as well as psychologists, social workers and scholars in the humanities.

Part I
The lost father

Chapter 1
The construction of the lost father¹

André Green

To reflect on the dead father might seem like reopening an old forgotten chapter in classical Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud was preoccupied with this idea for his entire life. Is it not in the famous letter of October 1897 that he makes the first allusion to the Oedipus complex, in a reference to a play with which he was familiar: Oedipus Rex? And doesn’t he extend his thoughts to Hamlet?

He presented the Oedipus complex from three angles: (1) personal self-analysis; (2) culture with universally celebrated works of art; and (3) clinically from material from patients. Freud was constantly concerned with the subject of the murder of the father. He confessed that The Interpretation of Dreams was “a portion of my own self analysis, my reaction to my father’s death, that is to say to the most important event, the most poignant loss of a man’s life” (1900, p. xxvi). In this book he devoted a chapter to one kind of typical dreams: “Dreams of the Death of Persons of whom the Dreamer is Fond”. The wishes that are represented in dreams do not always belong to the present. The wishes of the past have to be considered in the light of the child’s beliefs. To children, death has little in common with the thoughts of adults on this subject: “a child’s idea of being ‘dead’ has nothing much in common with ours apart from the word” (p. 254). He goes on to say that the dreams of the death of parents apply with preponderant frequency to the parent who is of the same sex as the dreamer. An investigation of Greek mythology recalls the examples of Kronos and Zeus. Finally, Freud gives his first formulation of the Oedipus complex, throwing light on the meaning of Sophocles’ tragedy. He adds that as far as human beings are concerned, wishful dreams express wishes that are unconscious, “We live in ignorance of those wishes” (p. 263).

Freud realized that he had made a significant discovery, in fact the cornerstone of his theory, which he later called the “Vaterkomplex.” He was so convinced of its importance – confirmed by clinical experience – that he wished to establish his theory beyond mere wishes. Just think of the Rat Man’s father, already dead, whom the patient imagined standing behind the door while he was masturbating looking at himself in the mirror.

The 1910 publication of James Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy opened a wide debate in which Freud wanted to take part. After writing Totem and Taboo (1913), Freud oscillated between the conviction of having made a very important step forward, and disillusionment, as if what he had postulated was too good to be true.

Of his four essays, the last on the return of totemism in childhood, is the most important. I will not review in detail Freud’s ideas that referred to Darwin on the primitive horde. Neither will I review the relationship between child and animal which Freud described in little Hans’ phobia where the horse, as a phobic object, is taken as a symbol of the father who generates feelings of both fear and tenderness. And I won’t give much credence to his belief in William Robertson Smith’s ideas on the totem meal, following the murder of the tyrannical father, as the foundation for religion, morality and the laws of society.

Starting first by examining ideas, Freud proceeds to affirm them not just as hypotheses, but as facts. “One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end to the patriarchal horde” (1913, p. 159). This was Freud’s explanation of guilt and the consequences of it. And this is also where he asserts that “The dead father became stronger than the living one had been,” adding “for events took the course we so often see them follow in human affairs to this day.” From this moment, Freud will remain obsessed with the ideas of the origins of social institutions. In other terms, the past is still alive, is present in ourselves but unconscious; hence the “dead father.” And the book ends with Freud quoting Goethe: “In the beginning was the Deed.” Therefore in 1913 Freud moves from the indisputable presence of wishes in dreams to a postulate about the relationship of the wishes to a primal deed. He adds that “everyone possesses in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him to interpret other people’s reactions, that is to undo the distortions which other people have imposed on the expression of their feelings”. But there is still another problem that awaits an answer. If there is a primal deed, how has it been transmitted from one generation to the next until now? This is the last piece of Freud’s construction, which he will deal with just before his death.

Moses and Monotheism (Freud, 1939) is a very rich and very disputable book. It can be read from many points of view. I think that Freud wanted indirectly to address psychoanalysts to express fears about the future of psychoanalytic theory, which he believed could be destroyed just as was Akhenaton’s original idea of the first monotheistic religion. He admits that most of his ideas were already present in Totem and Taboo. Freud qualified his book as a “historical novel,” a point that has been closely analyzed by Josef Yerushalmi (1989). In Freud’s mind, the murder of the father was truly a historical concept, dealing with what he calls historical truth, trying to describe historical development. I shall limit myself to one point: the archaic heritage. After postulating an analogy between what is shown by human neuroses, related to individual psychology, and what is learned from the analysis of religious phenomena of mass psychology, Freud concludes that the traumas of the remote past of people’s history are no different from the developmental traumas of the individual. So, he refers again to the murder of the father and says that it has also been repressed, forgotten or distorted.

What about the transmission of this important deed, in the form of an archaic heritage? Freud postulates this mechanism while being perfectly aware that it stood against science, which denies phylogenetic transmission as incompatible with Darwinian views. This answer was inevitable from Freud’s point of view:

Its evidential value seems to me strong enough for me to venture on a further step and to posit the assertion that the archaic heritage of human beings comprises not only dispositions but also subject matter – memory traces of the experience of earlier generations.

(1939, p. 99)

Without a doubt, these views are unacceptable. Maybe Freud undervalued his own discoveries on the unconscious and underestimated the degree to which all the same questions about fundamental issues arise in each generation. Of course, times have changed and our answers are quite different from Freud’s. In Western contemporary societies, we very often observe that the traditional family structures have disappeared. Families broken up by divorce are reconstituted with siblings coming from different fathers or mothers. Our methods of investigation have changed. We rely more on observation than on the symbolic significance of parental images which are affected by the changes. Freud was also aware of the impact of contemporary events on theory. In 1900 already he wrote: “In our society today [that is around 1900] fathers are apt to cling desperately to what is left of a now sadly antiquated potestas patris familiae” (1900, p. 257).² What about 2006, more than a century later?

The war interrupted the debate on Freud’s view. After the war, psychoanalysis followed different paths. In the cultural world, “classical” psychoanalysis was criticized because of the failure of most historical systems of thought which led to such errors of interpretation and ignored the masked aspects of Marxism, just as those of National Socialism. These movements of ideas objected to psychoanalysis as being an enterprise of “normalizing” people (Whitebook, 2005). On the other hand, psychoanalysis was attacked by science. Structuralism was conquering the intellectual world. Lévi-Strauss’s reading of Totem and Taboo led him to a radical rejection of Freud’s ideas, though he accepted the existence of an unconscious, as in linguistics, as a system of unconscious links, but fiercely denied its relationship to any content. The idea of the predominance of the signifier paved the way for Lacan’s ideas. Lacan shared many of the criticisms addressed to Freud and proposed alternate views. According to Lacan, we are wrong to assume that sexual wishes are symbolized. On the contrary, what comes first is the symbolic order and its signifiers. The symbolic order gets hold of the images and representations and gives them meaning. In other words, the processes of the dream work – condensation and displacement – compared to metaphor and metonymy, come into play, expressing the primacy of the symbolic over the imaginary. The symbolic order exists outside, independently and before the subject. In other words, the signifier necessarily precedes any symbolic act. No act can be given the role of a foundation. Moreover, to complete the assertion that the mother is the Other, Lacan adds: the father is not the Other of the Other. Only the “name of the father” can define its place, being at the root of the symbolic functions, which always identify the father’s person with the figure of the Law.

Rosolato (1969) has described the Idealized Father as an entity of unlimited power, tyrannical, ignoring frustration, that protects and allows something else in the mother’s desire: the phallus. This concept of the Idealized Father has to be distinguished from Lacan’s concept of exchange, another example of the symbolic order, and according to Lacan, having to deal with a symbolic death. As Shakespeare wrote: “Thou owest Nature [sic] a death.”³ However, even if the symbolic order helps us to understand the symptoms of neurosis, it may prove very difficult to apply to non-neurotic structures, precisely because the role of the dead father is questionable in them.

The views held in France were long debated and long to be accepted in Anglo-Saxon countries. In Great Britain, Melanie Klein (1932) had revised Freud’s views. For instance, re-examining the case of the Wolf Man in light of the Oedipus complex, Klein suggested that the fixations that were described in Freud’s essay had to be understood in terms of the much earlier oral phase with its related anxieties and defenses. Ever since, psychoanalytic research has been oriented toward the study of pregenital stages. Experience demonstrated that the references to the castration complex and to the Oedipus complex failed all too often to cure the patients. For the most part, this period of analytic research was devoted nearly exclusively to earlier stages of psychic life, considered from the perspective of mother–child relationships. This original dyad was thought to exclude the father whose influence was thought to be felt only later.

This phase, still ongoing, led to interesting discoveries. It relied on a genetic point of view. The dyad of the mother–child couple was taken as the originary one. Few theorists were concerned with how the father figure could lead us to consider triangular relationships! In contrast, Lacan adopted an entirely different point of view, long limited to France and the French-speaking countries.

In the newer mother-centered perspective, the question of the dead father disappeared. The dead father was dead because, in order even to think of his murder, he must have some kind of existence that one would like to end. The patriarchal order, already weakening around 1900 as Freud observed, continued its decline, in tandem with other changes in the social condition of women. A working life was opening to them, contraceptive measures were developed in spite of the opposition of the Church. Children came to have another type of child rearing based on the joint participation of fathers and mothers, both having a role to play in parenting.

Compared with work on mother–child relationships, little has been written on the early aspects of paternity. The dead father in Freud is an outcome of the Oedipus phase. What we would like to know is what precedes it. In what way does the father figure in the picture and how can his role be intuitively grasped in such a context. Referring to Freud once again may help us find intuitions in his work that can serve as guidelines, guidelines we don’t find elsewhere.

For instance, consider the following statement about the origins of the ego ideal: “for behind it lies an individual’s first and most important identification, his identification with the father of his own personal prehistory” (Freud, 1922a, p. 31).⁴ As far as I am aware, it is the first time that Freud mentions a personal prehistory and links it to an important identification with a father who is not yet involved in the complex web of intertwining ambivalent cathexes and relationships between mother and father. Freud explains, “it is a direct and immediate identification and takes place earlier than any object-cathexis”. He had already considered this two years earlier, in 1921, when he distinguished taking the father as an ideal belonging to the “early history of the Oedipus complex” (1913, p. 104). We see Freud groping in the dark.

In Group Psychology, he shows how the child has two types of ties. He writes:

At the same time as this identification with his father, or a little later, the boy has begun to develop a true object-cathexis towards his mother, according to the attachment [anaclitic] type. He then exhibits, therefore, two psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis towards his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model. The two subsist side by side for a time.

(Freud, 1922b, p. 105)

Here identification is related to a paternal model. Freud states that the boy deals with his father by identifying with him. In fact, Freud says that the boy appropriates, takes over, the father by identification, and suggests that the type of paternal identification implies a desexualization, a sort of sublimation. Even if Freud’s statements are not always very clear, he seems to oppose two types of bonds from the very beginning: (1) those relating to the mother are directed, “straight forward” and (2) on the contrary, those related to the father, taken as his ideal, imply desexualization as some kind of relinquishment of the former tie. This, as I see it, is the consequence of the outcome of the Oedipal component of the murder of the father: the birth of the ego ideal and the superego, desexualization, sublimation, and, in culture, what is called civilization.

What is important in my view is Freud’s persistent intention to build a picture of a three party relationship. I find this description more interesting than those of the supposedly exclusive mother–child dyad that makes no room for the father. Of course this dyad is related to what Freud qualifies as a “straightforward attachment,” whatever its nature is. But I want to add another factor. The father, apparently absent from the scene, is far from being inexistent. In fact, he is an observer of the scene. And even if he joyfully participates as witness of his child’s satisfaction, we also have to consider that given that he is not immediately included in and does not take part in this relationship, he stands in a sort of anti-sexual position. Even if he is not hostile, the simple fact of his exclusion from the direct exchange gives him a certain reserve about what is happening. Therefore the third party in the scene is the father’s look, to which all the limitations of this supposedly entirely satisfactory situation can be attributed. This is more intuitively grasped by the child than stated openly. Moreover this situation may become connected with any other feelings having to do with unpleasure. If we add that it is inevitable that the father, witnessing the scene, experiences nostalgia for something forever lost to him that the child and the mother have the privilege of enjoying, we can imagine what takes place here. All the threats of separation and the effects of repression can be linked to this look. And if, from all the functions that Freud describes as constituents of the superego, self-observation is the most important one, we can guess that it might be the result of a turning-against-the-self mechanism. The baby is not looked at by the mother alone, but also by the father.

In the chapter called “An Advance on Intellectuality,” in Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud characterizes the patriarchal order as following the matriarchal:

But this turning from the mother to father points in addition to a victory of intellectuality over sensuality – that is, an advance in civilization, since maternity is proved by the evidence of the senses while paternity is a hypothesis, based on an inference and a premiss. Taking sides in this way with a thought-process in preference to a sense perception has proved to be a momentous step.

(p. 114)

Freud connects this with the “omnipotence of thoughts” linked with the development of speech. “The new realm of intellectuality was opened up, in which ideas, memories and inferences became decisive in contrast to the lower psychical activity which had direct perceptions by the sense-organs as its content” .

This quotation can apply to our subject. Can we talk about the father in the same terms that we use to describe the relationship with the mother? This is something that the “new fathers” sometimes do not understand. These fathers have a closer relationship with the body of the child, giving attention and care in a proximity that he obviously enjoys. I will not go so far as to say that they are competing with the mother, but they sometimes seem to be doubles of the mother rather than finding what is expected of them as fathers.

The idea of the murder of the father is raised in the mind because the father is supposed to be the single possessor of something (the mother) that appears indispensable to the child. It is in this sense, standing for the indispensable, that it is called symbolic through the signs that are associated with it. We find so many varied circumstances concerning the father that we are not able to predict what emerges from them as an issue. The relationship with the father may have been marked in the past by sexual violence, transgression, rape, sodomy. These sometimes lead to an identification with the aggressor, not withstanding a strong fixation. At the other extreme, they can lead to masochistic fixations or feelings of emptiness as a reaction to an attitude of total neglect when the father desires to ignore the child’s very existence. It is the relationship between the parents that d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Prologue
• PART I The lost father
• PART II The father embodied
• PART III The father in theory
• PART IV Father culture
• Epilogue