Father
Alex Colston
Enough of fathers! From several provinces, one hears a call to restore the father’s old stature. This campaign to recuperate paternal authority dates back in popular consciousness at least to Christopher Lasch’s 1979 bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism, which ends in an agonized impasse between a younger generation of polymorphously perverse “narcissists” against the frail figure of a concerned Dad. If I must lash myself to the mast of his partial history, these arguments have been a kind of siren song to those lost sailors who have sought the Father’s resurrection as a guide and a balm. His elegies still soothe some more reactionary currents today. Lasch’s then sense of loss comports with an ongoing nostalgia for the heroic Dad capable of providing a beneficent social order originating from the family outward.
Magnifying Otto Kernberg’s theory of pathological narcissism into a strained and totalizing social critique in the 1970s, Lasch’s account was a lament against the encroachment of the “helping professions” on the family and of the apparent weakening of social ties. In different ways, some more cogent and believable than others, Lasch sought to show how the colorblind patriarchal family—framed as a haven within the political economy—had been undermined by runaway social-political and cultural forces.[1] But, in the decades hence, this line of argument has become something more insidious: the slow but effective retro-fashioning of social control through the idealized Father’s image. Coin this the “Father’s Insurrection” to keep his authority timelessly erect—a fluffer’s society. At whatever cost, these lost children pine, the male breadwinner’s prerogatives must be restored. This fantastic compulsion would invariably find neither a broad base of support nor a historical conjuncture to outfit its wish with any durable content. A belated misapprehension—like all nostalgia—the historical era of the Oedipal Father, or at least his postwar potlatch, is over.
But can we dispatch the father complex so easily? If you believe, as I sometimes do, that it’s a legitimate political project to do away with fathers once and for all, it is a rank humiliation to read how Freud discovered this to be the wish of a neurotic child. In “Family Romances,” Freud tracks how the child navigates initial love, dependence, and eventual disappointment with respect to their parents by imagining a more estimable heritage—an envy of other families predicated on a perceived slight and possible comeuppance. At first, this counterfactual wish is aimed at both parents. But, as Freud insists throughout his work, the biological mother, from which the child arrives, is certain, whereas the father is always uncertain and arrives from a distance. One has to calculate his dubious involvement in one’s origins. You must at least count back the months from birth to conception to determine paternity. The wished-for father accordingly serves as an index for the contingencies of social lineage, mistaken identity, and historical circumstance—someone else could be your Dad, you never know—while the real father looms as a shadowy fate to which one is condemned through unconscious repetition.
The father is the first place where ideals and models, wishful possibility and reality, part ways, incurring an internalized deficit that the disciplinary superego voices for its ends. In the opening line of the English translation of “Family Romances,” Freud appears to promise no less than “liberation” from both parents’ authority and thereby, perhaps, from neurosis. “Liberation” is an astounding word to read—elating and promissory, taken from the lexicon of a revolutionary. But the original German noun Ablösung is closer to replacement, detachment, or separation, with minor connotations of repayment, redemption, and relief as if from a burden, role, or debt. A mistaken translation that reveals a hidden desire, “liberation” from one’s parents is not itself free.
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In Freud’s early, classical account of the parent-child relation, the parents’ gender, division of labor, and heterosexuality seem to be foregone conclusions, so that the description now reads like a historical vestige—an old law to forget. Yet something possibly ineradicable survives in Freud’s account. The nuclear complex of the family form is organized by two dynamic poles: on the one hand, there is impossible intimacy, the drives and their satisfying crises, the infantile matrix of the confusion and separation between me and not-me, the forbidden pleasure of total fusion and the ambiguous pain of defensive rejection. In a word, incest. Then, on the other hand, there is the stranger who constitutes what is outside, foreign, and mediated—an interloper who bears society itself with its prohibitions and permissions—and who evinces a way out of the suffocation of the all too familiar. In a word, law. This is the complex dynamic of incest and its taboo—the reconstitution of nature by socialization—to which familial roles badly, inadequately, and insufferably conform.
The family is simply one site where the psyche is first torn between nature and culture—incest and taboo—and riveted to the traumas and identities of what does or doesn’t translate between them.
There is no necessity whereby the mother and father are imprinted permanently onto either side of the two-faced coin of incest and taboo: both mothers and fathers can say “no” to the right things and “yes” to the wrong things, both can be the subject with whom the child identifies or the object of the child’s desires. Both parents and child are subject to the whims and wishes of destroying or preserving something of themselves in, through, and against the other. Thus, if we start from Freud’s schema, it’s clearer that not only whom we call “mothers” and “fathers,” but the very axes of gender, sex, and sexuality are mutable symptoms of this core dynamic. We derive our reflexive sense of divisions of labor, the partition of private and public, and stylistic neuroses, predilections, and disinclinations from this dynamic and its conflicts. The development of psychoanalysis after Freud, moreover, followed this dialectical bifurcation: with the mother-child and the father-child relations marking distinct poles yet overlapping fields of inquiry into what makes and remakes the psyche. The family is simply one site where the psyche is first torn between nature and culture—incest and taboo—and riveted to the traumas and identities of what does or doesn’t translate between them.
Freud, who initially saw the analyst as an extension of the father’s social authority, willed to his followers the problem of motherhood, an oceanic realm of psychical life he admitted he did not understand or at least did not experience himself. Starting in the 1920s and through World War II, Melanie Klein was there to inherit this task by elaborating earlier methods of child analysis and infant observation, and Freud’s own daughter Anna soon followed on her heels to vie for the role of true heir. The British Psychoanalytical Society, nevertheless, birthed a theory whose primary locus was the infant-mother dyad, so you’d be forgiven for thinking the father fell out of view. This is not quite so. The UK state formed the paternal backdrop of these psychoanalytic inquiries into the infant-mother relationship, especially after the introduction of the NHS in 1948. The Janus of social democracy—with its two faces of vitalist capitalist growth and natalist regulation of reproduction through social welfare—carried out the paternal function of priming family development and setting limits on the national network of kinship. For this reason, Winnicott’s father figure, when he deigns to make an appearance, is indistinguishable from a self-consciously good-natured and aloof supervisor. It would then fall to a different inheritor, Jacques Lacan, to generate a doctrinal—or so he insisted—return to the paternal roots of psychoanalysis with his own theory of fatherhood, though it came with its own hysterical twist.
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“The symbolic father is nowhere,” Lacan said to his audience on March 6, 1957. “He intervenes nowhere.” Far from boosterism for paternal authority, which would equate fathers’ judgments with the Law itself, Lacan is emphatic that the only Father capable of embodying the Law would be a mythic one who could say “I am that I am.” In other words, no father is the God of pure tautology—a Master who always says what he means and means what he says, who can lay down the law by delivering pure signs of authority. No father, because no person, is without an unconscious. What is unconscious subverts mastery and splits the subject in twain. To the extent that fathers appear to function as lawgivers, they are imposters. They work through the self-imposed agony of trying to embody a Law that stands above them. This Law is what Lacan calls “castration,” which is a dramatic way of saying that one must speak and act while not exactly knowing what one is saying or doing. When it comes to their place in the social-symbolic order, fathers invariably suffer the inadequacy of not fulfilling this ordained fiction of an omniscient, beneficent holder and tutor of society’s children.
When it comes to the consulting room, the break with Freud’s intermittent paternalism is clear. In Lacan’s version, the analyst does not tell you what or who you are—or what your desires might be. Instead, Lacan turns things around. It is the analysand, in seeking an omniscient Father as a kind of protective armor against their own unconscious, who symbolically overvalues the analyst as the one who knows these things—if only to dispute the reciprocating analyst. Out of a sense of duty, affection, or narcissism, the analyst—not unlike the loving or disciplinarian father—might be seduced into parading around as someone in the know about another’s unconscious. The consequence is predictable: this performance tends to shut up the unconscious. To set this dynamic in the typical family scene, a child seeks a hearing with the father, but the father can never respond all-knowingly from the position sought—the place of the analysand’s or child’s desire.
Lacan’s psychoanalytic Law of castration should not, therefore, be too quickly relegated to the jurisprudential set of historical laws that purport to govern subjects. No doubt the subject has desire to follow and subvert rules, but psychoanalysis resituates that subject. We can only examine the desires for and against laws by following the fundamental analytic rule to say anything and everything—a task harder than it appears. The Law of castration—the Law of the Other—is a paradoxical Law without content. It’s a formal law that does not dictate—indeed, it merely exposes the desire for prescribed order. One fits themselves inside the symbolic order by addressing oneself and others, one’s fantasies and pleasures and traumas, one’s sense of the world’s necessities and possibilities through the Other (i.e., through language, other people, or the social-symbolic order). Still, there is always the open question of how to do so. This question remains even when parents provide the first dictate or suggestion.
Psychoanalysis has only one fundamental rule—speak freely and associate within the symbolic order—yet in reality no one is as free as all that. An analysand returns to the alibis and travails of their familial origins, but neurosis, compulsion, and trauma emerge where clarity, transparency, and flexibility end. The figure of the Father, for his part, indexes a set of these symptoms. If only the Father were there to relieve us of uncertain speech by making us follow his iron law, or conversely, if only we could kill his authority so that we might find liberation in what has been prohibited to us. This Father, Lacan insists, is always absent, and the afflictions that try and fail to conjure his presence are the ones we call Oedipal and anti-Oedipal.
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Psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati has argued in The Telemachus Complex that there are two ways to err with respect to this Law of castration without content.
First, consider the Oedipal way. As Lacan repeatedly points out, the Other—the mutable social-symbolic order—structures yet undermines autocratic sovereignty. Fathers who attempt to embody this latter fantasy—who attempt to be the Other—are no different than cops or judges: believing themselves to be the symbolic order, they don the armaments and robes of the state. They enjoy the unconscious fantasy of executing order on behalf of the social-symbolic order, and this emulation of the Other’s perceived authority provides them a kind of sado-masochistic satisfaction. Lacan calls this the “perverse father.” At his worst, the Oedipal father acts the part, and the child becomes imprisoned by kin. The Oedipal father imposes a sense of the law through fiat and the limited path of identification or disidentification with the law spuriously embodied by paternal authority. This dynamic makes familial inheritance the ultimate reality principle, and consequently, repressive, recriminatory, and resentful attachment or destruction becomes the narrow band of options—Oedipal victory or defeat.
There is thus a second, related mode of erring with respect to the Law: the anti-Oedipal variant of total self-sufficiency desired by parents and children alike. (Recalcati does not reduce this anti-Oedipal style to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus but rather to the “climate of opinion,” to borrow Auden’s formulation about Freud, of their time—what Recalcati dubs a “cult of self-sufficiency.”) Giving supremacy to the drives, the subject refuses submission to the Law of the Other. An anti-Oedipal subject is not even quite a subject, having thrown off the Law and the Other. They more resemble a machine, one that distrusts speech, desire, and authority as nothing more than impositions. No doubt this is an enticing rebellion—and even has its proper place as a counterweight to Oedipal tyranny—but when satisfaction rules in place of the Law and Other, dissatisfaction is incurred at an irrecuperable cost. Avoiding castration and voiding the Other, the anti-Oedipal drive rejects dependency on the symbolic order. It has a desperate wish to annihilate past and future for the sake of an eternal present of satisfaction without the Other. The drive disavows symbolic debt—our relatively intolerable dependence on others. This refusal of the Law of the Other—psychoanalysis’s fundamental rule to associate with and for another subject—is a “myth of freedom without ties,” as Recalcati puts it.
Segments of the political right, in fact, pursue this kind of freedom, thinking of it as the self-justifying end of obscene and pleasurable domination. But this refusal to traverse the symbolic order, ironically, makes a subject’s debt permanent and irredeemable, because the subject refuses to be addressed by the Other. This is merely a deadly and deformed variation of the original social order. All this anti-Oedipal subject can do is cathect to cycles of pleasure and pain, tension and release, in uncanny mimicry of capital’s cycles of accumulation and waste. This makes production and destruction the law of the land without any emancipatory horizon—such a horizon would necessarily depend on others. An image of the isolating anarchy of the market, the subject of the drive enshrines an unconscious rule of frustrated satisfaction and purposelessness.
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“Over-identification with the Law, or the Law’s rejection,” Recalcati summarizes, “are both simply super-egoic misunderstandings of the Law.”
By over-identifying with the symbolic order, the Oedipal subject’s super ego compels them to clone their psychical inheritance. By trying to emulate one’s inherited authorities, the subject seeks reassurance through the social-symbolic order. This fealty to existing social forms of authority acts as a bulwark against the anxiety of disorder and castration. In the case of the family or the father, a subject authorizes themself by being loyal to the paternal symbol, and that symbol resonates as a guarantee across the movement of a subject’s life. If that loyalty is disappointed, however, the super ego becomes obscenely disciplinary.
By rejecting the law, on the other hand, the anti-Oedipal subject’s super ego is also ascendant, but in this case it propels the subject into destructive reproduction. The quest toward the drives’ satisfaction can brook no barricade, and every project is mismeasured by the shortest lines of flight through appetite and acquisition—a headlong rush into calamity. Seeking dissolution in the drives’ will to enjoyment—a refusal of castration, a refusal of dependence—a subject ends up lost and alone. In this way, the anti-Oedipal figure, for all its necessary opposition, comes to resemble the perversion of the law-giving father, his obscene mirror of lawless drive.
The ideological false promise of capitalism is that castration is unnecessary: that you don’t have to depend on others to get your desire recognized, that you can have what you want without mediation.
These Oedipal and anti-Oedipal figures play out the existing psychical dynamics of the capitalist political economy. What appears to be an agonizing intergenerational conflict is, in fact, an expression of the permanent revolution of the capitalist mode of production. Oedipal and anti-Oedipal subjects each conjure up an image of the idealized father in capitalist society—a particularly stubborn figure of the social-symbolic Other, either positively or negatively regarded. This figure is propped up by a super-egoic force, who wins the day through a pernicious little trick of the super-egoic unconscious. This super-egoic voice says you must emulate the Other or refuse its address completely. This voice says, in other words, that you must refuse castration—either asserting the father’s intact authority or denying one’s unconscious split by refusing to address another castrated subject—in order to sustain the belief that your desire is immanently satisfiable. The ideological false promise of capitalism is that castration is unnecessary: that you don’t have to depend on others to get your desire recognized, that you can have what you want without mediation. In either case, this belief in immanent satisfaction leads the isolated subject to reproduce their oppression or annihilate their future—for most of us, some confused mixture of both.
Mirrored as in a mise en abyme, Oedipus and anti-Oedipus are psychical forms of capitalist socialization and governance that we’ve inherited from the twentieth century. The perverse father’s police state and the lawless refusal to plan for society’s future—choosing instead breakneck, destructive accumulation on borrowed time—have coalesced into a spectacle of deadly euphoria and dysphoria as capitalist growth declines into a morbid phantasmagoria. Perhaps the time of Oedipus and anti-Oedipus is passing into the rearview, yet the social and political symptoms of their dynamic remain everywhere in evidence. Whether in devotion and rivalry or eradication and overvaluation, these subjects are enslaved to an indestructible bond with the capitalist father figure, who once appeared to give structure to the social order but no longer does. Over and against this vicious cycle, Recalcati proposes that a new complex is petitioning to be heard beyond the law of the father, one he allegorizes through the figure of Telemachus, old Odysseus’s orphaned child.
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Odysseus finally appears as this humbled, castrated, mortal flesh before his son, who would prefer a king or a ghost.
For Recalcati, Telemachus is a figure of disinheritance, a child whose future is suspended by the fantasy of the return of the Father to restore their kingdom. Telemachus traverses his fantasy when, at the end of The Odyssey, instead of reuniting with a heroic father, “all he finds of his father are the remains of a nationless migrant.” What Telemachus inherits from his father, per Recalcati’s interpretation, is not riches, stature, and endowment—or the capitalist demand to reproduce or destroy them—but simply Odysseus’s testimony and witness of the world that passed before Telemachus was born and how poorly his father had managed to sail across it. “No monuments, no invincible fleets, no party heads, no authoritarian and charismatic leaders, no gods or popes will return from the sea,” Recalcati writes, “only fragments, splintered pieces, fragile and vulnerable fathers, poets, directors, teachers with no job security, migrants, workers.” These figures have an open-ended obligation to the future: to be “simple witnesses who bear testament and demonstrate how to communicate a sense of faith in the future to one’s own children and the new generations, giving a meaning to the horizon, a responsibility that does not lay claim to any notion of property.” To the extent that it’s possible, Recalcati suggests, those who act as castrated fathers testify to bearing time, loss, and mortality—not to condemn a younger generation to their own vices and pains but so that they might navigate a future of their unconscious choosing beyond the father’s complexes. Odysseus finally appears as this humbled, castrated, mortal flesh before his son, who would prefer a king or a ghost.
In keeping with the central point of Freud’s myth of the Primal Father in Totem and Taboo, any father is only legible as a pale shadow against the symbolic figure of the all-powerful Father who is always already dead. No doubt we will continue to hear the call to resurrect the father’s cultural authority—to return to some prelapsarian state when Father, Being, and Life together ordered the universe—but it’s a stature he never had and a world we never lost. “The call for the father is a neurotic demand for a primal father who will reinstall the prohibition,” Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe has written, “something that he was never capable of in the first place.” A father—or, truly, any parent or peer—might come to represent a master for someone else, but no one can bear the responsibility for dictating the order of things. To the extent that someone postures this way, they are shameless, because this is a collective responsibility that requires mutual adjustments through incorrigible ignorance and momentary enlightenment. What is most cruel about the call to restore paternal authority—and, in turn, to shackle families with the responsibility of preserving social order—is that it places an impossible demand on parents to control what they cannot: their children and their fates. A parent cannot fill in the lack—the locus of desire—the child must assume in order to make their life and future their own. The father “will never be able to fill in the lack,” Verhaeghe elaborates, “because he can only pass it to the next generation.” Willing this lack to the next generation is an act of love: giving to the other what one doesn’t have and cannot possess—the other’s desire.
[1] Lasch’s blinding colorblindness comes through in overweening declarations like “The ideology of white supremacy, however, no longer appears to serve any important social function.”