The Name-of-the-Father (French Nom du père) is a concept that Jacques Lacan developed over time, beginning in his Seminar The Psychoses (1955–1956). Lacan plays with the similar sound of le nom du père (the name of the father) and le non du père (the no of the father), to emphasize the legislative and prohibitive function of the symbolic father.
'In terms of Lacan's three orders, it refers not to the real father, nor to the imaginary father (the paternal imago), but to the symbolic father'.[1]
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Lacan's concept 'derives, in a sense, from the mythical, symbolic father of Freud's Totem and Taboo ';[2] and was used by him as a strategic move in his opposition to what he saw as the over-emphasis of object relations theory on 'the dual relation, which is the relation of the subject to [his/]her mother'.[3] Lacan saw 'the ternary relation of the Oedipus complex...the place that she [the mother] reserves for the Name-of-the Father in the promulgation of the law'[4] as a vital element in helping each new member of the human race to move from an exclusive, primary relation to the mother[er] to a new, secondary emphasis upon the wider cultural world - upon the symbolic order.
'Traditionally, the father's orientation is centrifugal, i. e., towards the outside world...his is the primary responsibility for facilitating the transition from home to society'.[5] The father (or fatherer) plays an essential role in the process whereby 'the toddler has got to see that Mum isn't God as a first step to seeing that Dad isn't God, and that...he's part of something bigger too'[6] - part of 'the chain of discourse...in which an entire family, an entire coterie, an entire camp, an entire nation or half the world will be caught'.[7] The internalisation of the Name of the Father with the passing of the Oedipus complex - both 'the precept: "You ought to be like this (like your father)"...[and] the prohibition: "You may not be like this (like your father)...some things are his prerogative"'[8] - was for Lacan an essential element of human sanity.
Lacan distinguishes between the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real father. 'It is in the name of the father that we must recognise the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law' - as distinct from 'the narcissistic relations, or even from the real relations, which the subject sustains with the image and action of the person who embodies it.[9] This paternal function imposes the law and regulates desire in the Oedipus complex, intervening in the imaginary dual relationship between mother and child to introduce a necessary symbolic distance between them (Dylan Evans). 'The true function of the Father is fundamentally to unite (and not to set in opposition) a desire and the Law' (Écrits), and the Symbolic father is thus not an actual subject but a position in the Symbolic order.
By contrast the Imaginary Father is an imago, the composite of all the imaginary constructs that the subject builds up in fantasy around the figure of the father; and may be construed either as an ideal father or as the opposite, the bad father - 'the reverse of the father, the "anal father" who lurks behind the Name-of-the-Father qua bearer of the symbolic law'.[10] As to the real father, Lacan stresses how 'the ravaging effects of the paternal figure are to be observed with particular frequency in cases where the father really has the function of a legislator...with too many opportunities of being in a position of undeserving, inadequacy, even of fraud, and, in short, of excluding the Name-of-the-Father from its position in the signifier',[11] and so opening the way to psychosis.
'Psychosis is...the impossible opposite of the Name of the Father, i.e., of the symbolic identification which confers on us a place in the intersubjective space...the field of common sense'.[12] For Lacan, 'the symbolic father is any agency that separated the young subject from its mother...such as "the biological father", "the step-father", and "the mother's work"....The child will have fixed some aspects of the symbolic father as proper names...the Names-of-the-Father.[13]
The Name-of-the-Father is thus the fundamental signifier which permits signification to proceed normally. It not only confers identity on the subject, naming and positioning the subject within The Symbolic Order, but also signifies the Oedipal prohibition (the "no'" of the incest taboo). If this signifier is foreclosed, in the sense of being excluded from the Symbolic Order, the result is Psychosis. 'Because psychotics have not been properly separated by names - from their motherer - they have a different relation to language, and a different way of speaking from neurotics'[14]
In On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (1957), Lacan represents the Oedipus complex in part as 'the metaphor of the Name-of-the-Father, that...substitutes this Name in the place first symbolized by the operation of the absence of the mother'[15] - meaning that all paternity involves metaphoric substitution. Lacan originally presents the 'paternal metaphor' in his Seminar La relation d'objet (1956–1957): it is the fundamental metaphor on which all signification depends (all signification is phallic). As previously stated, if the Name-of-the-Father is foreclosed, as in psychosis, there can be no paternal metaphor and hence no phallic signification.
in his late seminars, 'Lacan adopts a surprisingly new approach to the Oedipus complex and to what till then had been the key signifier, the Name-of-the-Father', dismissing them both as 'at best useless and irrelevant and, at worst, liable to lead us into significant errors'.[16]
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