Abstract
What is a father? Who can be a father? Sigmund Freud had elevated the paradigm of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to a universal model of psychic organization. He gave the father a key and complex role not only in modern families but, most importantly, in family romances. Working from basic Freudian and Lacanian concepts, this chapter explores the role of the father in contemporary psychic structures, with a view of tackling trans-identified subjects, using the author’s clinical experience as a psychoanalyst.
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Notes
- 1.
See Luigi Zoja, The Father: Historical, Psychological and Cultural Perspectives, New York: Routledge, 2001.
- 2.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In: Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, tr. James and Alix Strachey. 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953–74), III: 262. The Standard Edition is here abbreviated SE.
- 3.
Freud, “On Narcissm” (1914), SE XIV: 67–102, here 78.
- 4.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan III: The Psychoses 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, tr. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), 293.
- 5.
Freud, Totem and Taboo (1913), SE XIII: vii-162.
- 6.
Russell Grigg, “From the Mechanism of Psychosis to the Universal Condition of the Symptom: On Foreclosure.” In: Dany Nobus (Ed.), Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Other Press, 1999), 48–74, here 55.
- 7.
Freud, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides): The Case of Schreber” (1911), SE XII: 1–82; here 20.
- 8.
Lacan, The Seminar III, 63.
- 9.
This section updates an earlier version of a discussion of Lacan’s “push-toward-Woman” that appeared in my Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 173–181.
- 10.
Lacan, “L’etourdit,” Scilicet 4 (1973): 5–52, here 22.
- 11.
Renée Richards, No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
- 12.
Joyce Wadler, “At Home with Renée Richards: The Lady Regrets,” New York Times (February 1, 2007); https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/garden/01renee.html (access March 2021).
- 13.
Wadler, “At Home with Renée Richards.”
- 14.
Wadler, “At Home with Renée Richards.”
- 15.
Lacan, The Seminar III, 85.
- 16.
“Jouissance” is a term does not translate easily into English. Lacan himself suggested a combination of “enjoyment” and “lust.” The word connotes a form of enjoyment not necessarily accompanied by pleasure or joy (as in “it hurts so good”). Indeed, jouissance conveys enjoyment not just with a gratifying surplus benefit but a violent, climactic bliss closer to loss, death, fragmentation, and the disruptive rapture experienced when transgressing limits.
- 17.
Lacan, Le Séminaire XIX … ou pire. Le savoir du psychanalyste (1971–72), ed. Miller (ser.) Champ Freudien. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011.
- 18.
Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, tr. Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 445–488, here 481.
- 19.
This section expands an earlier discussion of this case in my Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism (New York: Routledge, 2010), 186–9.
- 20.
Juliet Mitchell, “Sexuality, Psychoanalysis, and Social Changes.” In: Anthony Molino and Christine Ware (Eds.), Where Id Was: Challenging Normalization in Psychoanalysis (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 96–108.
- 21.
Marie-Hélène Brousse, “The-Push-to-the-Woman: A Universal in Psychosis?,” Psychoanalytical Notebooks 11 (2003), 79–98, here 83.
- 22.
Freud, “The Case of Schreber,” 36.
- 23.
Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” 472.
- 24.
Luis Izcovich, “Identification féminine et pousse-à -la-femme dans la psychose,” L’Évolution Psychiatrique 69 (2004): 291–301.
- 25.
Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis,” 476.
- 26.
Lacan’s late notion of the sinthome refers to a “symptom” that does not need to be eliminated or cured but that rather becomes a creative solution, a supplement to make up for the father’s deficiencies. See Lacan, The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XXIII, tr. Luke Thurston, ed. Miller (Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2016), 147. The sinthome is a strategy of survival that makes life livable.
- 27.
Catherine Millot, Horsexe: Essays on Transsexualism, tr. K. Hylton (New York: Autonomedia, 1990), 42. See also Millot, “Un cas de transsexualisme feminine” et “Transsexualisme et homosexualité,” Ornicar? (1981): 167–176.
- 28.
Patricia Gherovici, Please Select Your Gender (New York: Routledge, 2010), 181–182; and Gherovici, Transgender Psychoanalysis, (New York: Routledge, 2017), 13, 32–33, 90–92.
- 29.
Susan Corso, “Drag Queen Theology”; https://www.huffpost.com/entry/drag-queen-theology_b_175120 (access March 2021).
- 30.
Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 77.
- 31.
This is a modified version of a case discussed in my book Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (New York: Routledge, 2017), 112–14.
- 32.
Lacan, “La Famille” in Encyclopédie française 8, Paris: A. de Monzie, Editor 1938. Reprinted in: Lacan, “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu.” In: Lacan, Autres Écrits, ed. Miller (ser.) Champ Freudien (Paris: Seuil, 2001), 23–84.
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Gherovici, P. (2022). Does a Father Need to be a Man?. In: Weissberg, L. (eds) Psychoanalysis, Fatherhood, and the Modern Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82124-1_8
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