Name of the father

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In the theory of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan , the name-of-the-father ( French: Nom-du-Père ) is a signifier that guarantees the consistency of the laws of symbolic order . According to Lacan, every law always speaks “in the name of the father” and owes its authority to him .

When the term first appeared in Lacan's work in the 1950s (at that time still lowercase), it denoted the prohibitive role played by the father, who imposed the incest taboo in the Oedipus complex and enforced it with the threat of castration . The term nom du père therefore plays with the homophone non du père (French for “no of the father”).

In Seminar III: The Psychoses (1955–56), Lacan capitalized the term for the first time and provided it with hyphens; at the same time he specifies and generalizes it in the sense of a “ master's signifier ”. The name-of-the-father now becomes the “fundamental signifier”, which fulfills a constitutive function in relation to the subject, gives it identity , and enables it to take a permanent place in the symbolic order (of the family and society). The “rejection” of this signifier from the symbolic order of the subject leads, according to Lacan, to psychosis .

The term “name of the father” is not to be taken literally. The bearer of the oedipal no and the law does not necessarily have to be the real father , it is more a question of the paternal function, the symbolic father, whose structural place is also occupied by other persons (mother, siblings, educators) or institutions ( Teachers, judges, police officers, priests, political and religious leaders, psychoanalysts, God, but also more generally: social norms , the great other ). Lacan therefore often speaks of the father's name in the plural. Jacques-Alain Miller writes : “The father has no proper name. This is not a figure, this is a function. The father has as many names as they [, ie the function,] the bearer has. "

Also, the famous castration threat, which is uttered in the father's name, is not to be understood literally as a father's utter threat to castrate his child . According to Lacan, it is the child himself who develops this imagination in order to explain the absence of a female penis . Likewise, the incest taboo does not have to be explicitly pronounced, but arises indirectly from the rejection of the child's desire by the desired person.

See also

literature

  • Jacques Lacan: Seminar III. The Psychoses (1955–56). Quadriga, Weinheim and Berlin 1997
  • Jacques Lacan: On a Question Preceding Any Treatment of Psychosis (1958). In: Ders .: Schriften II. Walter-Verlag, Olten 1975, pp. 61–117 (on the rejection of the father's name as the cause of psychosis)
  • Jacques Lacan: name-of-father . Turia + Kant, Vienna 2006, ISBN 3851324501
  • Dylan Evans: Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis . Turia + Kant, Vienna 2002
  • Erik Porge: Les noms du père chez Jacques Lacan. Ponctuations et problematiques. Érès, Toulouse 2013 (with a new foreword to the paperback edition, the first edition appeared in 1997)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michel Foucault , 1962 in the journal Critique on Hölderlin et la question du père by Jean Laplanche , 1961
  2. ^ Evans, Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis , p. 197
  3. ↑ Lacan: Name-of-the-father , blurb