Father’s Day[1]

Clinical work with children shows us, despite changing times, a persistence of family neurosis:  the same theater is played out for all even for children accompanied by two mothers… or two fathers. And the adult patients, as Charles Melman would say, express their feelings of discomfort or frustration, even violence, when confronted to this dissymmetry that is nevertheless structural of a hierarchical relation.

Families who consult psychologists and psychoanalyst are in the same state of confusion, as are the teams of professionals who talk about it in supervision. As are some politicians, when they talk about it. There you have it, the same difficulty in creating an effective place of authority; and instead, we are left with a place of abuse or a place for cronies and lapdogs. Because the first is prohibited – fortunately and necessarily — the second is becoming widespread.

It’s the Day of equals[2]! And freed from the primal pleasure-seeking father of the horde, we would be in fraternity, all equal. Orwell pointed out, however, in 1945, that there were some who were more equal than others… In other words, behind this rhetorical pirouette, he showed the illusion of a horizontal, acephalous logic.

However, it is rather the acephallus[3], as Lacan once said, which would be feared. Non-vectorized, without symbolic inscription and therefore without legitimacy, the one who holds the wheel will have seized it by violence – at the risk of returning to archaic forms of the master, confusing the function and the person.

Are psychoanalysts nostalgic, as they are sometimes accused of being? Reactionaries declaiming a desperate “it was better before”? Not at all. Beyond the clinical observations that they make on a daily basis, they cannot afford the naivety or the complacency of believing that they are definitively vaccinated: they know that they are plunged in the same social, fueled by a twisted discourse – the capitalist one – which lurks and seduces them (take into consideration, for example, the added value, which sits at our tables, at our screens). With what effects on transference? A fall out of love?

The space of the psychoanalytical session, and perhaps that of psychoanalytical teaching, remains a rare place where the subject is invited to become an adult, and therefore consequential. But this is only possible, as you will have understood, in a dissymmetrical structure, which is no longer necessarily that of a patriarchy now disavowed.

Omar Guerrero

[1] The original title “La fête des pairs” is translated into English as Father’s Day. However, a more literal translation would be Peer’s Day.

[2] Again, the original text plays on the words father [père] and peer [pair] being homophones.

[3] Lacan used the neologism “Assez phalle”.