The family receives its permanence from its function : constitutive of the subject. However, it is undergoing profound changes, which, in their multiplicity, distance it in a decisive manner from any idea of “natural” anchoring.
It is in fact the discourse of science, which was transmitted in the Enlightenment, then that of capitalism [1], which gradually affected the forms of the family.
More recently, advances in biology resulted in the detachment of childbirth from the formation of a couple. At the same time, the roles of father and mother have been profoundly shaken, particularly in that the father no longer falls within this “uncertain” relationship that Freud underlined [2], which established a regime of supposition and engaged in the child the question of belief, and therefore truth. [3] Today, as changes in the language indicate, we are talking about parenthood.
However, if science increasingly strips away the fictional part of familial constructions, the family does not dissolve, it persists through ever more diverse and flexible montages. What is the backbone of its resistance to these upheavals ? Its function of residue, as Jacques Lacan calls it in his Note on the Child. [4] The reason for it is that at its heart lies a real, that of non-sexual relation. Each family montage responds to this impossible, symptomatically ; it is from the way those who are the parents arrange it, that the subject is constructed.
The phallic hierarchy, which had constituted a form of a response to the sexual difference for a long time, has now become outdated, under the egalitarian pressure specific to our contemporary societies. However, the redefinition of the roles of father and mother which follows cannot make us forget Lacan’s key contribution : the mother is a woman and, what is decisive for the child, for the child’s symptoms, and beyond that for the clinic of any subject, is feminine sexuality with penisneid as its pivot. [5]
Thus, the way in which the mother will accommodate her desire, how she will preserve (or not) the not-all of feminine desire [6], that is to say, how she will support the lack that desire is based on, accounts for the position that the child will be able to occupy.
But the relationship to the not-all, which makes up the structure of feminine desire also applies to those who will occupy the father function, and their consent to “this other being Other, that is to say, desiring outside of oneself”. [7]
The stake for the family is therefore that of a transmission – irreducible as Lacan specifies – that is to say a transmission that is not reduced neither to knowledge nor to the satisfaction of needs, but which is constitutive for the subject. It is due to a desire that is not anonymous.
It will be played out according to the way in which desire, love and jouissance have found a way for those who occupy the function of parents.
The family and the institution
It so happens that the symptoms presented by a child lead his parents to contact an institution. It so happens that these parents then ask for help as parents.
The structural yardsticks of Lacanian oriented psychoanalysis make it possible to welcome them without creating the illusion of a family ideal, a dimension which haunts every institution insofar as it is part of the master’s discourse, and at the same time disqualifies parents.
The Note on the child [8] gives us precise indications for initiating an encounter with that which constitutes a symptom in the family. Noticeably, it makes it possible to situate the position of the child, whether in relation to the symptomatic dimension in the family couple or to the mother’s fantasy.
If the first case is the most open – and also the most complex – to our interventions, it is because a dialectic of signifiers can introduce the question of the position of the child as representative of the truth of the family couple.
On the other hand, the second touches the place of the object of the maternal fantasy to which the child is pushed and, in this case, the articulation is reduced considerably, explains Lacan : the child “becomes the “object” of the mother and has no more function than to reveal the truth of this object”. [9] What is at stake for the interventions is to loosen this “phantasmatic grip” and to present via the institutional device, or that of the clinic, another modality of the Other [10], an uncompleted Other whose jouissance is skinned-off, an Other which is not knowing everything.
An Other who is taught by what the child presents as responses to these modalities of desire and jouissance of the Other, who welcomes them as attempts to separate from them.
If the parents embody the primordial Other for their child – who can also be an adolescent or an adult – they are no less constrained by their own phantasmatic prism, which orders their relationship to the world. Re-educating, correcting, protecting, thwarting a dramatic destiny, sometimes imposes itself as a task that falls upon them, without any possible concession.
Welcoming the parents [11], introducing the notion of the real that emerges from their child’s difficulties as a dimension in excess, both for them and for their child, opening a place where they can express its manifestations, taking into account the knowledge that they themselves have developed about their child, contributes to establishing them as possible partners, in the face of the opacity of the jouissance that affects the family. The demands that drive their actions can be alleviated.
Continuing a conversation with parents about the symptoms, difficulties, improvements encountered, influencing a designation, proposing others, valuing a particular find, can loosen the stranglehold that binds the child and the parent.
The family today
The power of science to dismantle semblances increasingly scratches family fictions; the father had evaporated, and the mother will not be left unscathed, J.-A. Miller [12] tells us; therefore, what can we learn from the multiple forms that the new family arrangements take; if we consider them as responses to this real that is included in the necessary transmission which establishes the family, can we grasp the consequences in the subjectivity of our time ?
[1] Miller J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur”, Mental, no 48, november 2023, p. 14.
[2] Freud, S., “Family Romances” (1909), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX, London: Hogarth Press, 1906-1908, p. 239.
[3] Leguil F., “Un lien qui sépare”, La petite girafe, no 24, september 2006, p. 13.
[4] Lacan J., “Note sur l’enfant”, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 373.
[5] Miller J.-A., “L’Orientation lacanienne. Donc”, annual course delivered within the framework of the Department of Psychoanalysis, The University of Paris VIII, lesson of 26 January 1994, inédit.
[6] Miller J.-A., “L’enfant et l’objet”, La petite girafe, no 18, december 2003, p. 9.
[7] Cf. ibid., p. 10.
[8] Lacan J., op. cit.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Zenoni A., “Traitement de l’Autre”, Préliminaire, no 3, 1991, p. 111.
[11] Antenne 110, “Pas sans les parents”, Préliminaire, no 13, 2001, p. 25.
[12] Miller J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur”, op cit, p. 16.
Translation : Dana Tor Zilberstein
Proofreading : Manuela Rabesahala