Lacan quoted Durkheim on the “contraction of the family institution” [1] ranging from the ancient Roman gens to the family centred on patria potestas to the “conjugal family” with mother, father and children. Modern families often go beyond the canonical organisation into multi-parent families, rainbow families, single-parent families.
Occasionally we are contacted by couples describing a radical marital crisis, in the event of separation or divorce, who ask for counselling about their relationships in relation to the situation. These are parents of an autistic child, a teenager with a major eating disorder, a young person who repeats psychiatric admissions, a drug addict who does not talk and escapes all clinical treatment: in short, people who do not speak or only in a holophrastic, laconic, monosyllabic manner.
The marital couple no longer functions, but there remains a demand for support from the parental couple. Faced with children who lack, at least at a certain moment, of the kind of social bonding that is the succour received from “an established discourse” [2], this opportunity to talk offered to parents constitutes a residual space for a discourse in the family, even where the loving couple have broken up.
Some of these consultations quickly evolve into individual analytical treatments for one or both of the former spouses; we therefore consider them preliminary to the analytical experience, given that that we always analyse from the position of children rather than parents. At other times, when it is really difficult to put these children into the analytical work , instead a more prolonged analytic work takes place with the couple . It is sometimes characterised by a series of tranches at times of acute family dynamics; in these cases we do not have a crossing of the fantasy, an opening of the unconscious, a work on dreams or lapses: we remain in a different dimension from that of pure psychoanalysis, although the analytical orientation is valuable as a reading of these complexities. In such circumstances, the residual bond of the parental couple becomes an important element to work indirectly on the Other of a subject lacking in speech, desire and sometimes love. “It takes three to love, not just two” [3]; the function of the third is embodied by the psychoanalytically oriented clinician who restarts the family dialogue in these encounters.
[1] Lacan, J., “Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l’individu”, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 27. Translated by the author.
[2] Lacan, J., “L’étourdit”, Autres écrits, Paris, Seuil, 2001, p. 474. Translated by the author.
[3] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. B. Fink, Maldon/Cambridge: Polity, 2015, p. 132.
