“The family itself is dignified and respectable only insofar as it can be a place where everyone can find space for their residual particularity.” [1]
Through the articles in this issue, you will discover how, within the family, space may or may not be found for particularity.
What a time to die, the long-awaited weekend when the family is getting together! In the film Casa en flames, which Irene Domínguez tells us about, Montse finds her mother dead. In order for the family reunion to take place, she hides the death from everyone. Keeping the family together… but at what cost? It is in the constitutive failure of the family that each subject can find the material to invent themselves, starting from their symptom. Despite everything, there remains something around the idea of belonging (a name, a mark) that binds people together; the family remains a refuge.
Jean-François Lebrun talks to us about Mohammad Rasoulof’s film The Seed of the Sacred Fig, set against the backdrop of the assassination of Mahsa Amini [2]. For Najmeh, the mother, the most important thing was to keep the family together. The father, an investigating judge in the revolutionary court, hands down summary death sentences. During a family meal, the daughters stand up to the man who has become a father of terror. The mother realizes what a monster her husband has become, as he is caught up in the spiral of violence of power, and she too objects. How can they each retain their individuality, and how can life regain momentum? What will the filmmaker choose when jouissance is in control and crushes all individuality?
Camilo Ramirez shares his reading of Vanessa Springora’s latest book, Patronyme. It is through writing that V. Springora confronts the failure of the Name-of-the-Father in her family, relying on her father’s name, the only thing that connects her to him. Upon his death, a desire to decipher the secret behind this distorted name will shed a harsh light on the most opaque aspects of family subjectivity over three generations. The family name (patronyme) becomes a material to be invented.
There are cases where an institution other than the family is necessary. How does this institution support the path to the subject’s singularity? From there, Peter Decuyper asks: is it up to the clinician to find support in the family bond, to follow the path of the family, or, on the contrary, to distance themselves from it?
The text by Antonio Di Ciaccia that opens this newsletter reminds us of the two fundamental elements of the family as the first institution. On the one hand, its function is to inscribe every human being in the symbolic, concomitant with a limitation of jouissance, singularly valid for each individual; on the other hand, its role is essential in the transmission of culture. Here too, beyond the universal, we find the particular that concerns the way in which the symbolic is transmitted.
[1] Laurent, É., “Institution du fantasme, fantasmes de l’institution”, Les Feuillets psychanalytiques du Courtil, no 4, 1992, p. 20.
[2] Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian student of Kurdish origin, was arrested by the Iranian morality police for “wearing inappropriate clothing” on September 13, 2022, and died three days later.
Translated by Alasdair Duncan
Proofread by Susan McFeely
