The child now occupies the function of residue – the remainder of the sexual non-rapport between the parents. Residue indicates the position of object a that the child occupies in the construction of the family, as well as the irreducible dimension of this function, between a waste object and a precious object. This echoes J.-A. Miller’s text [1], in which he defines the family in terms of the Name-of the-Father, the Mother’s Desire and the objet a.
In recent decades, France has seen a significant increase in the number of single-parent families. In 1990, they accounted for 12% of all families. By 2023, they will account for a quarter of all French families. Single-parent families consist mostly of a mother living with her children.
Marcela Iacub, in her essay The End of the Couple [2], points out that the emphasis on romantic love has transformed the social relationship of the conjugal bond: individuals who become couples no longer exchange positions and assets as they used to.
Over the course of the 21st century, marriage has undergone a profound transformation in terms of its social, religious and legal meanings. At the beginning of the century, it was still a traditional institution with a social and religious contract, whose function was to ensure the transmission of property, legitimise children, and guarantee social stability. Divorce was legal (1884), but strongly disapproved of. It remained an exception. After the Second World War, the decline of religion and the emancipation of women, contributed to the transformation of roles within marriage. The rise of personal fulfilment and love, together with the 1975 divorce reform in France, led to a considerable increase in the number of divorces.
M. Iacub notes that, in recent years, the State has given prioritised to protecting the relationship between mother and child, while at the same time strengthening it, with other relationships always appearing suspect. In her view, this is a dissociative function of the social bond that the State supports in its actions: whereas in the past the family was centred on marriage and therefore on the couple, it is now centred on the mother-child bond. The father, who became the mother’s companion, is now an uncertain and replaceable secondary figure. His role is to enable his partner to carry out her motherhood thanks to his financial and emotional contribution.
According to this author, sexual and psychological violence is already more severely punished when it occurs within a couple, rather than outside it. These new provisions have further weakened the couple, which is now seen as a place of danger – especially for women who are victimised by financial dependence and physical vulnerability. Whereas in the past the couple had been rather impervious to the law, it has now become the place where law intervenes the most. This process is the result of a change in the family system that emerged from Napoleon’s codifications; more specifically, a change in the status of sexuality outside marriage.
Analysing the effects of May ’68 on families, M. Iacub concludes that it is not the end of the family that today’s families are often single-parent families, but that rather it is the end of the conjugal bond that once united those who occupied the role of father and mother. There is a dissociation between the family and the conjugo. The family is no longer based on the pater familias or the conjugal bond, but solely on the mother’s bond with her children,. which the author deplores as yet another form of slavery for women, who find themselves reduced to being mothers, and whose sexuality is therefore very limited. She advocates a utopian Reichian solution, in which children would be cared for by professionals, freeing mothers to lead their lives as women.
It’s a point of view that, despite its excesses, has its interesting angles and allows us to perceive in a different manner the evolution of the family. However, it does not yet lead us to the evaporation of the mother that J.-A. Miller spoke of. It’s more a question here of the ousting of the woman in favour of the mother and her children.
So how are we to understand this ‘‘evaporation of the mother’’, which has taken the same path as that of the father who preceded it?
First of all, we can see that the mother has also become a function in J.-A. Miller’s new definition of the family.
If Alexandre Stevens could still ask the question of the maternal function in 2000 [3], today the answer is obvious. Insofar as the mother has also become a signifier that anyone can embody, a signifier under which any character can come to lodge – she has therefore become a function: that of the Mother’s Desire. A man can occupy it, either embodying the Mother’s Desire in a heterosexual couple or embodying it in a homosexual couple. A woman other than the mother can also occupy it: an adoptive mother, a woman in a homosexual couple who is not the one who gave birth to the child, or any other person who cares for the child with a particular desire.
Let’s add that the extraordinary development of medicine has made the mother herself uncertain, since egg donation means that you can become pregnant with an embryo that has nothing to do genetically with you; or that is made up of your sister’s egg and your husband’s sperm and that it is possible to adopt a child that is genetically yours but was carried by another woman, etc.
After being real, the mother herself has become a semblance. The only real left is the child itself.
If there is a defamiliarisation of society – or rather an extremely varied refamiliarisation – it is quite different from the defamiliarisation envisaged today on the basis of the psychoanalytic clinic. During the crisis of the pass in 2021, J.-A. Miller made the following criticism of the testimonies of the AEs: they were still far too imbued with family history and bore witness to something that had not happened. The idea was that, at the end of an analysis and of disidentification, the little story should give way to the logic of the case, which only the analysand himself can really account for.
As early as Seminar xx [4], the lalangue – which is the unconscious itself – is initiated by the long analytic journey: like a foreign language, it defamiliarises the subject from his history and the jouissance attached to it.
[1] Miller J.-A., “ Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, The Lacanian Review 4, 2018, pp.73-77.
[2] Cf. Iacub M., La fin du couple, Paris, Stock, 2016.
[3] Stevens A., « Y-a-t’il une fonction maternelle ? », available online.
[4 ] Cf. Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX, Encore, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. Bruce Fink, New York/London: Norton, 1998.
Translated by: Dana Tor Zilberstein
Proofreading by: Manuela Rabesahala
