With a week to go before plunging into ‘‘Family and its discontents’’, the texts are abounding. The acceleration of productions on the road to the congress could make one’s head spin, even give vertigo… In tune with contemporary language, we could say that the path is itself ‘‘discontenting’’ [malaisant].
Indeed, in the words of the younger generation, discontent permeates all domains, to the point where it has become an adjective. ‘‘Discontenting’’ is used in all sorts of contexts, and has even found its way into dictionaries.
In the words of many of the people who come into our consulting rooms and institutions, it is less a question of discontent in the family than of the family causing their discontent. Embarrassing, cumbersome, traumatic, violent: the family, ‘‘discontenting’’!
So let us resume our oriented path, strewn with scattered, disparate pebbles that lead, as in the famous tale, to the parental home and what nestles there.
Here’s a brief overview of each pebble in this Famil. From Gide’s Unwanted to lalangue, Felix Rueda Soler examines the notion of transmission and the paths it takes, laden with the desire or non-desire of the parents towards the child.
In the Fritzl case, no “jouissance of substitution” [1]. Fatiha Sarah Belghomari highlights a family’s slide into the pure real, where the father establishes jouissance in the place of the master signifier.
In his reading of the film Little Miss Sunshine, Marco Moretti goes on to show how – for an entire family – the failure of the Ideal allows the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic and therefore access to desire.
Through the film La vita accanto, Giuseppe Spatoliatore proposes an alternative outcome that would not go as far as a passage à l’acte. How can one trace a new rim to a hole in the real?
A little further on, a few more pebbles. Fernando Sánchez Lanz develops the idea of shifting the impossible sexual relation to the natural imaginary mother-child relationship. At risk of the mother’s evaporation.
When family transmission is doubled by a hereditary disease, how can one avoid reducing the child to the status of a sick being, an object trapped in the maternal fantasy? Gabriela Medín unfolds a possible answer.
Finally, Françoise Labridy highlights the way in which Perrine Le Querrec’s writing maintains ‘‘affiliation with the signifier of the intolerable and unspeakable’’ included in humanity.
In today’s language, the counterpart of ‘‘discontenting’’ is ‘‘satisfying’’ – and not ‘‘enjoyable’’[jouissif]! I hope that reading this Famil will bring you more satisfaction than discontent.
[1] Cf. Miller, J.-A., “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, The Lacanian Review 4, 2018.
Translation: Robyn Adler
Proofreading: Polina Agapaki
