DECLINE OF THE PATERNAL FUNCTION (PSYCHOANALYSIS AND POLITICS OF THE FAMILY PT. 2) (w/ Daniel Tutt)

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[O.G.Rose.Michelle.and.Daniel]

Excellent discussion, and I really appreciated Tutt's emphasis on the need to approach family as a detective versus seek to oppose it. If we set ourselves for a conflict with the Paternal Function, that seems to be an arrangement for failure, and similarly if we ignore the Paternal Function, that also seems like a massive mistake, as often turns out to be the case. I also really appreciated the discussion on the new communities forming online, the challenges with running and organizing them, and the like. A very fruitful discussion all around!

[studham]

First time hearing about Lacan's 3 gen theory - so fascinating, personally & theoretically. Love how these convo's flourish so organically from topic to topic

[cleo]

In relation to the three generations, there is a body of work on this called Constellation work which allows you to access in some way those previous generations through visiualzation and play. And worth noting that the void beyond three generations is an artefact of modernism and perhaps of Christian culture. (Jesus not big on ancestor worship.) Most cultures cultivate, not without difficulty, longer generational memories over at least the famous seven generations. All of this is part of the therapeutic of shamanism, by the way, in the three lineages I have studied, especially in China and Africa.

[MarceloDali]

It is so strange the way Lacan is interpreted in this interview, I could make a list of all the misapprehensions of Lacan's work, but I'll just point out to some of them (I'll try to be brief)... To begin with, it seems that Lacan is taken as agreeing with Freud in many points, when actually Lacan criticizes and subverts many of Freud's concepts and ideas, you just need read his final public delivery in Caracas in 1980, where he makes a very important and heavy critique of Freud's and his followers's teachings (ironically, this is also the "seminar" where he utters his famous phrase "It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish, I am a Freudian", just seconds before he tears Freud's ideas apart, but people seem to just pay attention and hold in memory this phrase, rather than what he says right after). Second, in analysis, we Lacanian analysts do NOT analyze generations or trauma in itself, the analysand comes with some sort of knowledge (savoir) of reality (being it familial reality, about himself, etc.), but which is NOT truth, so the analyst's position is to interrogate this knowledge, interpret it, etc. to extract truth. Aditionally, we must remember that in Lacan, times are logical, not chronological; thus, it's not a phenomenological interpretion, but a strictly logical one. What happens within the family or through generations is fiction. Third, it sounds like you're considering the subject as a someone or something, in Lacan the subject doesn't have a substance, remember that "a signifier represents the subjet for another signifier". Fourth, the father does NOT introduce the child to language, language precedes any structure and subjectivity, we are born into language, our parents talk about us, have given us a name, have their own desire pointed towards us since before we're born, we are born into language, we need no introducton to it. This leads me to the fifth and final point: at 20:28, not only the paternal function doesn't rely on a "male logic", but it's the maternal function which introduces the paternal function, meaning that for Lacan, the father is NOT only not first (as it is for Freud), but rather needs to be introduced by the mother, who IS first. If the maternal function fails to introduce said paternal function, then the paternal function is forclosed, which results in a psychotic structure. This last point takes me back to the first one: Lacan does not agree with Freud, Lacan heavily criticizes all of Freud's concepts and ideas, Lacan is not a 2nd Freud, or someone who continues or completes Freud's thought, but rather subverts it.