lecker schmecker

Feb. 11, 2012 at 7:25pm with 10 notes

XXIII. The moral goals of psychoanalysis

That ought to put you on the right track. In a famous article called “Mourning an Melancholia,” Freud also says that the work of mourning is applied to an incorporated object, to an object which for one reason or another one is not particularly fond of. As far as the loved object that we make such a fuss about in our mourning is concerned, we do not, in fact, simply sing its praises, if only because of the lousy trick it played on us by leaving us. Thus, if we are sufficiently cruel to ourselves to incorporate the father, it is perhaps because we have a lot to reproach this father with.

It is here that the distinctions I presented to you last year may prove useful. Castration, frustration, and privation are not the same thing. If frustration properly belongs to the symbolic mother, he who is responsible for castration, according to Freud, is the real father, and as far as privation is concerned, it’s the imaginary father. Let us try to understand the function of each of these elements at the moment of decline of the Oedipus complex and of the formation of the superego. Perhaps that will shed a little light, and we won’t have the impression of reading two different lines at the same time when we take account of the castrating father, on the one hand, and the father as origin of the superego, on the other. This distinction is basic to everything Freud articulated, and in particular to the question of castration once he began to spell it out—the phenomenon is indeed a stupefying one since it is a notion that had never even been broached before him.

The real father, Freud tells us, is a castrating father. In what way? Through his presence as real father who effectively occupies that person with whom the child is in a state of rivalry, namely, the mother. Whether or not that is the case in experience, in theory there is no doubt about it: the real father is elevated to the rank of Great Fucker—though not, believe me, in the face of the Eternal, which isn’t even around to count the number of times. Yet doesn’t this real and mythical father fade at the moment of the decline of the Oedipus complex into the one whom the child may easily have already discovered at the relatively advanced age of five years old, namely, the imaginary father, the father who has fucked the kid up.

Isn’t that what the theoreticians of analytical experience say as they mumble away? And doesn’t one find the point of difference there? Isn’t it in connection with the experience of privation the small child undergoes—not because he is small but because he is human—in connection with what the child experiences as privation, that the mourning for the imaginary father is forged?—that is a mourning for someone who would really be someone. The perpetual reproach that is born at that moment, in a way that is more or less definitive and well-formed depending on the individual case, remains fundamental in the structure of the subject. It is this imaginary father and not the real one which is the basis of the providential image of God. And the function of the superego in the end, from its final point of view, is hatred for Go, the reproach that God has handled things so badly.

-Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 307-8.