Transmission
The family has been the place of symbolic inscription in society through the family name, a signifier that orders its members in a line between the past and the future. In addition to the signifier of the family name, other arrangements can be added, as is evident when the same professional line is followed between parents and children.
Lacan, in his paper on Family Complexes, distinguished the supposedly natural family from the family as a cultural phenomenon; and, he also distinguished biological inheritance from the transmission that takes place in the family as a cultural institution [1]. This unnaturalness of family and heredity introduces a difficulty with which the speaking being must contend. The complexes were defined as the symbolic apparatus regulating that which was not subject to instinctive laws, with the caveat that it was not so much the “response” to certain “vital functions” but rather their “congenital insufficiency” [2].
In this framework, transmission depended on what was said, but also on the repressed unconscious, the unsaid, which was woven into the complexes.
Thirty years later, in Note on the Child, Lacan had already established the family as the operation of the Name of the Father on the mother’s desire, an operation not without remainder. And in this family, transmission is related to what is irreducible to the order of needs, which reveals itself in the truth of each parental couple, and which is singularized in each child. The condition of transmission will be the possibility of a non-anonymous desire, in which the child’s word, can be included.
We could say that the transmission is that of a name, but that in this name, not everything is transmitted. That which does not pass with the name can take form through “interdiction” [4], or the family secret, that which is not spoken about, the secret jouissance of the parents which unites the family [5]. The intrusion and Oedipus complexes will bring this secret into play. Freud already emphasized that infantile curiosity, the investigative interest in knowing what the parents enjoy, is animated by the aggressive drive awakened by the birth of a sibling or by the sexual drive in the Oedipus Complex [6].
As a result of these operations, what is transmitted is an identification and a remainder.
Tensions and clashes
This remainder will take different forms and, especially, will reveal itself, in moments of crisis.
At the family level, we find an example in the question “whom do you love the most?”, a tension, which Lacan pointed out, is nothing but an imaginary masking of the mystery of the union or disunion of the parental couple [7], precisely.
Another way in which it manifests can be observed in the clinic, when some parents are torn between exercising their authority or avoiding any discomfort, even any trauma to the child, by showing themselves as their friend or as an affectionate teacher. Cases in which the difficulty of dealing with jouissance in times of “everything is educable” is detected.
At the social level, the tension is between moving towards the new or returning to paternalism [8] in the illusion that this was a better time, it is an illusion that forgets that the father was dispensed with, in the belief that, by eliminating the father from the equation, the problem of jouissance would disappear [9], without being able to calculate that through this path, that jouissance would be elevated to the status of agent.
Finally, the “clash of civilizations” shows that cultural assimilation comes up against irreconcilable points.
Often, the difficulty of transmission is expressed through strong oppositions and disagreements. It is about that which is irresolvable and can reveal itself in the form of tensions that might lead one to believe in the possibility of reducing it to a problem with a solution.
In the Lacanian orientation, the focus is on what is not educable and not reducible through identifications, on that which has no universal translation and will require singular arrangements.
What is not transmitted
Therefore, in the regulating operation that can be the family institution, a remainder is not transmitted. The knowledge that is supposed to each parent does not come to say how to do with jouissance. To reach this knowledge, castration must be transmitted, a margin that will allow the symptomatization of this remainder.
Throughout his teaching Lacan circled around the Oedipus Complex, ultimately showing that it is the mythical translation of the disturbance that language introduces into the living body [10]. That Oedipus reveals the castration of the father, since the father would not have knowledge of sex, was translated by Lacan with the idea that the signifier introduces a loss and with it the impossibility of absolute jouissance in the living being. The irreducible difference will pass from generation to generation, forcing each of those who inhabit it to symptomatize it, to achieve a singular arrangement.
At present
The patriarchal family has been succeeded by the diverse family which, within the framework of capitalist discourse, cannot inscribe the loss of language. Today, the orders of yesteryear are replaced by the disorder that seems to preside over family organization: open couples, polyamorous, motherhood without a father, men who can be mothers, fathers who are only genitors, or women who can keep in their wombs the child of another. The secret of jouissance has exploded, giving rise to as many conjugations as the signifier can invent. It is said that there is no secret. For the same reason, the belief is encouraged, that it is possible to educate jouissance and to communicate this knowledge without mystery or loss. What happens then with transmission?
If the patriarchal family is organized around the castration determined by the father and the mystery at play, when science and capitalism regulate the family institution [11], its organization will be under the impossibility of inscribing the loss. The consequence is that the difference introduced by jouissance will not be read in relation to a desire but by the suspicion of abuse. It will no longer be the desire expressed in the complaint: you did not teach me about jouissance, but rather it will be the denunciation of jouissance with: you abused me. It is no longer the jouissance of castration [12], but the certainty of abuse [13], that very often organizes sexuality when there is no place for the lack.
Questions
Mystery and the drives impulses animate children’s curiosity, giving rise to fictions that allow us to invent an arrangement around this lack. Today, when the prevailing discourse does not include lack, how can access to jouissance be arranged? Is the passage to the violent act an attempt at a solution? There is still a fictional margin, the feminist complaint that makes the father consist for example, seeks ways to access fiction in which abuse is a place of combat and narrative. How do these questions present themselves in our clinic?
Finally, the question must be asked of how these changes influence the practice of the analyst. Miller points out in various places that the role of the analyst is never that of a guardian of social reality [14] or public order, rather, their function is to awaken [15].
Lacan already pointed out that the decline of the father is at the foundation of psychoanalysis [16], it is not something so new. But Freud rather lamented its loss [17], whereas Lacan took it as a premise [18]. A premise that allows us to better read the consequences of this decline in the ordering of the family and jouissance, consequences that could not have been foreseen at the time. That is what we have to make do with. If we consider the function of the analyst in the place of semblant of object a, it will be a matter of being able to leave aside one’s own jouissance and one’s own knowledge, in order to make possible new accommodations and inventions.
Thus, the interpretative word of the analyst loses weight; and it becomes necessary to operate from reading, introducing the cut and the not-all, promoting a knowledge of another order, and true questions, as ways of reintroducing the loss from the operation of language that takes place there. These are rich questions that we will be able to continue talking about and debating in the pages of this blog and at the next PIPOL12 Congress.
[1] Lacan, J. “Los complejos familiares en la formación del individuo”. Otros escritos, Paidós, Buenos Aires,2012, pp. 33-96.
[2] Ibid., p. 45
[3] Ibid., p. 58
[4] Miller, J.-A., “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, The Lacanian Review 4, 2018, p 74.
[5] Freud, S., “On Infantile Sexual Theories” (1908), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume IX, London, Hogarth Press, 1961, pp. 212-213.
[6] Lacan, J. “On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis”, Écrits trans. B. Fink, New York/London: Norton, 2006, p. 482.
[7] The author gives the exemple of the emperor trying to restore the monarchy as pointed by Miller J.-A., in “Le père devenu vapeur”, Mental. Revue internationale de psychanlyse, no 48, 2023, p. 13.
[8] Lacan, J. “Introduction to the Names of the Father” in On the Names of the Father, Cambridge/Malden, Polity, 2013, pp. 55-91.
[9] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, NewYork/London: Norton, 2007, pp. 87-133.
[10] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. I take this idea from the section “The Other Side of Contemporary Life”. The title chosen by Miller for the section, based on a slip of Lacan’s tongue, directs us to the reading of Balzac’s “The Other Side of Contemporary History” which shows the birth of capitalism where the monarch no longer rules. Again, Miller will take up this idea in his article “Le père devenu vapeur”, op. cit. p. 13.
[11] Miller, J.-A. “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, op. cit. p. 77
[12] Miller J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur”, op. cit. p. 14.
[13] Ibid., p. 14
[14] Miller, J.-A. “Violent Children”, The Lacanian Review 4, 2018, p. 42
[15] Miller, J.-A. “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, op. cit., p. 77
[16] Lacan, J. “Los complejos familiares en la formación del individuo”. Otros escritos. op. cit. pp. 71-72.
[17] Miller J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur”, op. cit. p. 14.
[18] Lacan, J., “Introduction to the Names of the Father”, op. cit. pp. 55-91.
Traduction: Linda Clarke
Proofread: Inés Breton
