Making family is the most fashionable syntagm for talking about the family nowadays. It links to other signifiers falling within the field of action: deconstruction, construction and reconstruction. These are also taken up in the media and at a conceptual level with increasing variations such as the factory of… found in many books. In those expressions that translate the current discontents of our civilisation, the act is relative to the subject of the will, to the autonomous citizen, as the register of unconscious causality is tending to disappear. We move from the family symptom to the dysfunctional family that the dys era brings. However, for humans, the relationship with action always implies a signifying causality: the act as a decision is at the centre of the action. What does not fit – the mismatch, the lack – is objectified and taken care of by society; what happens on the world scene seems removed from the family dimension.
In this syntagm, Making family, we notice the disappearance of the indefinite article, a. One doesn’t make a family, one doesn’t build a family, one doesn’t belong to a family, one makes family. Parentality, a recent term, comes here to designate all the ways of being and living the fact of being a parent. Each one is referred back to their essential identity as a parent, the signifier parent replacing those of father and mother. Thus, after “the evaporation of the father,” [1] Jacques-Alain Miller predicts the evaporation of the mother – the era of the Ones-all-alone is under way.
At the same time, we need to preserve other forms of bond that are less obvious. As Jacques-Alain Miller points out, the bio-socio-legal transformations of the modern family (sperm storage, oocyte freezing, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilisation), as well as broken families, recomposed in a veritable kaleidoscope, lead to “de-realising the status of kinship” [2]. De-realisation is a significant concept. Lacan denounced de-realisation of the crime nestled in theoretical concepts that certain post-Freudians psychoanalysts were applying to crimes. He thereby demonstrated that the criminal fades there as an incarnated being, as a being of jouissance, behind the theory. Parentality became a theoretical concept in its turn, giving a narcissistic coloration to parents while any metaphor about having is eliminated in favour of an essentialisation.
One would be tempted to see in this reorganisation a place for the child and his recognition as a subject. But what is the flip side of this? Are children any less “objects” when they are considered as also making family from a very early age? We are thinking here about the child as a One-all-alone, sometimes the real object of abuse and incest, sometimes an adult to whom the parent openly confides the intimacy of his or her sexual life, or sometimes again the child struggling with the madness of one or other parent, brother or sister, without any knowledge to relieve or protect him from it. It is, in the end, His Majesty the child, identical and transparent to himself, whose least saying is taken as truth and immediately returned to him in reality. To take what is said at face value is not to offer oneself to the exchange, not to want to make symptom. This denial, this refusal of the symptom, is the push-to-enjoy peculiar to our modern times and is nothing other than a ferocious superego: that of having to solve the impasses of existence alone and only receiving a way of doing things by way of help and support, that is to say a kind of technical help.
This push to the illusion of uniquely personal self-realisation or of egalitarian ratio is likely to de-realise, in that the relationship to the object a, that is, the asocial part of each one, fades away. It is that the child faces the unlimited, which characterises debasement – in the absence of castration – which is none other than the other side of love, its side of jouissance. One can think this all the more because we find in the clinic, in the form of “inmixing” [3] of jouissances,what is now called toxic bond. In the places of Lacanian-oriented treatment and care, appeals for analysis continue to grow. Indeed, a more accurate interpretation is expected, one that doesn’t dehumanise, one within which the subject regains his place and treats his own real, his enjoyment, his singularity. Hence one can have the chance to find a way out of the discontent other than the passage to the act.
In such a context, where the need to extract oneself and to be recognised in order to exist is essential, let us not neglect the growing importance of public speaking: testimonies, life stories, autobiographies. In the form of acting, they answer the call of the media and of public opinion to a voyeurism which could perhaps be a desire to know. To know what? What remains of parochialism, abuse, incest, secrets, that is to say all the dramas, madnesses, debasements that shaped the discontent of their own family. A discontent that one doesn’t know how to talk about anymore because the master’s discourse gags it; a discontent that is, by definition, undefinable. A discontent that only reveals itself through the other, the social alter ego. The status, the profession, even that of an influencer, pretty much indicates the place of substitution of bonds which the family of the parental Ones struggles to offer.
Lastly, the imaginary bonds are weak. They break and fail in the passage to the act, which always involves going beyond the limits of speech. The perplexed subject, without recourse, disappears as a subject in the act where he precipitates and condenses into an object. Wild attempt to grasp in the real the cause that evades itself, the feeling of living that failed to be written, or the sexual signification which creates not a mystery but an enigma, where what is unspeakable cannot find a place.
The family is modified, but the ineradicable bit of the bond remains; it is “tied by a secret […] a secret about jouissance”. “[The] family has its origin in the misunderstanding, in the non-encounter, in the disappointment, in sexual abuse or in crime” [4]. The family nucleus was and still is where one learns to speak, where one learns the maternal tongue, where one enters, through the consequence of jouissance, into a discourse, the one that the family supports. The marks of the modes of jouissance of an era are enrolled and transmitted within it. Madness, dramas, ravages, abuses, crimes, perversions have always inhabited the heart of families. Unknown, repressed, protected, hidden, denounced or revealed, they participate in the drama of each parlêtre, each speaking being.
This is why it is up to the analyst to rise to Lacan’s challenge: “to meet at its horizon the subjectivity of his time” [5]. He will do so by maintaining the credit given to the spoken word and its “truth effects” where the transference is knotted. “According to Freud, transference marks the adoption of the analyst by the subject – the analyst enters, if I may say so, into the family, and is given the authority of what was that of the father or of the mother, the authority of what we will name the primordial Other” [6]. Today, the primordial Other is there in its minimal form, the minimal form of the necessary dissymmetry: le père, l’impair, l’Un-père remains the one that impresses (é-pate) [7]. The one who wows us (é-pater) touches us, touches the body while leaving some room for affect and desire. Wowing (épater) to make family.
The forthcoming texts will concern family madnesses, dramas, abuses, instances of incest, and crimes as they occur in the context presented here and testify to the refusal of the symptom and its return in the real.
[1] Miller J.-A., “Le père devenu vapeur”, Mental, no 48, November 2023, p. 13.
[2] Ibid., p. 16.
[3] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book iii, The Psychoses, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. R. Grigg, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 193.
[4] Miller J.-A., “Affairs of the Family in the Unconscious”, trans. F.-C. Baitinger and A. Khan, The Lacanian Review 4, 2018, p. 74.
[5] Lacan J., “Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis”, Écrits, trans. B. Fink, London and New York, Norton, 2006, p. 264.
[6] Miller J.-A., “Au commencement était le transfert”, Ornicar ?, no 58, Paris, Navarin, 2024, p. 193.
[7] Lacan J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book xix, …or Worse, ed. J.-A. Miller, trans. A.R. Price, 2018, p. 184.
Translation: Manuela Rabesahala
