Concept
Name-of-the-Father
In Lacan's teaching, the signifier of the symbolic father. It is neither the real father nor his image, but the function of law and prohibition that separates the child from the mother and anchors the subject in the symbolic order; the French nom ('name') puns on non ('no'). Lacan first named it in the Rome discourse of 1953, as the support of the symbolic function. In the 1958 essay on the treatment of psychosis he wrote it as the paternal metaphor: the Name-of-the-Father takes the place of the mother's desire, and this substitution produces the phallic signification. He held that its foreclosure from the place of the Other, and the failure of the metaphor that follows, is the essential condition of psychosis and what sets psychosis apart from neurosis. From 1963 he spoke of the Names-of-the-Father in the plural.
Development
1953
introduced by Jacques Lacan
In the Rome discourse of 1953, Lacan names the father's name as the support of the symbolic function, which identifies the father with the law. In 1958 he develops it as the paternal metaphor.
In Écrits (1966)
Relations
- 1953 introduced by Jacques Lacan
In the Rome discourse of 1953, Lacan names the father's name as the support of the symbolic function, which identifies the father with the law. In 1958 he develops it as the paternal metaphor.
- 1958 derives from Metaphor
In his 1958 essay on psychosis, Lacan casts the Name-of-the-Father in the form of his metaphor: it substitutes for the mother's desire and so produces the phallic signification. Psychosis follows when this signifier is foreclosed and the paternal metaphor fails.
Works
- 1966
Lacan's collected papers, published by Éditions du Seuil in 1966: a volume of some nine hundred pages gathering articles and essays written over three decades, from 1936 to 1966. It includes the text on the mirror stage given at Zurich in 1949; the Rome discourse of 1953, 'The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis', which has been called the founding manifesto of Lacanianism; 'The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious' (1957); and the 1958 essay on the treatment of psychosis. Across these papers Lacan pursues his return to Freud by way of structural linguistics, reading the unconscious as structured like a language, and turns against the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein. The book became a bestseller in France and made Lacan known as 'the French Freud', while also fixing his reputation for difficulty. Its first complete English translation, by Bruce Fink with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, was published by W. W. Norton in 2006.
See also
People
References
- Écrits1966Evidence for a relation