ABSTRACT
The quest for the father is an ancient and archetypal theme that symbolically tells both society and the individual that a father is an always continuing effort that never reaches a definitive end. The quest contains an unconscious residue of phylogenetic memory, and retells the story of the father's always precarious status. Both the Old and New Testaments can also be seen as an endless search for the father, who is found only to be lost once again; and they present human history itself as a vain and tormented attempt to give visibility to his necessarily invisible structure. The search for the father is not only a personal problem: it's a torment for the whole of society, which attempts to make the fathers prevail over the males of the pack. The reasons for the search for the father don't simply lie in his frequently being at a distance from his child, at work or at war, periodically or forever.
