ABSTRACT
Between Paternal and Maternal: A New Terrain of Investigation In The Myth of Motherhood, Elisabeth Badinter (1981) notes: ‘Whoever controls the child and has him in his camp can expect to win out whenever society’s interests are identified with the child’s’ (Badinter, 1981: 4). In a patriarchy, this control rests with the father, which as Clément noted, is symptomatised in strong rites of passage. In Clément’s views, rituals aim to reassure the father as to the child’s true paternal lineage, giving the name of the father to the child for example. But other rituals also assert the father’s claim upon the child. Schooling for instance rests upon a value system rewarding and punishing the child for mastering, or failing to master, paternal discourse. If, for Clément, a patriarchal society asserts the child’s paternal lineage through ritual, for Badinter parental claim to the child goes further than mere genetic reassurance. If society is defined as the sum of its parts, investing in the child’s existence and welfare equates with investing in the existence and welfare of society in general. The parent claiming the child is then investing in social belonging. Parental roles serve a system founded upon economic and political needs: ‘In all fairness, it must be admitted that the man was stripped of his fatherhood. In granting him (and him alone) an economic role only, society was gradually removing him, literally and figuratively, from his child’ (Badinter, 1981: 258). If the parent ‘increases’ their social membership through the child, then the social can also ensure social membership by reinforcing the link parent/child. The parent’s social performance is established through the politicoeconomic construction of biology: the father’s function is to facilitate the production of ‘child’ and guarantee its maintenance, the mother’s function is to carry the child in and out of the womb to social maturity (hence child custody is awarded to the mother in divorce settlements while the father finances the arrangement). Through the control and modification of parental functions, contemporary society uses the child as the social commodity through which it can serve its own needs. Badinter demonstrates that parental care and in particular maternal love, or maternal instinct, are not constants through time. She argues that, in fact, contemporary cultural understanding of the natural parent (naturally loving, caring, etc.) was inherited from late eighteenth century values. In western Europe, the state
shifted its interest from wanting ‘docile subjects for His Majesty’ (Badinter, 1981: 118) to wanting to avoid ‘the waste of human beings that characterised the Old Regime’ (Badinter, 1981: 118). Writers, administrators, doctors were recruited to shift cultural values from authority to love. Badinter argues that this translated in a shift from paternal authority to maternal love, initiating the move from the paternal to the maternal function. Nineteenth and twentieth century literature reinforced the move from authority to love (and from paternal to maternal) as their interpretation of pre-eighteenth century accounts were tinted by the new parental ideology.1 The effect was a new organisation of parental roles: ‘the mother and the state had usurped, each in their own way, the essentials of the father’s role […]. His qualities as a father were measured more by his ability to support his family than by any other criterion’ (Badinter, 1981: 258). With ‘the replacement of the patriarchal family by a ‘patriarchy of the state’ (Badinter, 1981: 253), the paternal function is now performed by the state, in partnership with the mother. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, the father has then moved from the actual father of the Freudian family triangle to the symbolic father of Lacan. Badinter (1981) explains that recently, ‘some psychoanalysts have reconsidered the question of the father, dissociating the symbolic father from the flesh-and-blood father’ (Badinter, 1981: 281). With the work of psychoanalytic theorists such as Lacan and Dolto, the involvement of the actual father has become less important than the function played by his name, his law or his word. In fact, the efficacy of the paternal function is at its best when the actual father remains distant, even absent, permitting his replacement by a more potent figure, the symbolic father, guarantor of the law of prohibition against incest. Freud believed that social organisation rests on an historical event where the sons, jealous of the father’s exclusive sexual intimacy with the women, murdered the father and ate him. Riddled with guilt, they then forbade themselves any sexual encounter with the father’s women (the mothers) and thus avoided further parricide. Freud insisted that the father became more powerful by virtue of being dead, giving rise to the idea of the ‘dead father complex’. Badinter’s description of the psychoanalytic construction of the symbolic father is founded upon the same logic as Freud’s dead father complex. Psychoanalytic theory advocates the actual father’s distance, in order to enable the symbolic father to play its powerful role in the process of subjectivation. The
1 They interpret past accounts of maternal indifference (even cruelty) as an effect of the socio-economic difficulties of the period, while maintaining that maternal instinct is a human constant: ‘some have drawn the conclusion that mother love may vary in intensity depending on the external difficulties, but that it always exists. Mother love thus becomes a constant in history’ (Badinter, 1981: 59). For instance, Badinter argues that maternal indifference was not the result of high child mortality rates whereby the mother would protect herself from constant mourning through indifference; rather, the high mortality rate amongst children was a direct cause of maternal indifference and negligence, which was itself caused by the State encouraging parents to produce docile subjects (Badinter, 1981: 60).
