ABSTRACT

Recent decades have seen much discussion regarding the anthropological, social, cultural, and psychological meaning of the nuclear family and its functions. This chapter establishes the difference between paternal function and third-party function. It presents genealogical analysis of the origin of the notion of paternal function. The analysis can be approached from two points of access: from discourses and significant systems provided by the history of culture; and from the psychoanalytic viewpoint. Returning to the specifically psychoanalytic sphere, the father, if thought of as exercising the paternal function, accomplishes the objective of separating the child from the mother, of cutting off this relationship centered on thinking of the child as the mother's phallus, a relation that only the paternal metaphor could cut off. The condition that proposes that the introduction of the father into the mother's mind implies that she accepts separation from the child is a patriarchal interpretation that again pushes the mother back into the place of pure nature.