ABSTRACT
This chapter touches on two questions that are currently guiding the author's research and that stem from his psychoanalytic practice. The first question concerns the very Lacanian assertion that the father is the sole metaphor of the mother’s desire in the structuration of the subject. The second question concerns the social function held by fathers, to which both children and adults implicitly appeal when “dads” are precisely unable to sustain authority acting as semblance. The psychoanalytic act is never visible, so its existence cannot be measured or substantiated, yet it gives a place to the unconscious. Literature has always depicted the traces and immemorial acts through which human beings help each other access their humanity.
