ABSTRACT
The paternal metaphor is Jacques Lacan's account of what is essential in the Freudian Oedipus complex, and gives a first response to the question of what is operational in a father. The Name-of-the-Father places them both under an interdiction signified as universal: a law in place of the caprice of a mother and an organ. The child makes appeals for prohibition and he obeys his father—this is clear from both observation and the mother's speech. Lacan's theoretical move from the father considered as a person draws from this Freudian heritage. S. Freud writes of how an intolerable arousal, against which the subject is helpless, is represented in memory by a "boundary idea" which has no sense but can be repeated indefinitely while its object, the real experience, is lost by virtue of being represented. Lacan puts forward a way beyond the effects of the castration complex, which are the effects of the imaginarisation of the father, that Freud considered interminable.
