ABSTRACT
Anna Freud’s paper “Mourning and melancholia” indicates that the absence of the object opens the space for the beginnings of thinking and, one can suggest, of time. The simplest narrative contains the story of an object that left and then came back. In the French psychoanalytic literature, the concept of desire is also related to an object that was known and then lost. A moment of understanding of the transference might lead to a structural insight in relation to phantasies about the internal objects: mother, father, siblings, or aspects of the self. Freud’s myth, in which the father needs to be murdered in order to be erected as the third, seems to be a mythical account of the process of growing up, where the parents need to be destroyed by the adolescent in order for him to grow. The analytic process, in so many ways, recapitulates the narrative of the dead father complex.
