ABSTRACT
Lacan wrote "The Neurotic's Individual Myth" in 1953, at the very moment when he "invented" the notion of the Name-of-the-Father. The zero value has an algebraic place, whose anthropological and psychoanalytic importance has already been emphasized, but also, more generally, gives a structuralist legitimacy to Lacan's use of his "little letters" or of algebraic series. Lévi-Strauss' response is to go to the very condition of the kinship system's existence, a condition that is outside the system, where he places the paternal institution with which the reader is already familiar in the form of the zero symbol. [Phobia] is another way of solving the difficult problem introduced by the child's and the mother's relations …. [I]n order for there to be three terms in the triangle, there must be a closed space, as a way of organizing the symbolic world, that is called the father.
