ABSTRACT
Erik Porge poses the question of whether any invention has the role of intermediary, of liaison, between the real and the symbolic. It is in this sense that we can say that the child’s fantasm is an invention since it is exactly that which mediates between the real and the symbolic. For Robert Levy, the consequences that follow for the child with a difficulty in the constitution of this discursive formula include specific types of symptoms that are often responsive to brief interventions with the child and the parents. Levi-Strauss was influenced by his reading of Anna Freud, in particular Freud’s work Totem and Taboo. Thus the problematic became one of being able to overcome such contradiction in order to discover what was more fundamental and coherent in mythology. The fantasm, as opposed to myth, always evokes the historical and in particular the family structure, in which the desire of the subject is inscribed.
