‘A father is being beaten’: Constructions in the analysis of some male patients

Abstract

I will suggest that the phantasy of ‘a father is being beaten’ and its transformations emerges for certain male patients as a result of the work of analysis and becomes a potential appropriation of the (symbolic) father. The symbolic beating of the father takes place at the threshold between an anal–sadistic organization and the oedipal situation. The phantasy of the ‘father being beaten’ does not necessarily mean that it is the father who is explicitly being beaten. It is a construction derived from the free associations and dreams, in the analytic encounter, reached through the work of interpretation. Detailed material of sessions of the five times a week analysis of one of my patients will be presented. This will be contrasted with material from four other analyses of male patients where the ‘father being beaten’ phantasy was not achieved. The common feature in all these other configurations is a foreclosure in the relationship to the father and a lack of an internalization of the paternal function as a symbolic capacity. It is my suggestion that this absence of the father in its symbolic function is then sexualized in a fusion between life and death drives. A final contrasting example is derived from Karl Abraham’s classic paper detailing the analysis of a patient where one can interpret a dream as expressing ‘a father is being beaten’ phantasy; however the dream’s repetitive nature and its links with a current dream in the analysis points out to a lack of differentiation between the sexes and an anal–sadistic organization.