Legacies and Memorializations in the Intergenerational Transmission of Psychic Life: Psychoanalytic Notes on Some of the Ways in Which Sons Assume Their Father's Mantle.

Abstract

The intergenerational transmission of psychic life has been difficult to explore psychoanalytically given that a treatment of both parent and child is rarely, if ever, feasible. Here the issue is explored in terms of father-son relationships. Three legendary fathers (Abraham, Laius, Shiva) are discussed as illustrating the filicidal legacy they imposed psychically and corporeally on their sons. Three contemporary case vignettes are then presented, indicating ways in which sons ambivalently memorialize their fathers. This material provides a model as to some of the ways in which sons assume the mantle of the father's conscious and unconscious dynamics in the course of their personal history. Paternal legacies generate "memorializations" that express profound and poignant conflicts animating the son's psychic life. In the context of this investigation, the significance of the distinction between actual fathers or father figures (who are mortal, who possess some sort of gendered qualities, and who may be present or absent, emotionally and physically) and the "symbolic father" (who is the locus of the phallus that organizes the possibility of representational discourse) is discussed. It is suggested that boys and men typically develop in terms of confusions around this distinction. The oedipal conundrum and challenge of the boy's passage into manhood is then formulated as follows: Masculinity involves both the integration of patricidal desire (in response to the paternal legacy) and the mourning of actual fathers or father figures. It also involves the acceptance of the human condition, which is both that of mortality and of our "castratedness" in relation to the "symbolic father" as the locus of the phallus (the only one who knows whereof "He" speaks and acts, and who can neither be mourned nor surpassed).