In 1956, J. Lacan looks with pungent irony at the idea that psychoanalysis could serve as a social drug in a world whose foundations have been shaken, and the anxiety of a changing world is experienced daily, so that individuals see themselves differently [1]. He refers to the holders of the object relation, promoters of the normalisation of the subject through the advent of genitality. It will be Little Hans who will teach us with regards to the object, the place that a child can occupy between the mother and the father.
In 1968, two months after the French May, whilst the sexual revolution promises freedom to an entire generation, he dares to speak of a somewhat short-sighted perspective. During a meeting with M. Mannoni, he is surprised that starting from the child, we come to talk about psychosis and the institution. What is short-sighted? To arouse a certain freedom, that Lacan wonders, carries within it its limit and its illusion? [2] Where is Lacan going, what is the compass? The idea that madness, inherent in man, is what limits his freedom, and he goes so far as to say that, precisely because of the new question of every social structures as a result of the progress of science, what we are going to be contended with, not only in our domain as psychiatrists, but in the furthest reaches of our universe, and in ever more pressing fashion is segregation. [3]
If love, desire, jouissance, in the name of a utopian freedom, are not framed first within the Oedipal structure, and later, in Lacan’s teaching, within another logic, they produce devastations, or solutions that weigh on the child with the consequences that the clinic shows, beyond so-called love – let us add maternal love? Lacan will say in 1969, in the dyadic relationship with the mother the child gives her, in immediately accessible form, what the masculine subject lacks: the very object of his existence appearing in the real [4]. In the background is outlined the non-existence of the woman and the non-existence of the sexual relationship.
J.-A. Miller reminds us that with the establishment of liberalism, the family responded to the dream of a natural social bond. Two centuries later, it will be regulated by the law on the basis of certain functions that make the unity felt through love reduced to the rank of utopia [5]. Not even utopian communities will be able to contain the function of residue that the conjugal family […] supports [6].
Feminism becomes feminisms. Women have acquired unthinkable rights. Gender policies change History, although Italy was still ranked in 82nd place in 2017, in freefall compared to other countries [7] … Communities of segregation [8] grow, basins of reception of jouissance. Society changes rapidly, except when it seems that a virus stops it. It seems so because the real advances irreducibly. Not everything for the speaking being is exhausted, however, with rights and not even with the tools of science and its innovations. Especially not if this speaking being belongs to the dark continent that, with Freud indicates precisely the non-existence of women and sexual relations.
It is a question of leaving behind the 20th century, says Miller, […] in order to renew our practice in a world itself amply restructured by two historical factors, two discourses: the discourse of science and the discourse of capitalism. The older ones, those who have lived through the turn of the century, have bid farewell to so-called tradition in its deepest foundations. [9]
Freedom/Madness. Advancing science. Segregation. Becoming parents: no longer just as a natural fact or regulated by love and the laws of the traditional family. At stake is a real that disrupts, where wanting, “wanting a child,” as the title of PIPOL 10 states, seems to elude desire and love, by delegating the legitimacy of such wanting to science, which in turn is asked outside of the known rules of the game.
Rules that on the other hand, for psychoanalysis as the clinic teaches us, have never extinguished the question of desire and love that preside over the birth of the speaking being. In the south of Italy there is a saying when a child is given the name of his grandmother: La supponta della nonna [10]. “I was not spoken,” says a woman whose fantasy and that of her twin, was that she was adopted and that for each of them, the other was the one desired and loved. It is the being adopted that is missed. Giving a place to the subject by naming him/her is different than giving him/her a name-zeppa (wedge) because one is not expected, one is “in the way.” Naming implies the desire that the unborn child was “spoken”: it is to be adopted. We are always adopted, as Monica Vacca recalled in one of her speeches at the Clinical Section in Rome. [11]
The unanticipated, un-spoken child, the one who is in the way, on one hand, and the one wanted at all costs on the other. Costs! They can be real costs in the sense of the market that makes of the child a product. From the natural family to the family whose parents – not always known and sometimes reduced to a frozen test tube – are guided in medically assisted procreation or surrogacy by a pre-parent: science. Who is it that adopts then? What place does the child occupy? What is the gap between a request made to science and to desire? And what about love?
The enigma of origins, which we encounter in so-called normal situations, arises from the couch to question the place that the subject has occupied for the mother, for the father, within the couple. These questions will arise in the new clinic and they are already arising, for example, from the maternal side. A mother, all-consumed by her child born of in-vitro fertilisation and an unknown father, must answer questions about the origin, about the father. For a while, the father, the sweet father [12], was a star in the sky, his function was embodied up there: the child is not psychotic. The all-consuming love for the child, could in the analytic experience, be declined according to the two meanings of declining all-love and declining mother-woman.
In a country like Italy, which in 1939 was the seventeenth year of the Fascist Era, where infant mortality was very high in a very primitive [13] Sardinia where people could have eleven children, and where contraception came very late in some regions and was a transgression of the laws of the Church, the new regulation of births stands out according to the will. It stands out, if we think of the weight given to maternal love, which traces that of Our Lady – as I am writing, the Pope, surprisingly and privately, went down to Piazza di Spagna to celebrate the Immaculate Conception – a love made of self-denial, omnipotence, infinitude, especially towards the male child, a condenser of jouissance for a woman who in some cases will never exist. Yesterday, I watched Clint Eastwood’s 1995 film again, The Bridges of Madison County, where Meryl Streep, torn away from her native Bari to become a bride in the boring state of Iowa, gives up her dreams, and meets herself for the first time as a woman in adultery. Reading her diary, her children discover that behind their mother was a woman who wrote: The woman who chooses to have children in a certain sense begins life and in another, she stops.
Pipol 10, “Wanting a Child,” puts us to work under six rubrics: Sexuality; Love; Time; Name-of-The-Father?; Destruction; Science. In the furrow of the Love rubric, together with Bernard Seynhaeve, I have been invited to orient us along three axes: child suppleance; adopted child; (un) desired child, calling on each one to propose texts (about 4,500 characters), that will make the blog lively and stimulating. The three meanings of the child highlight how this new configuration lifts a veil on what is called the desire for a child and the way it is affected by these technical advances but also by the social advances of the status of women and homosexuals, whether gay or lesbian [14]. Behind and beyond wanting, what does a child embody in the couple, or for each parent? For the mother, if there is one, for the father, if there is one. Why if there is one? There may be no mother in the gay couple, if not a surrogate; there may be no father in the lesbian couple, if not in a test tube; there may be no father, if not in the semen received in a flash by a woman who declares to do without a man, and so on, according to the most imaginative declensions of motherhood, fatherhood, co-maternity and co-paternity. A child may never have the right to meet/seek the biological parents, who may have had a desire to have him, until coming of legal age.
One day, perhaps Emma who born in Tennessee last October from an embryo frozen 25 years ago, will be able to say something to her analyst about the enigma of origins, about desire, about love, about the wanting that presided over her birth; she, who from a biological point of view, is almost the same age as her mother.
And once again: what about love? What is behind the false evidence of the natural bond and the universal of the child’s desire? [15]
It is up to us psychoanalysts to find out by learning from those who come to speak to us!
Picture : ©Nathalie Crame.
Translated by Rachele Giuntoli
Reviewed by Caroline Heanue
[1] Lacan J., Seminar IV, Object Relation & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) Sessions 1-8 now available in English from www.LacanianWorksExchange.net. In French: Livre IV, La Relation d’Objet, 1956-1957 edited by Jacques-Alain Miller : Éditions du Seuil, March 1994.
[2] Lacan J., «Address on Child Psychosis,» Hurly-Burly, Issue 8, October 2012, p. 270.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Lacan J., «Note on the Child,» The Lacanian Review, n°4, 2018, pp. 13-14.
[5] Miller J.-A., «Towards the Next Days of the School,» La Lettre mensuelle, n°247, avril 2006.
[6] Lacan J., «Note on the Child,» op.cit.
[7] Cfr. Global Gender Gap Report 2017 da parte del World Economic Forum.
[8] Miller J.-A., «The Dark Causes of Racism,» Agalma, n. 4, 1990, Milano, Arcadia edition. The redacted text will be published in issue 28 of Attualità Lacaniana.
[9] Miller J.-A., “A Real for the 21st Century, Presentation of the Theme of the IXth Congress of the WAP,” in Scilicet: A Real for the 21st Century, Paris: New Lacanian School Publications, 2014.
[10] «Grandma’s supponta ». « Supponta » is the wedge (zeppa) that you put under the door so that it won’t close.
[11] Clinical Section of Room, Parents and Children of the 21st century, 29 April 2020.
[12] I evoke here the sweet father who was Virgil to Dante (Inf. VIII, 100; Purg. XXV, 17).
[13] Cfr. Mameli G., Hotel Nord America, Nuoro, Il Maestreale, 2020.
[14] Laurent D., “How to produce Bio children,” in Lacan Quotidien n. 794, preface to the book by C. Vacher-Vitasse, Enigmas of the female body and the desire for a child. From gynecology to psychoanalysis. [the translation is ours].
[15] Laurent D., «The desire for a child in the age of science: clinical implications ,» Letterina, Bulletin de l’ACF Normandie, 63, 06/2014, p. 28.
