Are We on the Verge of the Paternal Function?

The original audience for these lectures on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” was a group of 70+ doctoral students in clinical psychology. Some had studied Lacan with me before, others were completely new to his work, and a few were predictably resistant at every step of the way. All of which made the conceptual centerpiece of Part 5 — prohibition, the law, and the paternal function — especially fun to discuss. The clinical structure of perversion figures largely here, with sadism and masochism taking center stage. Followed by logics the American Western, the allure of overeating / workout cycles, and a hint at why the best father is a dead one. Then along comes phallic jouissance and, with it, a wide-ranging critique of “sexual enjoyment at the level of the swimsuit zone,” with help from subaltern theory, animal philosophy, Fanon’s case studies, even Freud himself.

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