The Father is still well preserved and has good days ahead. As an analyst and as a woman, with others, we deplore it.
As crudely and cruelly evidenced by Joyland, a film by the young Pakistani director Saim Sadiq: a patriarch reigns over the home where his two sons, their wives and the children of the eldest live. The religion has a limited presence, but we can imagine it through the prescriptions of the old father who knows what a man is, what a woman is, or at least what are the roles that he or she must play. Women will pay the heaviest price when a grain of sand and a beauty spot will disturb the well-oiled machine: the younger brother, who cannot live his homosexuality, falls in love with a young and beautiful transgender.
The director, in an interview for the French magazine Télérama, tells us that “Pakistan relies on a very patriarchal system. But paradoxically it is also a place where trans women are highly visible and important…”[1]. They are highly visible, because they panhandle. His film also shows us that they prostitute themselves and risk their lives. It is not as a paradox as it looks like.
Our newspaper announce it as follows: “the patriarchy supplanted by love, in Lahore”[2], “a moving family drama that dismantles the patriarchal myth as it occurs in the Eastern world even more than in the Western world”[3].
It is rather the fatal triumph of the Father.
During the first of the two conferences in Brussels in March 1960[4], Lacan said that Freud never dropped out the Father. I understand it as: to the point of making it a religion.
Then Lacan has this phrase: “The decline of the Oedipus complex is the mourning of the father, but it leaves us with a durable consequence: the identification known as the superego”[5].
Fourteen years later, in Rome, Lacan told us that psychoanalysts deal with the real, the symptom, namely “what doesn’t work”[6].
But religion will triumph. “It will triumph not only over psychoanalysis but over lots of other things too. We can’t even begin to imagine how powerful religion is.” [7] We will cure humanity from psychoanalysis not with science but with the religious meaning. “Religion is designed for that, to cure men – in other words, so that they do not perceive what is not going well.”[8]
Lacan saw it as a consequence of the extension of the real of the science and the disruptions that it produces. Its rapid technical progress in the trans-formation of the bodies is one of them, which is well illustrated in Joyland. The return of the Father is all the more ferocious, and freedom comes at the price of life.
As for us, we believe, after Lacan, in the perversion of the father. “Freud had shown the root of the religious illusion in the function of the Father, and Lacan on the contrary marks the divine mirage which is properly mortifying or psychotising when it is supported by the father. The father must be ‘perverse’ in the sense that he must be marked by the particularity of a symptom.”[9]
[1] Besse C., « Saim Sadiq, réalisateur de “Joyland” : “Au Pakistan, les femmes trans sont très visibles et très importantes” », Télérama, 25 mai 2022. No translation available.
[2] Cauhapé V., « Dans “Joyland”, Saim Sadiq envoie valser le système patriarcal pakistanais », Le Monde, 28 décembre 2022. No translation available.
[3] Campion A., « Avec “Joyland”, le Pakistanais Saim Sadiq signe un premier film fascinant dont la vedette est transgenre », Le Journal du Dimanche, 27 décembre 2022. No translation available.
[4] Lacan J., « Discours aux catholiques », Le triomphe de la religion précédé de Discours aux catholiques, Paris, Seuil, 2005, p. 69-102. Translation : The Triumph of Religion, by Jacques Lacan (Author), Bruce Fink (Translator), Polity Press, 2013, p. 3-52.
[5] Ibid., p. 25.
[6] Ibid., p. 61.
[7] Ibid., p. 64.
[8] Ibid., p. 71-72.
[9] « Freud avait montré la racine de l’illusion religieuse dans la fonction du Père, et Lacan au contraire marque le mirage divin qui est à proprement mortifère ou psychotisant quand il est supporté par le père. Il faut que le père soit pervers au sens où il doit être marqué par la particularité d’un symptôme. ». Miller J.-A., « L’orientation lacanienne. L’Un-tout-seul », enseignement prononcé dans le cadre du département de psychanalyse de l’université Paris 8, cours du 6 avril 2011. Not published. Translation for this article only.
Translation: M. Rabesahala
Proofreading: C. Grolleau
Picture : © Elena Madera
