Análisis de la figura paterna desde el psicoanálisis

Análisis de la figura paterna desde el psicoanálisis (Analysis of the father figure from psychoanalysis)

In front of an art work there is no other way but to let us be questioned by it, telling us all it can beyond its author’s reasons. However, we have been invited to “visit” with a “guide” as a way of dialogue. Talking, from a focus of thinking proposed by Alejandra´s painting. In this case, a psychoanalytic focus. Visiting means going to see, and watching as perceiving, which is more than the exercise of the organ of senses, in this case the sight. Perceiving is letting us  be challenged, from what we are, by what opens a clear view of where we are and where we go to. These folded and varnished paintings open up a space of clearness. From this space of clearness, about which we could talk in all its breadth, we are now going to try to lead a dialogue about a possible path of this clearness. It is not an easy task.

In an attempt to think about the artwork, there is an intersection between an aesthetic concern and the issue about the truth of the being; in other words, art is not an imitation of reality, mimesis, but as setting ahead the truth of the existing, in the being. However, the work of art in front of us would have to be accessible in terms of what it is. But, why do we call it  a work of art? What does an artwork imply? It may be a demonstration that is not only true, but  a manifestation of the truth involved in all existence, the being.

This manifestation is not presented conceptually and categorically, however it speaks and opens clearness. Something that, as an artwork, is  installed and opens a “world”, a world where we are subjected as individuals, the story that contains us, the options and their consequences. It implies elaborating from that something, as bringing the “land”, which was before closed in itself (Heidegger). The opening of this world and the earth, an essential combat where the artwork rests, the truth as disclosure and not as representation (Heidegger).

Therefore, a number of questions arise: Who puts the artwork there, in front of us? What criterion is useful to select that a piece is such to be put in front of us? What interests are involved behind discerning among things, which are works of art or which are not? This questioning does not support definitive or classificatory  responses, but it means being open to what is manifested. It means being surprised, beyond the categories.

Before us there is a man, Alejandra´s father. He is present in the memory, moving from the threshold of death. However, he is not within the painting, but because of the painting. Also, in front of us there are the rescued and selected photographs, moments that were captured in the click by a technology of light. The photographs are no longer Alejandra’s father, but they keep the light that was reflected on this man, which permeated a sensitive sheet as a document of that moment in the past. Nevertheless, the pictures are not in the painting, but because of the painting, from its transference and pictorial intervention. In front of us is Alejandra, who has displayed her paintings, her carefully selected work. However, she is no longer in the painting, because this painting had its own life before who looks at them. In front of us there are these six painted sheets with the marks of their folds. They are shown to us no longer as the memory of a man, not as photographs of the light of a past moment, and not as one of Alejandra’s belongings, but as something that is emerging in our presence today to say something about the truth of the being and its destiny, and it says that it is “Something unfinished”.

In that space that opens with art, as a light of truth and its destiny, in these paintings  the fragile and vulnerable human condition about what is unfinished and complaining resonates. This unfinished feature of the human condition, a condition that is sometimes paradoxically pretentious, reveals us a real impossibility from the subject in their quest to access and obtain full enjoyment (Lacan). Something has been taken away, dragged away from us, something that we no longer have and that releases us, like nostalgia that hangs in the course of time.

The father has died, but we have already acknowledged his death. Real death and symbolic death. The symbolic father whose death we have recognized has taken something unfinished to the grave with him. What has already been symbolically structured with the father shows that the coveted enjoyment is impossible to obtain, and that it only allows partial pleasures. Hence the emergence of symptoms, such as the language of nostalgia, that in certain occasions hurts us and in others sets us free. The symptom allows the subject the encounter with the enjoyment, a way of enjoyment, of instinctual but partial satisfaction. And here we are, seeing something unfinished emerging from the painting, the claim for full enjoyment in its colors and lines… we can only enjoy seeing it, but the enjoyment will be partial. We may wonder about the human condition of being in time that is shown to us. We can remain in the symptom, we can go further.

Alejandra has already taken us where she opened a light of truth, truth that is beyond the mere information of her own relationship with her father. We are now in front of  the astonishment of  something unfinished from fatherhood, since once it is dead, it leaves the unfinished not only in each of us, but also in the human being who looks for it, while they have such scarce available time before their own death.

The development of the mind since early age, with its fantasies and ability to attribute qualities to what is observed, meets the father as the other parent that fills in  our main object of love, which is the mother. This has been called, since Freud, Oedipus. At the right moment, it will be accused not only of taking away the mother, but of the whole experience with the forbidden, by imposing strictness and the repression of all the desires.

The father protects against the threats, both from the environment and from the dangerous actions that we perform when exploring the reality. Therefore, protecting becomes prohibiting. The figure of protection is in an intersection with repression. Later on in our growth, when we intend to go beyond the mother, as the exploration of worlds to know, the father is found again with the attempts for identification and construction of identity: being somebody in the world. Maturity will gradually open the ability to tolerate, accept and appreciate the diversity and the union of the maternal and paternal aspects. Nevertheless, this is not an achievement, as if it was an ability to execute with skill, but a tension and a conflict. There is always something unfinished. There is something unfinished regarding the father within us. There is something unfinished regarding the forbidden and the knowledge about who we are. Prohibition and protection play a role in the development of the psyche, not only to tolerate the world and the reality, but to display healthy love for others. There is a limit determined by the cultural/historical processes of the last decades, with increasing complex experiences of the father in each one of us: absences, abandonment, degradation, humiliation, the rupture of its significance as a protector, in his masculinity, in his social role as a provider…

If the symbolic function of the father in Jacques Lacan’s terms is to save the baby´s psyche from the structural psychosis where it is because it is in symbiosis (Margaret Mahler) with the mother, to open it to the world and the social reality, to the sense and judgment of the real, then what “Something unfinished” is in this function  leads us to the question about the symbiotic that has not  been finished yet.

This questioning, before the pictorial language Alejandra offers to us, can be formulated as: what is that “something unfinished”? What do a world and a society look for that returns an echo of what is given by the father? Is it possible that in the world and the society we will find the lost traces of an absent father, about whom we have no certainty that he set the transition between the symbiosis with the mother and the openness to the story? May the folds of these paintings hide crumbs of what does not seem to have left traces, but nostalgia? The association of the father to law and punishment is, for the children, opposite to the father and the meaning that in their fantasy they expect to be in his affection. Kafka reproaches to his father: “I meant absolutely nothing to you…”, where the fact of not meaning anything to the father is the attribution of a mind that looks for building itself, beyond him, but with the inputs given by this expected love relationship with the father, to rise from the maternal arms to a vast and alien world. The vast and alien world does not know about its own threatening structure, if the protective banning disappeared in the absence of contemporary uncertainties. Therefore, we are subjects who are split not between the private and the public, but between the symbiosis and the nostalgia of being. “Something unfinished” lets us in front of every single new face that we meet and it puts in movement, again, what was structured with the father. Being in the world is being in relationships, which are multiple and unique, unfinished and expectant. The relationship with another that dilutes or overwhelms us, but always with partial enjoyment.

Pedro Rodríguez Carrasco
August 2015