THE NAME-OF-THE-FATHER; PSYCHOANALYSIS AND DEMOCRACY

ERIC LAURENT

How to link together, with a conjunction, psychoanalysis and this predominant form of
modern politics that is democracy? There was a time when democracy co-existed with
other non-democratic forms of politics. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 there are
no credible alternatives. It does not mean that China and some others are not the
exception, but everybody affirms, at least from the tip of their tongues, to want only
democracy. This unanimity made it possible for some authors such as Francis Fukuyama
to think that the end of history had arrived, little time before some events seriously
questioned this. Lets more prudently note that there is a desire for democracy. It can be
sustained from the published results of a Pew Research Center survey, Center of
independent research of Washington made in 2002 on 38000 people in forty-four
countries that showed the very large adhesion of the world public opinion to democracy.
Madeleine Albright recently commented on it: “I find very interesting this vast support of
democracy. I have longtime sustained that democracy is not only an occidental value.
This survey proves it”1
Surely Psychoanalysis could not enjoy such a global transference as democracy does. It is
only practiced in certain regions of the world. They are precisely democratic regions. It is
a fact that only democracies have allowed, tolerated, and sustained the emergence of
psychoanalysis as a discourse. Psychoanalysis was at first accepted as a clinical discipline
and Freud used the medical authorization to make it exist. Once psychoanalysis was
accepted, Freud did not fail to extricate the critical thoughts this practice inspired him
about civilization. Going beyond traditional medical humanism, he highlighted the
antinomies of the subject satisfactions and the “exigencies of drive renunciations”
imposed by civilization. Psychoanalysis was positioned very fast as a critical discourse.
Only the democratic form welcomed it. Elsewhere it was denounced as “bourgeois
science” or ignored.
Nevertheless, democracy and psychoanalysis don’t make a good pair. When democracy
identifies to bureaucracy watching over the regulation of all that can be consumed in a
commercial space, homogenous and global, it worries about the strange character of the
psychoanalytic practice. It aims to make it enter in the ragbag of psychotherapies and
stifle it under regulations. Under the name of psychoanalysis, in the democratic countries
that have adopted these regulations, only the shadow of what it was subsists.
The shelter that psychoanalysis has found in democracy is necessary but not enough. It
remains precarious. This is by a structural reason that derives from the nature itself of the
social link according to psychoanalysis. To approach it Freud started first from the other
side of democracy: the primitive horde, the monarchy, the Church, the army.
Freud’s approach of the political dimension is not separable from his theory of religion.
The question of power is indissociable from the interrogation on the sources of belief.
Since the Interpretation of Dreams, discreetly, the role of the father is stated in the
genesis of the forms of power and in the religions2. In a way, from the moment Freud

1
Bortin, M., “In war’s wake, hostility and mistrust”, International Herald Tribune, 4 juin 2003, p. 6
2
“ It is said that the prince is the father of the people. The father is the most ancient authority, the first one;
he is for the child the unique authority. All the other social powers developed from this primitive authority
(except matriarchy)”. Freud S., L’interpretation des reves, Paris, PUF, 1973, p. 192, note

1
perceived the place of the father as the bearer of the prohibition of incest in the psychic
economy, he makes it the pivot of the construction for the social and religious building,
indiscernible in a first approach. It will be his first word and also his last as he resumes it
in Moses and Monotheism (1939). Freud’s political anthropology is a political theology.
It is by identification to the place of the One, that Freud will deduce the possibility of
democratic equality. In Totem and Taboo’s fiction, social contract projected at the edge
of history, the so-called Freudian Darwinism has very Hobbesian tones. The Freudian
social contract allows to be delivered from anxiety at the cost of renouncing to repeat the
murder of the father. The Freudian fiction makes of the murder of the original father the
real moment of the contract, the moment where the transmutation is effectuated. In that
sense, it is Christian, as Lacan notes it3. It is secondarily that the horde or group4, equal
social form, is produced5. The organic link of law and crime doesn’t allow Freud to think
that the charisma of the chief could institute a peaceful source of authority; neither that
the original murder could be reabsorbed by the system of rules of civilization. The
Freudian death drive is like a nature estate that always menaces civilization. At the core
of the contract, is the grounding terror that made the father of the horde reign in the
nature estate. “The leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father, the group still
wishes to be governed by unrestricted force"6. The establishment of a social link, the
drive foundation of the identification, does not allow contemplating peace. The father of
the horde had access to all the women. This unlimited jouissance dwells in the chief that
inherits it.
In 1921, after formulating the second topology that gives its entire place to the superego,
Freud resumes this question of the group and the ego in their reciprocal dialectic. He
begins from the mechanism of identification that regulates the psychological life to
approach very structured groups7. It is the padding of mechanisms identification by the
leader that allows the production a new social link constituent of the organized group.
The Church and the Army, eponymous organizations, remain groups and their chiefs are
homologous to the leader of simple groups8.
The heart of these organizations conceals the same boundless principal drawn from the
primitive group. Freud can thus explain the discipline of the Army and the savage killing
3
“It is because of the secret curse of the Great Man, whose only power derives from resonating at the
bottom of the inaugural murder of humanity, that the Christian redemption… is accomplished. Only this
tradition takes to the last consequences the work of revealing what is at stake in the primitive crime of the
primordial law” Lacan, J. Le Seminaire, livre VII, l’Ethique de la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1986, pp. 205-
206
4
Note of the translator: Where in the French text the word mass or masses appears we will translate it by
group, following the tradition of the Standard Edition,
5
“A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the
place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego” Freud,
S., “Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego”, (1921) Standard Edition, vol. XVIII, P.116
6
Ibid. p. 127
7
“And, in complete opposition to the usual practice, we shall not choose a relatively simple group
formation as our point of departure, but shall begin with highly organized, lasting and artificial groups. The
most interesting example of such structures are Churches-communities of believers- and armies”. Ibid. p,
93
8
We have already heard in the discussion of the two artificial groups, Church and army, that their
necessary precondition is that all their members should be loved in the same way by one person, the leader.
(…) All the members must be equal to one another, but they all want to be ruled by one person (…) that is
the situation that we find realized in groups which are capable of subsisting”. Ibid, p. 121

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power that accompanies it. In Civilization and its Discontents (1929) he designates the
shadow of the war of religion that follows each one of them. The profoundly disquieting
character of the organized group allows him to think the hateful functioning of the single
party in the thirties. He will refer to the national-socialist anti-Semitism as well as to the
exaction of soviet power9. In his analysis of the place of the leader, Freud finds the roots
of what Max Weber highlighted in 1921 as “charisma” in the three sources of legitimacy
that he distinguished. Monarchy finds legitimating in tradition, bureaucracy authorizes
itself from the rational commandment. After the 1920 defeat, Germany was hit in these
two registers. That’s why in the modernization of the Bismarck system Max Weber is
partisan of a parliament sustained on a charismatic chief. He yearns for it and
unconditionally believes in it10. It’s all the difference with Freud. Weber can discern the
logic of the future and the path German politics will take. Only Freud was able to report
on the possible swing of the charismatic leader into the enemy of humankind.
The charismatic supplement is necessary in democracy insofar as the French revolution
undermined the traditional status of the Father. The rupture with tradition allowed
distinguishing what was mixed in it. It allowed distinguishing the logical function of the
father and the existence, one by one, of fathers that fulfill this function. Freud presented
this function under a mythical form: “the Oedipus Complex”. Lacan, on the thread of the
results obtained by social anthropology only had to give it a logical form.
The plurality of fathers is also that of the diverse communities that form contemporary
societies. The logical function, good for “all” the fathers is the “Name-of-the-Father”. It
doesn’t fit well with Human Rights. The first effect of this discontent is to decompose the
“Name” in the multiplicity of different functions attributed to the father. Lacan call this
pluralisation “the Names-of-the-Father”. One goes from a political-theological discourse
on the essence of the father to the review of the component of a “wide specter concept”
as the philosopher Hillary Putnam would say.
The democratic leader aims to justify the exercise of his power either over the necessary
administration of things, or over the maintain of public space as an space of always open
debate. In France, the school of Claude Lefort, in the USA that of John Rawls, in
Germany that of Jurgen Habernas, share this research of a support point founded on the
irreducibility of conceptions, over an impossibility to obtain the good form of
government. From this “nowhere place” could be found the equal solicitude of the State
towards the citizen. The empty regulating fiction thus created would be particularly
adapted for post-totalitarian and post-modern societies. It expresses a conception that
renders compatible the irreducibility of everybody’s wealth conception and the existence
of places for arbitration and decision. It is the place of the dead father.
This dream of a fictional regulating space is proposed to us while we assist to strident
religious manifestations, frenzy populism of ferociously juxtaposed communities, little
linked to the public space. Forcing the line, only the common market and legal rules
reduced to the minimum instrumental language status, seems to link them together. The

9
“All the Middle-Age massacres of the Jewish did not make it a more peaceful or safer period for the
Christian brothers” and “one asks with anxiety what will the Soviets undertake once all the bourgeois are
exterminated” Freud, S. Civilization and its discontent, Paris, PUF, 1992, p. 68
10
One must read the 1919 conversation between Weber and Ludendorff, documented by his wife,
Marianne Weber. The main part is translated by Raymond Aron in Etapes de la pensee sociologique, Paris,
Gallimard, 1967, 5 1, notes

3
communities in withdrawal danger risk to speak only through passages-a-l’acte. They
are there to remind us of the mystery of the social pact, of murder and terror that it
conceals.
The subjects identify themselves less and less to family stories full of holes, made more
of break-ups than continuity. There still remain the communities. New religious
communities, founded on the individual and brutal adhesion at the rupture points, make
the ancient ceremonies grow pale. The communitarian adhesion thanks to the moment.
The call for respect of the social pact justifies every day the birth of new “authorities”.
The more they authorize themselves of the ideal the more they are inflexible. The
devotion to the community is verified in the obedience until death. The finality of the sect
is to exterminate its members. In a civil society the judge can punish. One loves him or
hates him for that. The transfer on the judge makes him a democratic hero. He remains
always on this side of what is requested of him. However much he punishes it is never
enough. He will never quell the thirst of punishment that can lead to massacre. The
superego wants always more. Thus, far from assisting to the extension of a politics
conceived as procedures of arbitration and respect of the norm, we assist to the extension
of the state of exception. The “new authorities” declare willingly the suspension of
Human rights in their community of discourse. Likewise, the supreme guarantor of the
state of law, the president of the United States, declares the state of exception for more
and more people.
The resort to the new authorities reveals a pathological nostalgia of the Name-of-the-
Father in a new configuration of civilization. J.-A. Miller defines it as “burst, dispersed,
un-totalisable, an “inconsistent multiplicity” (Cantor), a not-all (Lacan)”11. The current
form of civilization is perfectly compatible with chaos. This is what Antonio Negri and
Michael Hardt’s essay calls the “absence of limits of our civilization”12. Civilization
doesn’t need a harmonious whole and doesn’t even dream of it. Alain Joxe summarizes in
his title The Empire of chaos13.
The common markets, bureaucratically regulated, are from the past. We are in the realm
of incertitude of the global market. The markets seek a master signifier and don’t find it.
The great regulators disappoint each one by one: audit offices, the State, the directors of
central banks. Even Alan Greenspan, the director of the American Federal Bank, the nec
plus ultra is touched by suspicion. The best way to characterize the situation of the global
markets is to qualify them as unreadable. This is a way for us to understand Lacan’s
statement according to which a master signifier is indispensable to read writing14. That is
why we have to take into consideration the two faces of contemporary subjectivity. On
one hand, the authority of the Name-of the-Father fades, we have the phenomena of
“twilight of duty” as Gilles Lipovetsky calls it, and on the other hand we have the most
diverse push-to-enjoyment (pousse-au-jouir), the generalized overdose. The phenomena
that come under the “twilight of duty” are very lively presented by Gilles Lipovetsky:
“The duty was written in capital letters, we lowercase them; it was severe, we organize
recreational shows; it ordered the unconditional submission of desire to the law, we
reconcile it with pleasure and “self-interest”. The “must” has ceded the path to the

11
Miller, J.A.., Le neveu de Lacan, Paris, Verdier, 2003, p. 165
12
Hardt, M, Negri, A., Paris, Exils, 2002, p. 363
13
Joxe, A., The Empire of chaos, Paris, La decouverte, 2002
14
Lacan, J. le Seminaire, livre XVII, L’envers de la psychanalyse, Paris, Seuil, 1991, p. 218

4
happiness incantation, the categorical obligation to the stimulation of senses, the
irrefragable prohibition to a la carte regulations”15. The author perceives well that the
decline of the ideal is accompanied by exigencies of jouissance. Let’s follow his
descriptions adding ourselves that hedonism doesn’t remain on the limits of the pleasure
principle. The true nature of the superego is a drive exigency with power of
unlimitedness beyond any pleasure. The drive reveals there much more its mortal face.
The manifestation of the death drive can wear many masks. The overdose is not reached
only on the evidence of the suicidal behavior of substance abuse of hard drugs. The
subject can kill himself at work, choose to practice dangerous sports, strange trips, want
to be amateur astronaut, present a multiform appetite for risk. He can also choose
political suicide, become a human bomb, surround himself with dynamite and enjoy
(jouir) of his death. In all this bacchanal we find the manifestations of the search of
presence of the Other in us, The same bad jouissance is at work in neo-totalitarian
repressive fantasy and in suicidal bacchanal.
To be really democratic, can psychoanalysis pretend to bring to the contemporary subject
a relief of his lack of enjoyment of existence? How to bear the inconsistency of the Other
without yielding to the imperative of jouissance of the superego? The answers that the
different psychoanalytic currents contribute to this question constitute the most
interesting contribution to the democratic challenge we are confronted with.

Translated by Maria Cristina Aguirre

15
Lipovetsky, G. Le crepuscule du devoir, Paris, Gallimard, nrf essays, 1992., p. 48