{"id":10290,"date":"2013-01-27T13:57:42","date_gmt":"2013-01-27T18:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10290"},"modified":"2013-01-27T19:40:39","modified_gmt":"2013-01-28T00:40:39","slug":"fink-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/01\/27\/fink-2\/","title":{"rendered":"fink"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique<\/em> Harvard University Press 1997.<\/p>\n

As Bruno Bettelheim once put it, “love is not enough” when it comes to raising children, and even the contemporary espousers of “tough love” do not usually grasp the distinction between setting limits and establishing the Law as such<\/strong>. Parents often set limits for their children simply because it is more convenient for them to do so, and the limits depend on nothing but the parents’ own mood or whimsy. If I tell my children they have to go to bed by 8:30 pm every school night, and then I let them stay up until 11pm on a school night because I feel like having company, I show them I consider myself to be the only limit to their jouissance<\/span>. If I tell them they have to obey property rights and speed limits, and then proceed to steal little things from hotels and try to talk my way out of speeding tickets, I show them that I accept no law above myself, no legitimate limitations or restrictions on my own will and desire. 252 note 71<\/p>\n

The law of the symbolic pact<\/span>, on the other hand, applies to all parties, limits all parties<\/strong>. If I promise my child that Saturday afternoons arc his to do with what he will, then I cannot arbitrarily decide that he has to spcnd all of this Saturday afternoon cleaning up the toy room, his bedroom, and his closet. According to the symbolic pact, I am bound by my promises just as much as my child is<\/em> If I make as many exceptions as I like, nothing remains of the rule, and the child \u2014 perceiving that I consider myself my own law \u2014 aspires simply to dethrone me and become his own law in turn.<\/p>\n

A mother is just as likely (if not more likely) to grasp the importance of the law of the symbolic pact<\/strong> (or law with a capital L”) as a father is, but both mothers and fathers, insofar as they are neurotic, are likely to have their own problems accepting the Law (as we shall see in the next chapter) and are more likely to criticize each other’s breaches of the Law than to criticize their own. We find it far easier to detect capriciousness, selfishness, and inconsistency in another’s speech and behavior than in our own. A single mother can, in theory, provide both a loving mother-child bond and appeal to a law beyond herself (whether Dr. Spock or the U.S. Constitution, either of which could scrve as a Name-of-the-Father in Lacanian terms) that applies equally to mother and child, thereby introducing that necessary symbolic third term.<\/strong> So too, single fathers and gay couples could, in theory, provide both love and Law. Given how frequently the traditional family structure already fails, despite centuries of dividing love and Law between the sexes in considerably codified sex roles, what are the chances that both roles will be played by one parent alone or by two parents raised into similarly codified sex roles? Isn’t the incidence of psychosis likely to rise in such cases?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Our relation to the Law is obviously a very complicated matter, and I have barely scratched the surface in these brief comments. For we can always raise the question or the injustice or immorality of the law (whether local, state, national, or international), and this has been done from Antigone to Thoreau, from the civil disobedience tradition to the civil rights and women’s rights movements, and takes myriad forms. In such cases, we appeal to a notion of right or justice beyond the particular laws of the land, questioning what it is that makes the law right or just in the first place and thereby raising the question of what Lacan calls the “guarantee” \u2014 that is, what legitimates or lends authority to the Other, to the Law itself. The problem being that there can never be a guarantee<\/em>: there is no absolute justification of the Law (in Lacanian terminology, no “Other of the Other,<\/strong> no stable bedrock outside the Other that serves as the Other’s foundation or anchor in truth, no outside point that guarantees the Other’s consistency and coherence). […]<\/p>\n

But the more the law’s representatives appear untrustworthy, the more the law itself can be thrown into question, and the less we are inclined to accept the sacrifices exacted by the law (that is, to accept limitation\/castration)<\/span>. If we are to preserve some notion of a just Law above and beyond the particular laws<\/strong> of the land \u2014 given the current legitimation crisis of the legal, juridical, and executive branches of government \u2014 a just Law that is equitably and uniformly enforced, we must have an experience of Law at home which at least approaches that ideal to some degree.<\/strong> As rare as this experience may be in the stereotypical nuclear family, practices currently being advocated seem likely to make it rarer still.\u00a0As Lacan once said, in a pessimistic vein, “I won’t say that even the slightest little gesture to eliminate something bad leaves the way open to something still worse \u2014 it always leads to something worse” (Seminar III, 361).\u00a0 254<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique Harvard University Press 1997. As Bruno Bettelheim once put it, “love is not enough” when it comes to raising children, and even the contemporary espousers of “tough love” do not usually grasp the distinction between setting limits and establishing the Law as such. Parents … Continue reading “fink”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,24,118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jouissance","category-lacan","category-symbolic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10290"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10298,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10290\/revisions\/10298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}