Name of the Father

The name of the father (French nom du père) is a concept that Jacques Lacan developed from his seminar The Psychoses (1955–1956) to cover the role of the father in the Symbolic Order.

Lacan plays with the similar sounds in French of le nom du père (the name of the father), le non du père (the no of the father), and les non-dupes errent (the non-dupes err) to emphasize with the first two phrases the legislative and prohibitive functions of the father and to emphasize with the last phrase that "those who do not let themselves be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction and continue to believe their eyes are the ones who err most."

Lacan's concept draws on the mythical father of Freud's Totem and Taboo; and was used by him as a strategic move in his opposition to what he saw as the over-emphasis of object relations theory on the exclusive relationship of the individual and his/her mother as a dual pair.

Lacan emphasised instead the importance of the third party in the Oedipus complex – what he called “the place that she [the mother] reserves for the Name-of-the Father in the promulgation of the law”. He saw this as a vital element in helping each new member of the human race to move from an exclusive, primary relation to the mother[er] to a wider engagement with the outside, cultural world – the symbolic order.

Anthony Stevens has similarly argued that “Traditionally, the father's orientation is centrifugal, i. e., towards the outside world...his is the primary responsibility for facilitating the transition from home to society'. Likewise the family therapist Robin Skynner sees the father (or fatherer) playing an essential role in the process whereby “the toddler has got to see that Mum isn't God as a first step to seeing that Dad isn't God, and that...he's part of something bigger too”.

For Lacan, that bigger context could be seen as “the chain of discourse...in which an entire family, an entire coterie, an entire camp, an entire nation or half the world will be caught”. The internalisation of the Name of the Father with the passing of the Oedipus complex ensured for Lacan participation in that wider chain of discourse, and was for him an essential element of human sanity.

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