WHAT LACAN SAID ABOUT TOTEM AND TABOO Markos Zafiropoulos

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1 Powered by TCPDF ( WHAT LACAN SAID ABOUT TOTEM AND TABOO Markos Zafiropoulos Association Recherches en psychanalyse «Research in Psychoanalysis» 2016/1 N 21 pages 117 à 125 ISSN Article disponible en ligne à l'adresse : Pour citer cet article : Markos Zafiropoulos, «What Lacan Said About Totem and Taboo», Research in Psychoanalysis 2016/1 (N 21), p DOI /rep Distribution électronique Cairn.info pour Association Recherches en psychanalyse. Association Recherches en psychanalyse. Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit.

2 Research in Psychoanalysis /1 What Lacan Said About Totem and Taboo Ce que Lacan disait de Totem et Tabou [Online] May 31, 2016 Markos Zafiropoulos Abstract: This article sets out to revisit Totem and Taboo as the keystone to all psychoanalytic anthropology, from case studies to group analysis. Furthermore, offering a preliminary repositioning of this founding issue must necessarily lead us to place this within the perspective of what Lacan said about Totem and Taboo in his return to Freud. This article thus identifies the different moments in Lacan s reading of the Freudian myth. These different moments find their essential pivotal point in Lacan s transference to Lévi-Strauss at the time that he was re-grounding psychoanalysis, setting aside his familial-centered vision in favor of a structuralist reading, in which the laws of language and speech outclass those of the family. Résumé: Cet article entend ressaisir Totem et Tabou comme la clef de voûte de toute l anthropologie psychanalytique au plan du cas, comme au plan de l analyse des masses. Aussi, resituer de façon liminaire cet enjeu fondateur doit nécessairement nous conduire à le mettre en perspective, dans le retour à Freud, avec ce que Lacan disait de Totem et Tabou. L article dégage ainsi les différents moments de la lecture lacanienne du mythe freudien ces différents moments trouvant leur pivot essentiel dans le transfert de Lacan à Lévi-Strauss, au moment où Lacan refonde la psychanalyse, écartant sa lecture familialiste au profit d une lecture structuraliste où les lois du langage et de la parole surclassent celles de la famille. Keywords: psychoanalytical anthropology, structuralism, Lévi-Strauss, matriarchy, patriarchy Mots clés: anthropologie psychanalytique, structuralisme, Lévi-Strauss, matriarcat, patriarcat The author: Markos Zafiropoulos, PhD Research director at the CNRS and at the Paris Diderot University at Sorbonne Paris Cité. Member of the Center for Research in Psychoanalysis, Medicine and Society Lab (CRPMS). CNRS - Centre national de la recherche scientifique 3, rue Michel-Ange Paris cedex 16 France Electronic Reference: Markos Zafiropoulos, What Lacan Said About Totem and Taboo, Research in Psychoanalysis [Online], /1 published May 31, This article is a translation of Ce que Lacan disait de Totem et Tabou. Full text Copyright All rights reserved 117

3 Conflict of Interest Statement Markos Zafiropoulos declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. To come straight to the heart of the matter, I will say that Totem and Taboo 1 is, from my point of view, the keystone to Freudian anthropology as a whole, from case studies to group analysis. Indeed, this is the text that first and foremost aims to give an account of the unconscious father from Freud s point of view, or even that which motivates nothing less than the existence of societies with rights. I shall quickly remind you of the central idea of the 1912 text. Once upon a time men purportedly lived according to the logic of a primal horde dominated by a paternal tyrant who kept all the females in his possession. By the same token, this paternal tyrant condemned his sons to a sort of exile in which they would practice a kind of homosexuality that was not fully satisfying, hence their wrath and their conspiracy, leading to the killing of the paternal beast whom the anthropophagic sons then tore into, devouring the father in order to incorporate his strength and, by the same stroke, to identify with each of the others present at the meal. Thereafter, they would be united by this kind of primitive communion in which they introjected a piece of the father into themselves, but also by this strange guilt that afterwards is said to have prompted the idealization of the paternal beast, who then becomes a sort of divine figure in whose Name the sons formulate a law to guarantee peace among brothers, since each of them would have given up some share of the sexual jouissance that was expected from exchange with the mother and / or sister. Thus, the brothers are said to have promulgated the prohibition of incest, opening the door to exogamy and to the exchange of women, and thus, in the end, to the alliance, which has to be constantly renewed, with the very principle of forming societies of law and peace. The flipside to this law is that it leads to the incestuous desire that Freud recognized in the fine tragedy by Sophocles. This tragedy was thereafter elevated to the dignity of the text of a universal Oedipus complex that unconsciously organizes the heart of the neuroses that encumber the Oedipal sons with a desire for their mother, a desire for which they will bear a guilt that will be that much heavier given that it is naturally coupled with a wish for the father s death, where we meet again the logic of Totem and Taboo, though this time on a case-by-case basis. Well, all of this has been traditionally received in our analytical field, but it is very precisely this Freudian interpretation of the foundation of the law that was being criticized, back in 1938, by the young Lacan in Complexes familiaux, 2 when he noted that, in particular, he could not really see why, after the father s killing, the sons should have felt the slightest guilt, to the extent that they would know nothing of law. In short, from the point of view of the young Lacan (he was 37 at the time), Totem and Taboo presents as a construction that he deems to be blighted by the only petitio principii that it contains, namely, to attribute to a biological group the possibility, which it is precisely a matter of grounding, of the acknowledgment of a law [ ]. 3 Furthermore, he adds that as our knowledge about anthropoids grows, the tyranny of the leader of the horde that Freud mentions is reduced to an increasingly uncertain phantom. 4 Above all, however, Lacan underlines that we cannot endorse the Freudian point of view that attributes the underpinnings behind the promulgation of the law to the veneration of the dead father alone because, so he writes, this goes against the existence that he thinks is attested to by universally present traces of the vast legacy of a matriarchal family structure which show that the order of human families possesses foundations that are removed from the force of the male. 5 So, what can we say, quickly, about the position that is taken in early Lacan? In order to understand it we need to insert it back into Lacan s corpus of that time, which in many respects was not Freudian 118

4 since we may recall that from the time of his first entry into the psychoanalytical field Lacan was putting forward a theory of subjective structuration that was very far removed from Freud s. Where Freud believed that he could perceive in the newborn an entirely narcissistic being-in-the-world, Lacan perceived on the contrary a fragmented being that had come into the world without an ego, and begins his existence by what Lacan calls the weaning complex, a complex that is overshadowed by the power of a mother who maintains an organic relationship with a child in fragments who is always born too early. And according to Lacan this explains how the mother s imago lurks in the depths of the psyche, and how its sublimation is particularly difficult. To the extent that the imago resists these new exigencies, which are exigencies related to the progress of the personality, though initially beneficial it becomes a factor of death. 6 So, we know that from Lacan s point of view, at this weaning stage (which is earlier than the mirror stage) the child wants to die in the mother by the grace of a primary masochism, whereby he would like to return to the lost paradise of the womb. We also know that the child emerges from this testing phase when indeed he does emerge from it through an identification with the brother (intrusion complex). This identification with the brother allows the child to take on the image of the other that becomes an imaginary envelope to his own body, in accordance with the logic of the mirror stage that Lacan borrows from Henri Wallon, in a model that explains rather well the imaginary underpinnings of alienation from the image of the brother. This alienation is heavy with aggressive underpinnings, but it also explains the openness to the Other of the symbolic by which the child will meet, at least in the West, the Oedipal complication that ultimately leads him to his encounter with the other who takes the form of the father. It falls to the boy to identify with this father following the typical form of idealized virility, while on the girl s side, the most perfect form of the Ego ideal is, so says Lacan, the virginal ideal. 7 This means that there is no relationship between girls and boys. I will be coming back to this. But what I want to show now, first of all, is that at the time, if Lacan chose to object to Totem and Taboo with matriarchy, or even if he chooses the nostalgia for the mother over the nostalgia of the father that is specific to the Freudian corpus, it was because he was promoting a theory of subjective structuration that was very far removed from Freud s, and because, as I said, he was placing at the earliest times of subjective structuration the weaning complex as overshadowed by an imago of the mother whose superegoic and unconscious underpinnings with regard to the promulgation of the law are earlier and much more powerful than those that are deduced from the idealization of the father at the time of the decline of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud it was these latter underpinnings that allow the subject, girl or boy, to conform to the law. Thus, in my opinion, we have: 1. the fact that the nostalgia for the nourishing breast in early Lacan runs counter to the Freudian nostalgia for the father; and 2. the fact that Lacan reinterprets the Freudian theory of the death drive, which in his writing becomes the death instinct 8 because, from his point of view, the subject wants to die in the mother; and then 3. the idea that this will to return to the mother s breast via primary masochism is decisive on the plane of the clinical approach to groups or to culture, because, according to the Lacan of that time, it prompts sepulchral practice, or the primitive forms of habitation, but also, the metaphysical illusions of universal harmony, the mystical abyss of affective fusion, the social utopia of a totalitarian protection, all of which come from the obsession with a prenatal lost paradise and the most obscure aspiration to death. 9 We can now understand how and why the young Lacan sought to reintroduce, against Freud, the power of attachment to the imago of the primordial mother as a foundation removed from the force of the male 10 with regard to the anthropological emergence of what he calls the order of the family, and 119

5 the same goes for the law. And from this point of view he was encouraged, as were many other intellectuals of the time, by the unavoidable Bachofen, 11 who believed he could perceive what Lacan calls traces of matriarchies, which are implicit everywhere in Antique culture. 12 So, now we know, but it always needs to be repeated, that matriarchy has never existed, 13 and yet it is a fact of the history of thought that between 1936 and 1950 the young Lacan objected to Totem and Taboo on the grounds of an alleged matriarchy. But let us leave that behind: if, six years after Les complexes familiaux, that is to say in 1948 (in Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis ), Lacan renewed his critique of the mythical circle that taints Totem and Taboo insofar as from a mythological event the killing of the father [this book] derives the subjective dimension that gives this event its meaning: guilt, 14 we may note that he shows even more clearly the heuristic aspect of Freud s text with regard to the pacifying function of the Ego ideal, because in this same text, Lacan underlines what he calls the anthropological import of Totem and Taboo, guaranteeing for the pacifying function of the Ego ideal the connection between its libidinal normativeness and a cultural normativeness, bound up since the dawn of history with the imago of the father. 15 That is what Lacan said about Totem and Taboo in And two years later, that is to say in , Lacan tones down a little further his critique of Freud s text, to ensure that whatever criticism his method in that book might be open to, what was essential was his recognition that man began with law and crime. 17 Let us add in passing that three pages further down, in the same text, Lacan makes amends with regard to matriarchy, mentioning a matrilineal society such as that of the Zuni or the Hopi Indians. He indicates that, the problem of comparing the advantages that a supposed matriarchal family organization might have over the classical triangle of Oedipal structure in forming a superego that is bearable to the individual is thus outdated. 18 The supposed matriarchal family organization! Gosh! From 1939 to 1950, we can see the distance that Lacan takes from the assertions from the Basel jurist, on the basis of which he had objected against Totem and Taboo, because the famous Bachofen believed he could perceive a matriarchal structure in the origins of the family, a structure that attested to the place of mothers at the anthropological base of familial order and law. Let s say that Bachofen was himself confusing the immense crop of myths that he had collected with as many archive documents on which history is grounded with sound methodology. As I have said, a number of researchers allowed themselves to be hypnotized by this blind window of matriarchies, including Engels, Morgan, and also Freud, but also Otto Gross, and then the young Lacan, as we have seen. I should add that it so happens that I have found in texts from some of the major voices in psychoanalysis 19 this same notion of matriarchy, whose scientific value is obsolete and clinically ruinous, for both the clinic of the case and the clinic of the group, even though these underpinnings are strictly impossible to find, as I showed in my book La question feminine, de Freud à Lacan. 20 But let s stick to what Lacan said about Totem and Taboo in order to point out that in 1950 he broke away from this notion of matriarchy that had been blinding him since 1938, in favor of the correct notion of matrilineal society that he endorses from 1950 onwards, as though he had in a certain sense, on this crucial notion, taken a refresher course in anthropological knowledge. So, what happened for Lacan s position on matriarchy, and thus on Totem and Taboo, to have been modified to such an extent by 1950? Well, it so happened that a certain Lévi-Strauss, who was back in Paris, published in 1949 The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 21 a crucial text in which: a) The ethnologist gives an account of what prompts the formation of joints between nature and culture, namely the incest prohibition, which is both cause and effect of kinship; b) he gently criticizes Freud s contribution in Totem and Taboo, while still stressing the fact that psychoanalysis is a social science; and 120

6 c) he maintains that, for reason of structure of power, it is always women who are socially exchanged and that, therefore, as objects of exchange, women are unlikely to be elevated to the rank of a matriarch. I will add that in 1949, Lévi-Strauss also published (January / March 1949) his article on Symbolic Efficacy, 22 in which he mentions neurosis as an individual myth, in Revue d Histoire des religions, which Lacan read, because it was this very article that became Lacan s first reference to the work of Lévi- Strauss. This is a reference that we find in Lacan s writing back in his article on The Mirror Stage, 23 an article that dates from July 1949 and in which Lacan assumes as his own the Lévi-Straussian phrase symbolic efficacy, albeit strangely furnished with a penumbra. In short, and whatever the case may be, Lacan was immediately taken with Lévi-Strauss 24 and he concludes his text on the mirror stage with a mention of him. For example: this intersection of nature and culture, so obstinately scrutinized by the anthropology of our times. To which he adds that, here psychoanalysis alone recognizes the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever. 25 In short, and to put it simply, we can see that what Lacan was formulating from 1950 onwards is incomprehensible if one fails to spot his transference to Lévi-Strauss 26, and clearly this holds true for what he says about Totem and Taboo. His critique of the book is strongly moderated in 1950, as I have already said, because it left to one side the notion of matriarchy that up to that point had functioned for him as the critical basis of Totem and Taboo. Moreover, in 1950, in his Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology, Lacan affirms what he had been asserting since 1938, namely that the Oedipus complex is not a universal, and that what should be grasped as generic for man is not the Oedipus complex, but the superego. Hence his return in 1950 to Totem and Taboo, leaving to one side his criticisms of Freud s method in order to lay the emphasis on what according to him is important, that is to say, according to his own terms, and as we have seen, Freud recognized that man began with law and crime. 27 But the triggering of what I have been calling Lacan s transference to Lévi-Strauss does not touch only on what Lacan said about Totem and Taboo, which he now deems important with regard to man s genesis through crime, because, as I have largely shown in my book, Lacan et les sciences sociales, and in my other book, Lacan et Lévi-Strauss, it is this transference that overshadows Lacan s return to Freud as a whole, just as in 1953, it will overshadow Le discours de Rome, with which Lacan re-grounds psychoanalysis, setting aside his formalist reading in favor of a structuralist reading in which the laws of language and of speech outclass those of the family. 28 And naturally this is also valid for what is involved in the theory of the father, which in Rome, and in the written text, becomes a pure signifier; a signifier that religion has taught us to invoke as the Nameof-the-Father. 29 This is what he confirms four months later, at a crucial moment when he was becoming Freudian and structuralist on the question of the unconscious father, because it is utterly impossible to understand the invention of the Name-of-the-Father in Lacan without understanding what it owes to the theory of the zero signifier or the signifier of exception that he finds in Lévi-Strauss and that allows symbolic thought to be exercised, in accordance with Lévi-Strauss s account. 30 But, in the end, if Lacan recognizes, through and in his return to Freud, the figure of the father as a pure signifier that leads him to reconcile with Freud s theory of the dead father and the unconscious, Lacan considers Totem and Taboo the same way that Claude Lévi-Strauss considers it, namely as a myth. Hence, one can also see that his return to Freud via Lévi-Strauss is a critical return that ultimately opens onto what I could call a third Lacan, the Lacan of the real if you like, but a real that does not exclude myth because much later, in 1970, he maintains that Freud insisted a great deal that the original patricide should be attested, notwithstanding the fact, as he underlined then, that we have seen orangutans. But the slightest trace has never been seen of the father of the human horde. And he added, amusingly, that Totem and Taboo is Darwinian buffoonery. 31 Then he presents this text more 121

7 seriously as a myth, namely as manifest content that stands to be interpreted. And to do this, he invites his audience to reread the article on the structure of myths 32 by the man who in 1970 he calls our dear friend Claude Lévi-Strauss. 33 Highly disciplined as it is, I will not be coming back on this occasion to The Structural Study of Myth (which dates from 1955), but rather to The Jealous Potter (1985), 34 in which Lévi-Strauss indicates that while Freud chose as a subtitle to Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Lévi-Strauss himself set out to show that there are points on which the mental lives of savages and psychoanalysts coincide, 35 since he reports in The Jealous Potter a very beautiful Jivaro myth which for the Jivaro Indians has the value of a Genesis. The myth tells how societies arose when the primitive horde split into hostile clans after the murder of the father whose wife had committed incest with their son. 36 So? So, if, for a whole number of reasons, Totem and Taboo is historically difficult to accept, this is, as Lacan indicates, because the text has to be taken for what it is: not the product of a historian s research, but as a myth produced by Freud, whose greatness, Lévi-Strauss assures us, lies partly in a gift he possesses in the highest degree: he can think the way myths do. 37 This compliment in the mouth of the ethnologist is a strong one, and Lacan will develop, on his side, with verve, what is at issue in this myth. In 1970 he will say that, like any myth, this myth is a structural operator capable of placing a term for the impossible at the center of Freud s utterance [énonciation]. 38 So, if we recall that for Lacan, there is no other possible definition of the real than: it is the impossible, 39 we can conclude, here, with him, that the myth of Totem and Taboo is a structural operator capable of bringing the real to expression and, we should specify here, the real of the original father who never existed, just like, moreover, the real of The Woman [La femme] who does not exist either in the text of Totem and Taboo. A series of consequences begins here, including a kind of unexpected marriage between the real of the father and the real of The Woman who does not exist. But, let s keep things simple: what is, then, all in all, my point of view on Totem and Taboo? Well, my point of view is that, while Totem and Taboo cannot be accepted scientifically, it is, in what concerns us, a myth positioned at the heart of the logic of the structuration of the Western subject of the unconscious, and beyond the West (for example in the Jivaro Indians studied by Lévi-Strauss). It is therefore a manifest content that we have to interpret. And even if one might still be unsatisfied with the fact that we are still caught up in the psychoanalysis of myth, when we are in the age of science, as Lacan noted in , well, we still have to conclude, with him, that however one might like things to be, the analysand structures him- or herself in a certain field that is occupied by myth, not the field of science, but in a field that concerns you, my good man 41 : the field of myth. To put things in a different way, I will say that Totem and Taboo appears, therefore, very much like a myth that structures neuroses, but less directly as a Freudian myth than as a major myth of heterosexual and neurotic sons. It is a myth that Freud had the immense genius to bring to light in his texts, just as he bore it in the shadow of his own neurosis, as do other neurotics. This is why this myth has had such a great success, and why, in my opinion, it maintains its contemporary edge. Hence my complementary idea that the unconscious presence of the dead father remains eminently active at the heart of the constitution of neuroses today, just as it is at the heart of the institutions of our contemporary world (families, religions, and so on). This is so, whatever one may think of the idea that we might be in a phase of leaving behind the era of the Father, 42 as the editor of Désir et son interprétation indicated on its back cover, but we shall return to this question elsewhere and later. 43 In the meantime, and for our commemoration of Totem and Taboo, I have come here first and foremost to reaffirm, solemnly, the immense contemporary relevance of this text. And I will add that 122

8 the fact that Lévi-Strauss finds, so far away (in the Jivaros), a very intelligent version of Totem and Taboo, should lead the ethnologist less to gently mock the psychoanalysts than to verify with us his own axiom of the universality of the human spirit, which is also enough to explain quite logically that close by (Freud, 1913) and far away (Lévi-Strauss) we find two versions of one same organizing myth, here (in Vienna) and there (with the Jivaros), the structure of the neurotic sons. There you have it then for the place of the sons in Totem and Taboo, which appears clearly as a business of males, from which the women are absent. Happy anniversary, then, to all heterosexual males! But to conclude more seriously what Lacan said about Totem and Taboo, one can see at least that one cannot understand the evolution of Lacan s point of view on this text without understanding the three conceptual galaxies that form, in my opinion, the first three periods of Lacan s thought, leading us from the young Lacan who rejected the myth in 1938 to the old Lacan of 1970 who finally endorses the existence of Totem and Taboo as a myth to be interpreted, that is to say, as a myth that structures neurosis, at least the neurosis of male subjects. Bibliography: Bachofen, J. J. (1996). Le Droit maternel. Recherches sur la gynécocratie de l Antiquité dans sa nature religieuse et juridique (1861). Lausanne: L âge d homme. Freud, S. (2005). Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, (1913). On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. (Whiteside, S. Transl.). London: Penguin Modern Classics. Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (1975). Lecture given on December 2 nd 1975 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Scilicet, 6/7, Lacan, J. (2001). Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l individu : Essai d analyse d une fonction en psychologie (1938). Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil. Lacan, J. (2006). Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (1948). (Fink, B. with Fink, H. & Grigg, R. Transl.). Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co.. Lacan, J. (2006). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function (1949). (Fink, B. with Fink, H. & Grigg, R. Transl.). Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co.. Lacan, J. (2006). On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (1958). (Fink, B. with Fink, H. & Grigg, R. Transl.). Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co.. Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, (Grigg, R. Transl.; Miller, J.-A. dir.). New York: W. W. Norton & Co.. Lacan, J. & Cénac, M. (2006). A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology (1950). (Fink, B. with Fink, H. & Grigg, R. Transl.). Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co.. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). The Effectiveness of Symbols (1949). Structural Anthropology (Jacobson, C. & Grundfest Schoepf, B. Transl.). New York: Basic Books. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). The Structural Study of Myth (1955). Structural Anthropology (Jacobson, C. & Grundfest Schoepf, B. Transl.). New York: Basic Books. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949). (Bell, J. H., Sturmer, J. R. (von) & Needham, R. Transl.). Boston: Beacon Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1996). The Jealous Potter (1985). (Chorier, B. Transl.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Miller, J. A. (2013). Back cover of Lacan, J.. Le désir et son interprétation. Le séminaire, VI ( ).( Miller, J.-A. ed.). Paris: Éditions de La Martinière. Zafiropoulos, M. (2003). Lacan et Lévi-Strauss ou le retour à Freud. Paris: PUF. Zafiropoulos, M. (2010). La question féminine de Freud à Lacan ou la femme contre la mère. Paris: PUF. Zafiropoulos, M. (2014). Du père mort au déclin du père de famille, où va la psychanalyse? Paris: PUF Zafiropoulos, M. (2014). Lacan et l École française d anthropologie. Paris: Centre Sèvres. 123

9 Notes: 1 Freud, S. (2005). Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913), translated by J. Strachey. In (1958). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIII, Totem and Taboo and Other Works ( ). London: Hogarth Press, p ; reprinted in (1991). Penguin Freud Library Vol. XIII: The Origins of Religion. Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, p ; retranslated by S. Whiteside in On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia. London: Penguin Modern Classics. 2 The full title of this article is Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l individu : Essai d analyse d une fonction en psychologie. It was published in the l Encyclopédie française (1938). Paris: Larousse, t and , and republished under the same title, Paris: Navarin (1984), and then a second time for the centenary of Lacan s birth in Autres écrits. Paris: Seuil (2001). 3 Lacan, J. (2001). Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l individu : Essai d analyse d une fonction en psychologie. In Autres écrits, Op. cit., p Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p. 35, p Ibid., p Ibid. p Bachofen, J. J. (1996). Le Droit maternel. Recherches sur la gynécocratie de l Antiquité dans sa nature religieuse et juridique (1861). Lausanne: L âge d homme. 12 Lacan, J. (2001). Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l individu : Essai d analyse d une fonction en psychologie. In Autres écrits, Op. cit., p On the crucial point concerning the history of civilizations, see Zafiropoulos, M. (2014). Du père mort au déclin du père de famille où va la psychanalyse?. Paris: PUF (and in particular the chapter titled Qu est que le matriarcat? ). 14 Lacan, J. (2006). Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis (1948), translated by A. M. Sheridan in Écrits: A Selection, London: Tavistock Publications. Retranslated as Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis, by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co., p Ibid., p Lacan, J. & Cénac, M. (2006). A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology (1950), translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co., p Ibid., p Ibid., p See Zafiropoulos, M. (2014). Du père mort au déclin du père de famille, où va la psychanalyse? Paris: PUF and in particular the chapter L anthropologie psychanalytique d aujourd hui et ses enjeux : de quoi la théorie du déclin du père est-elle le nom?, p Zafiropoulos, M. (2010). La question féminine de Freud à Lacan ou la femme contre la mère. Paris: PUF. 21 Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship (1949), translated by J. H. Bell, J. R. von Sturmer and R. Needham. Boston: Beacon Press. 22 Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). The Effectiveness of Symbols (1949). In Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books. 23 Lacan, J. (2006). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience (1949), translated by A. Sheridan in (1977). Écrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock Publications, p. 1-7; retranslated as The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Lacan, J., Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co., p See Zafiropoulos, M. (2003). Lacan et Lévi-Strauss ou le retour à Freud. Paris: PUF.. 25 Lacan, J. (2006). The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I Function. Op. cit., p See Zafiropoulos, M. (2014). Du père mort au déclin du père de famille où va la psychanalyse? Op. cit., the fifth chapter, titled, Effets du transfert de Lacan à Lévi-Strauss sur la clinique psychanalytique. 27 Lacan, J. & Cénac, M. (2006). A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology. Op. cit., p See Zafiropoulos, M. (2014). Lacan et l École française d anthropologie. Paris: Centre Sèvres. 124

10 29 Lacan, J. (2006). On a Question Prior to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis (1958), translated by B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg. In Écrits, The First Complete Edition in English. New York / London: W. W. Norton & Co., p On this point, see Zafiropoulos, M. (2003). Lacan et Lévi-Strauss ou le retour à Freud. Op. cit. 31 Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, , edited by J. A. Miller, translated by R. Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., p Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). The Structural Study of Myth (1955). In Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. Grundfest Schoepf. New York: Basic Books, p Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, , Op. cit., p Lévi-Strauss, C. (1996). The Jealous Potter (1985), translated by B. Chorier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 35 Ibid., p Ibid., p Ibid., p Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, , Op. cit., p Lacan, J. (1975). Lecture given on December 2nd 1975 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published in Scilicet, Issue 6 / 7, p Lacan, J. (2007). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, , Op. cit., p Ibid., p Miller, J. A. (2013). Back cover of Lacan, J., Le désir et son interprétation? Le séminaire livre VI, ( ). Paris: Editions de La Martinière. 43 This promise has since been kept by the publication of a first volume of essays in psychoanalytical anthropology: Zafiropoulos, M. Du père mort au déclin du père de famille où va la psychanalyse? Op. cit. 125