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Fatherhood today is in crisis. Fathers have gone missing, or have become their children's playmates, and the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power. What remains of the father today in the wake of this decline, and what should the relation between children and parents now be?
In addressing these questions, Massimo Recalcati draws inspiration from the story of Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. The Telemachus complex is the reverse of the Oedipus complex. Recalcati argues that children are possessed not just with a desire to annihilate their father, as their key rival in the contest to win the mother's love, but also with a longing for a father-figure, as someone who brings meaning, structure and order to their lives and who imbues them with a sense of the future.
This fresh and insightful account of the changing relations between parents and children in the era of the decline of the father will be of great interest to a wide general readership.
List of contents
Introduction
1. The Law of the Word and the New Hell
Praying Is No Longer Like Breathing; Aphonia and the Father's Amnesia; The Hell of Salò; The Law of the Word; How Do We Transmit the Word of the Law?; We are A Scream in the Night; Escape From Freedom; The Fantasy of Freedom As a Hypermodern Fantasy; Mass Freedom; Dying to Work
2. The Confusion Between Generations
The Parents' Task; The Law and the laws; Adulterations; Transgression, or an Appeal to the Law?; A New Discontent of Youth; The Trauma of the Non-Existence of the Sexual Relationship; Femicidal Violence; The Technological Object and Depression in Youth; Evaporation and Invention
3. From Oedipus to Telemachus
Four Types of Child; The Child-as-Oedipus; The Anti-Oedipal Child; The Child-as-Narcissus; The Child-as-Telemachus
4. What Does It Mean To Be A Rightful Heir?
Inheritance as Reclamation; An Excess of Memory; The Anti-Melancholy of Jesus and Nietzsche; The Negation of Symbolic Debt; Telemachus Is The Rightful Heir; What Does Inheritance Mean?; The Recognition of the Symbolic Debt; The Symbolic Difference Between Generations; Act, Faith and Promise
Epilogue: Reading Pain on the Leaves
Index of Names
About the author
Massimo Recalcati is a psychoanalyst who teaches at the universities of Pavia and Verona.
Summary
Fatherhood today is in crisis. Fathers have gone missing, or have become their children's playmates, and the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power. What remains of the father today in the wake of this decline, and what should the relation between children and parents now be?
In addressing these questions, Massimo Recalcati draws inspiration from the story of Telemachus in Homer's Odyssey. The Telemachus complex is the reverse of the Oedipus complex. Recalcati argues that children are possessed not just with a desire to annihilate their father, as their key rival in the contest to win the mother's love, but also with a longing for a father-figure, as someone who brings meaning, structure and order to their lives and who imbues them with a sense of the future.
This fresh and insightful account of the changing relations between parents and children in the era of the decline of the father will be of great interest to a wide general readership.
Report
'With his customary blend of wisdom, acumen and wit, Recalcati travels deep into the world of Odysseus to re-tell the story of Telemachus for our times. This book shows the Italian master at his thought-provoking best. All fathers shall prescribe it to their children!'
Dany Nobus, Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Brunel University London
