One will never be able to say what “the” family passes on. At the core of “each one”, there is jouissance , beyond compare, unrivalled. There is no family without jouissance. But nonetheless, there is no family without desire, whether it is the non-anonymous one of the mother, the one of the father by introducing the law in the desire, or even-more that of which the child is there as “many miscarriages of what has been, for those who engendered {it}, the cause of desire ”, namely object a. “{T}he family has its origin in misunderstanding, in the non-encounter, the family...

Lacan quoted Durkheim on the “contraction of the family institution”  ranging from the ancient Roman gens to the family centred on patria potestas to the “conjugal family” with mother, father and children. Modern families often go beyond the canonical organisation into multi-parent families, rainbow families, single-parent families. Occasionally we are contacted by couples describing a radical marital crisis, in the event of separation or divorce, who ask for counselling about their relationships in relation to the situation. These are parents of an autistic child, a teenager with a major eating disorder, a young person who repeats psychiatric admissions, a drug...

There are ideals, and there is the residue. They are not of the same order. Family ideals organise an entire field where the child is structured, while simultaneously distancing from these ideals by not fulfilling them. The residue, on the other hand, is the remainder—the fragment of the real from the games of jouissance, family jouissance on occasion, in which it is caught as an object, and it is also what it is, the place that the object a occupies for itself. “The function of residue that the conjugal family supports in the evolution of societies highlights the irreducibility...

Patriarchy, as the incarnation of the Name of the Father, ensured the stability of family constellations. It was akin to Kepler's law describing the motion of celestial bodies around the sun, where the central position of the Father carved the trajectory of movement for the other family members. Even when this small planetary system experienced shocks, its inertia sought to restore the social order, the first price of which was suffering, the second its repression, and the third were symptoms organised according to the principle of metaphor. Renunciation and the suffering it caused were the price of social bonds. According...

Here we are at the departure gate for the seventh edition of the Famil newsletter. It will enable us to read the world as it is, as well as its consequences for the social bond ; and more specifically, on and within families. Indeed, the constitution of the subject isn’t without the discourse of the Other, which one first encounters in the family. In “Family Complexes…” Jacques Lacan defines the family as the institution that is “predominant in the beginning of education, in the repression of instincts and in the acquisition of the aptly named mother tongue”.  Later on, “Dr...

To illustrate the first PIPOL 12 newsletter, published on January 16, 2025, Philip Metz offered us the inverted image of a train. Even before departure, the train had derailed. In French, the imperfect tense sometimes leaves a certain ambiguity open. To demonstrate this, Lacan cites the following sentence: “an instant later, the bomb would be exploding” (“un instant plus tard, la bombe éclatait ”). It is impossible, as it is, to know with certainty whether the bomb had actually exploded or not. It is not the same for our train. It is not about to derail, because it has already derailed before...