Chapter 2 “A Father is being Beaten”1

The distinction between the murdered father and the dead father was discussed in Chapter 1. The shift from the murdered to the dead father represents the attempt to regulate desire and institutes the incest taboo. Each individual man has to face the desire to kill his father.

In this chapter, I suggest that the phantasy “a father is being beaten” becomes an important achievement in the analysis of some men, as an expression of the constitution of their sexual choice and masculine identification. It is through the construction of this phantasy in the vicissitudes of the transference that these patients are able to elaborate symbolically their aggression towards their fathers and find their own sense of time in the chain of generations.

The phantasy of “a father is being beaten” may frequently be found in the analysis of some male patients at the point of transition between these two configurations – that is, from the murdered father to the dead father. The former – the murdered father – is present within an anal–sadistic, perverse structure, as described by Abraham (1924) and Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985), where the father does not have a symbolic place; the latter – the dead father – indicates the constitution of the symbolic father. In “murdered father” configurations, patients find it difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the role of the father in the primal scene. Examples of this configuration are patients who commit actual violence against men in a real attempt to eliminate them (see Perelberg, 1995a). There are, however, patients who are not actively violent but are locked up in daydreaming beating fantasies. These fantasies tend to have a fixed, masochistic shape and express these patients’ position of helplessness in facing their fathers, unable to mobilize their aggression. In this chapter, several perverse configurations are described that express

a foreclosure in the relationship to the father and tend to express a denial of differences between the s