You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What we call our future is the shadow that our past projects in front of us.
In this chapter I examine the Akkedah, the biblical narrative of the Binding of Isaac, and suggest that this story may be interpreted as inaugurating paternal function and thirdness. If psychoanalytic concepts have helped me view this biblical episode from a new angle, the narrative, in turn, sheds new light on our psychoanalytic concepts of paternal function and thirdness. This story marks the passage from the narcissistic father to the law of the symbolic, dead father, inaugurating a generational link that involves at least three generations: God, Abraham and Isaac. It enables Isaac to have his own children and is at the origin of the Shlosha Avot: Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the three fathers/patriarchs present in so many prayers and blessings in Judaism. The number three, as I note, accompanies Abraham on his journey.
It is this open, intergenerational temporality that inaugurates thirdness as it establishes a link with another time and another space that is not the here-and-now.
The paternal function has been largely ignored in contemporary British object relations theory, which has tended to focus on the mother–infant relationship. This is in contrast with the multitude
of writings on the paternal function in the French tradition.2 My own thinking alternates between the pre-oedipal and the maternal, emphasizing the notion of a primitive, archaic temporality based on rhythmic corporeal and perceptual experiences linked to phantasies about the mother’s body on the one hand and the understanding of the paternal, derived from attempts to comprehend aspects of male sexuality as well as the borderline and the violent patient, on the other. The movement between these paradigms is that of a pendulum – “like a beating heart, bobbing and tossing” (to quote the philosopher Epstein in Nurith Aviv’s 2004 film, From Language to Language, when he refers to how he moves between French and