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[The paternal relationship is] … a relationship with a stranger who, while being someone else, is also a part of me.
—Levinas 1982, pp. 63-64, translation by Steven Jaron
Freud placed the father's function at the core of the acculturation process, as well as at the center of the construction of the individual subject. Anthropologists, moreover, generally agree that a transcultural paternal function exists (Godelier 1996, 2004; Lévi-Strauss 1969; Malinowski 1948). In every culture, the relationship with the father is fundamental. It marks the evolution of a direct object-cathexis toward a more complex relationship based on identification. The child takes possession of his father through identification, which results in a highly ambivalent relationship characterized by love and hate. But above all, the process of identification opens the way to otherness.
The first identification prior to object choice, for both boys and girls, is identification with the father of personal prehistory:
Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It plays a part in the early history of the Oedipus complex. A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like
Translation by Steven Jaron.
Page 27him and be like him, and take his place everywhere…. This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father …; it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the way. [Freud 1921, p. 105]
Though it is well known and clear in boys, this identification also exists in women and is at the origin of the ego-ideal tied to the superego, itself essentially constituted by identifications with early parental objects. The formation of the female superego is made more complex by the father's dual position as the original seducer but also guarantor of the law. Later, the girl may give up her oedipal attraction to the f