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The Telemachus Complex
Parents and Children after the Decline of the Father
Massimo Recalcati (Author), Alice Kilgarriff (Translated by)
9781509531721, Polity Press
Paperback / softback, published 6 September 2019
160 pages
19.6 x 13 x 1.5 cm, 0.204 kg
‘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
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.
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
Subject Areas: Society & culture: general [JF]
