Family Complexes

The notion of complex family was introduced at the beginning of the XX° by Carl Gustav Jung which, in its experiments of associations, discovered the Complexe S and realized that the members of the same family often had similar complexes. Thereafter it was not interested directly any more in this concept.

the family complexes is one of the first texts of Jacques Lacan, is the meeting of two articles written in 1936 for the French Encyclopédie at the request of the professor of psychology Henri Wallon. After multiple revisions operated by the editors and Lacan, they were published in 1938 in the volume VIII of the Encyclopedia entitled " The life mentale".

The text on the family complexes is an important text, because it summarizes the intervention of 1936 in Marienbad on the " stage of the miroir": " The complexes familiaux" is a text of transition because it comprises the whole of the conceptual recasting of pre-war period of Lacan and a starter from definition of new concepts of a system in full development.

This text is famous obscure being. However, thanks to the multiple rewritings, Lacan made a dense continuation of it, but of a logic relentless. This text should be read as a mathematical theorem where each term of the statement is meaning and where the terms are connected between them by a complex but strongly articulated structure.

The family

Lacan poses initially the principles on which it will build its reasoning by giving the precise definition of the family from which it will build the scaffolding of the complexes. For him the human family is governed by a principle of mutual attraction. The mental communication plays a great part there. The economy of the instincts is not the same one as in the animal groups because, at the human one, the instincts can be subjected to conversions and inversions. The family is determined by a double biological relation:

the generation which allows the constitution of the group
the conditions of the " milieu" (umwelt) which allows the maintenance of this group by ensuring the development of the young people. This maintenance gives place at the same time to a conservation, a transmission of the values, and with a progress.

For Lacan, the family is a collective work about the culture, a term which it employs with the German direction of civilization.

Three family complexes: weaning, intrusion, Oedipus.

These three complexes are to be heard like three " phases" and precedes what Lacan will develop post-war period in the topics of reality, of imaginary and of the symbolic system.

What the complex for Lacan? The complex is included/understood by its reference to the object. It develops according to three authorities:

its CONTENTS is representative of an object, it is an image (for example image of the center). It is a relation of knowledge to this object.

Its FORM is characteristic of the psychic stage of development to which it is formed. It is its emotional organization. It is related to a lived stage of the objectivation (for example the complex of weaning).

Its ACTIVITY is the capacity of repetition in lived of the reality of the " ambiance" who governed the formation of the complex (for example the oceanic Sentiment, the desire to amalgamate with totality). This repetition occurs at the time of tests to the shock of reality during the life. It shows an objective deficiency in a current location.

In the human family, the objectivation is not done according to an instinctive fixity, but each new form emerges from the conflicts of the preceding one with reality.

The complexes are primarily unconscious factors and it is in the unconscious expression (dream, lapse) that their unit appears. The basic element of it is an unconscious representation: the image.

Prematurity of the human one

The complex of weaning forms the image of the maternal center, i.e. of the intra-uterine habitat. The intra-uterine life guaranteed conditions of environment and nutrition which formed a parasitic balance. This balance is broken by the birth. The child has vital impotence (not myelinisation of the nerve centres, delay of the apparatuses and functions, chaos of feeling, misses driving coordination…) who lasts beyond the first two years. During the first six months of the life, the small human being saw a faintness indeed paramount due to an insufficient adaptation to the rupture of the intra-uterine life. The reality on which the complex of weaning is based is the need for the human infant of a parasitic life in the first times after its birth By complex of weaning, Lacan understands a process of rupture with the parasitic life independent of the process of the ablaction (fine of breast feeding). Weaning does nothing but give the first and the most adequate psychic expression to the imago of an older weaning which is that of the birth, separation always premature of the maternal center and " that no maternal care cannot compenser".

Parcelling out of the image of the body

The complex of intrusion signs the constitution of the identity, of the unit of the body. Its contents are the imago of the other, its form that of the perception of the form of the similar one. The age of its development is located by Lacan between 6 months and 2 years. Its moment genetic is mirror stage, that Lacan will describe in 1949 as a particular case of the function of the imago which is to establish a relation of the organization to its reality, i.e. of In Umwelt The activity of the complex of intrusion, i.e. its capacity of repetition in lived of reality at the time of tests of reality during the life is the infantile jealousy, which is found for example later in the jealousy in love.

Progress of psychology made it possible according to Lacan to understand that it is not a question here of a vital competition, but of a mental identification. Whereas the feeling of diffuse faintness related to the constitutional prematurity of the human being formed the funds of the complex of weaning, in the complex of intrusion, it is of a body given by the proprioceptivity as parcelled out, victim of a prolonged incoordination, and presenting a discordance of the impulses and functions which it is necessary to triumph by giving him a unit. The psychic tendencies aim then at a " sticking together of the body propre" , but also with a scheduling of the space, him also lived hitherto as parcelled out and conquered by successive statics of the child.

If the intrusion of the other occurs at the time when the subject is in prey with the distress of weaning, the successive reactivation of weaning, brings the subject to a regression which evolves/moves, in its pathological forms according to the destiny of the individual, like regression in schizophrenic psychosis or hypochondriac neurosis, or like imaginary destruction in perverse impulses or obsessional culpability.

On the other hand, if the intrusion of the other occurs after the Oedipus complex, it is adopted on the plan of the parental identifications which is a richer structure. It is not any more one obstacle or a reflection, but a person worthy of love or hatred. The aggressive impulses are sublimated in tenderness or severity.

Psychological puberty

In the " Complexes familaux" , Lacan calls in question the primacy of the Oedipus complex in the psychic relations of the human family posed by Freud. Lacan locates the apogee of the genital impulses of the child in the 4th year and speaks about it like premature psychological puberty compared to physiological puberty. One thus finds here the concept of prematurity which it had applied to the birth and its complex of weaning.

The prematurity of the impulses compared to the relative of opposite sex generates a frustration which the child reports to the third object, the of the same relative sex, indicated like obstacle with the impulse. On another side, intuition that the child has sexual relationship of this relative with the wished relative, its for him an example of transgression of an interdict which is posed to him with him.

The of the same person sex is thus at the same time agent of prohibition and transgression. The tension finds a double resolution in repression of the sexual tendency which forms the super-ego (repression of sexuality), and in sublimation of the reality which forms the ego ideal. These two authorities remain registered in psychism in a permanent way.

The analysis of the Oedipus gives the opportunity to Lacan to raise the question of the social forms. The matriarchy, by separating the functions from repression and sublimation in the father, brings certainly a harmony and one notes the absence of certain neuroses related to the double function of the father in the patriarchate. But it is also the place of the social stagnation and that of the cruel rigors (human sacrifices) related to the phantasms of the paramount relation to the mother.

The patriarchate émancipe of this tyranny matriarcale and marks the end of the royal murder, whose promise of Abraham is the most known figure. Thus, the patriarchate introduces into repression an ideal of promise. The patriarchal culture doubly affirms the requirements of the person and the universalization of the ideals. The latter find their expression in the social structure by the extension of the rights and the preferences to the unit of a company. The modern structure of the family and the institution of the marriage are marked by this individualization with the personal preponderance of the spouse who was established there with the detriment of the social choice.

It is in this context that it is necessary to analyze and include/understand the anguish of the modern man.

The family structure shows a power in the production of the conditions morals of the creation born of the sublimation which exceeds any educational rationalization. To allow each one " to conclude according to its désirs" is a power which is opposed to the theories of a social education with totalitarian aiming.

References

Imago

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