'My Heart Belongs to Daddy': Some Reflections on the Difference Between Generations as the Organiser of the Triangular Structure of the Mind

Abstract

The author begins his paper with a historical review of the concept of the difference between generations, which is in his opinion a metaphorical transformation that underpins the three-dimensional functioning of the psychic apparatus by introducing a differentiating intergenerational space between subject and object. He postulates that at the point of intersection between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic the subject clings to the specific fragments of his parents' history that are consistent with a belief about himself and the oedipal couple in which intergenerational links are severed and infantile incestuous wishes are seen as fulfilled. Disavowal of this generation gap is considered to lead to failure of post-oedipal secondary identifications, resulting in disturbance of the triangular structuring of the mind and consequent impairment of the genesis of thought processes. These ideas are compared with related conceptions of other authors and illustrated, with an account of the associated transference/countertransference vicissitudes, by a clinical example of the constellation the author calls 'My heart belongs to daddy', which he sees as a way station in the negotiation of the female Oedipus complex.

Second thoughts onAgieren: Listening to the enacted

“…This double modality of unconscious processing, at once verbal and imaginary-gestural, leads us to conceive the subject in a perpetual, everthwarted, attempt to link, to bind these never-verbally-thought archaic remnants to libidinal narratives with the objects of potential intersubjective reality, where something of the archaic, inscribed as a psychic gesture, can then be reappropriated in a new form which is integratable with the more evolved functioning of the psyche. The question is to find the intrasubjective sameness in intersubjective otherness (Sapisochin, 1999a(Sapisochin, , 2006(Sapisochin, , 2008. Milner (1952, p. 97) sets out the process of symbol formation as a psychic work that permits the individual to find the familiar of his unseen inner self in the unfamiliar of the external world.…”

“…And yet, from the initial description of a particular phenomenon in the analytic practice of the 1970s, encouraged by listening to traumata negativized in one generation, the effects of which reverberate in the psyche of subsequent generations, we have come to consider that these intergenerational identificatory processes might be universal in scope. This is the upshot of the original psychic helplessness of the human subject, who primarily needs to cathect an other who, in turn, cathects him and irreducibly does him violence by projectively attributing to him a certain identificatory position with internal objects of his own past history pertaining to past generations (Sapisochin, , , ). This other becomes a necessary condition in the ‘epigenetic structuring’ of the subjective identity, by providing the modality of giving meaning to experience in drive terms (Laplanche, ).…”

A Boy and Two Mothers: New Variations on an Old Theme or a New Story of Triangulation? Beginning Thoughts on the Psychosexual Development of Children in Nontraditional Families.

“…As with so many other unpleasant aspects of reality, children often try to undo reality by opposition in fantasy. In 1913 Ernest Jones (as noted by Sapisochin, 1999) addressed the child's wish to reverse generations by imagining that adults get progressively smaller as children get larger. The triumphant child has now obliterated the generational distinction and “become father to the man”—that is, he has fathered himself.…”