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Father's age Volume 23, issue 4, Octobre-Novembre-Décembre 2021

Author
Société de psychanalyse freudienne, Paris, France
* Tirés à part

To be concerned with the age of the father engages several levels of reflection according to whether one questions the real father, the imaginary father or the symbolic father. As a psychoanalyst, it is this dimension of the symbolic father, which will hold my attention; it is the one, which conditions our psychic organization, namely the construction of our subjective identity, the affirmation of our sexual identity as well as our capacity to become a parent in our turn. Several questions are addressed here: is there an ideal age to be a father? How do we work on the question of origins, the desire for a child and transmission at a time when the law authorizes ART for all and when the claim of an infinite number of identity postures erected as new norms pulverizes the universal notion of the difference of the sexes, thus shaking one of the major foundations of our civilization? Faced with these paradoxical parentalities that he must accompany, what can be the positioning of the psychoanalyst?