The role of the father is to guide the child into the world

Presenting his book in Moscow, Luigi Zoya admitted that the reason for writing it was the observation that among publications on psychology, there are eight books about mothers for one book about a father. The exaltation of the role of women (both in child development and in society) has become a distinct trend in science and culture in general. Modern men are disoriented about their gender identity: raised by women, they are forced to play by the rules invented for them by their mothers.

A personal discovery that prompted Zoya to write a book was an understanding of the role of a father’s gesture – to raise a child on outstretched arms above him. He found the first mention of this gesture in Homer’s Iliad (Hector’s gesture). In ancient Greece, the father, not the mother, gave life to the child, biological childbirth did not play a special role. Much more important were social births, that is, a symbolic gesture – the proclamation of a child as his heir. Raising a child to the sky where the gods dwell means creating a connection with the spiritual dimension. The mother gives birth to an animal, and the father gives birth to a man. Maternal is natural and primary, given to us by default (mother and matter are the same root words in many languages). And the concept of “father”, as Zoya shows with examples from evolutionary biology, arises only in the process of cultural development. The father deals with ideals, values, norms, social connections, designing the future. The mother produces the child, and the father directs it into the world.

Today, everything is different: a man helps to produce a child, and then is reduced to the role of a breadwinner. But from the point of view of psychoanalysis, the earner, the breadwinner is not a man at all: feeding is the function of the mother. It is not even the mother that is projected onto the man, but the so-called partial object – the mother’s breast. There can be no relationship with the breast, it can only be consumed. Not surprisingly, men resist becoming surrogate mothers to their wives: they procrastinate or refuse to enter into marriages that threaten to castrate masculinity instead of realizing it.

This is why a detailed analysis of ancient patterns of paternity is important to us. We want to know how, at what turn of history we lost our father. Its role must be restored, otherwise modern Western man is literally threatened with extinction. Zoya’s book gives men a sense of the importance of their mission, helps women understand and accept the positive side of patriarchy, and helps readers of both genders to build relationships with their (bad and absent) fathers, whom they tend to blame for all troubles.

* Luigi Zoya took part in the international conference “Fathers and Sons” organized by the Moscow Association of Analytical Psychology (MAAP) in October this year.