Perversion the Social Relation

58 Bruce Finkship between words and the world (signifiers and "reality"), and on themovements and displacements within language itself (metaphor and metonymy),provide the necessary linguistic basis for understanding thecrucial role of the Freudian father. The paternal function served by thelatter is grounded in linguistics: his function is a symbolic one. His crucialrole is not to provide love—as the popular mind is so likely to sustain—butto represent, embody, and name something about the mother'sdesire and her sexual difference: to metaphorize it. 49 Serving a symbolicfunction, he need not be the biological father, or even perhaps a man. Itis the symbolic function itself that is essential.The Paternal Metaphor as Explanatory PrincipleUnderstood as involving two distinct logical moments, and as instatingthe symbolic order as such, the paternal metaphor can be usefully understoodas providing a subject with an "explanatory principle," an explanationof the why and wherefore of its having been brought into theworld, an interpretation of the constellation of its parents' desire (andoftentimes grandparents' desire, as well) that led to its being born.For the neurotic, there is always some sort of explanatory principle;there is always a little story, vague and confusing as it may be, aboutwhy our parents wanted us, or perhaps didn't want us at firstbut grew tolove us. This little story tells us something about the place we occupy intheir desire—not the place we occupy in the universe as a whole, scienceseeming to provide us with such insignificant places in it (the universecontains, as Carl Sagan says, "billyuns and billyuns of galaxies")—andthis space in their desire, however small, is our foothold in life.But what are we wanted for? That is the question. 50 If we are wantedonly as an extension of one parent, and expected to devote ourselves tothat parent's "sexual service," trouble ensues. We must be wanted forsomething else, something perhaps extremely obscure: "We just wantyou to be happy," "We want you to achieve something important," "Wewant you to make us proud." As anxiety producing as such parental desiresoften are to the neurotic, they are part of the price that must bepaid to stave off the "worst."The delusional metaphor constructed by a psychotic serves to make upfor the lack of just such an explanatory principle. The psychotic's delu-