The Law of the Mother

Genevieve Morel sets the mother beside the father in the formation of the symptom. Where Lacanian teaching has fixed on the paternal function, she traces how a mother's speech, saturated with jouissance, marks the child and conditions the later shape of the sinthome and of sexual position. Her argument runs through maternal subjection: whether and how a subject separates from that early inscription to reach a sexual identity of their own.

Morel builds the case from clinical material, reading sexual ambiguity, transsexualism, and the impasses of sexuation against Freud's Oedipus and Lacan's later work on the sinthome. She takes up biblical and literary figures alongside analysands to test the reworking.

For the clinician, the book offers a way of hearing the maternal signifier in a patient's speech and of situating a symptom as a knotting particular to that person. It also reads contemporary law on parentage, adoption, and marriage through the same frame.