The Son's Secret
Reads the figure of the son from Oedipus to the prodigal son to rethink inheritance.
Recalcati sets Sophocles' Oedipus beside the New Testament parable of the prodigal son and reads the two figures against each other to map the psychic position of the son. Working from a Lacanian account of desire and the law, he argues that most parenting, whether it commands or negotiates, quietly conscripts the child into completing a plot written before he arrived, so that the son's life becomes the realisation of the parents' own fantasies rather than his own.
The secret of the title is what the son rarely says aloud: he wants to be recognised as separate, singular, and free to follow a desire that is his and not an inheritance handed down. Recalcati locates the parental task in tolerating that separation and clearing room for it, instead of sealing the child's fate in advance.
Polity published Alice Kilgarriff's translation in 2020, three years after the Italian original. For clinicians, it offers a compact frame for hearing filial guilt, refusal, and the wish to be known.
About the author
Massimo Recalcati
Massimo Recalcati (born 1959) is an Italian psychoanalyst and writer who works within the Lacanian tradition. He is known for his clinical and theoretical work on eating disorders, particularly anorexia and bulimia, and for books on love, contemporary subjectivity, and the reading of myth. In 2003 he founded Jonas Onlus, a network of centres for the psychoanalytic treatment of new symptoms, and he serves as scientific director of IRPA, the Institute for Applied Psychoanalysis Research. He teaches at IULM in Milan and writes regularly for the press.
Details
- 2017
- 2020
- Il segreto del figlio
- Italian
- Alice Kilgarriff
- Polity
- Polity
- 120
- 9781509531752