The Telemachus Complex: Parents and Children after the Decline of the Father [Paperback]

Fatherhood today is in crisis. Fathers have gone missing, or have become their childrens playmates, and the symbolic authority of the father has lost its power. What remains of the father today in the wake of this decline, and what should the relation between children and parents now be??

In addressing these questions, Massimo Recalcati draws inspiration from the story of Telemachus in Homers?Odyssey. The Telemachus complex is the reverse of the Oedipus complex. Recalcati argues that children are possessed not just with a desire to annihilate their father, as their key rival in the contest to win the mothers love, but also with a longing for a father-figure, as someone who brings meaning, structure and order to their lives and who imbues them with a sense of the future.?

This fresh and insightful account of the changing relations between parents and children in the era of the decline of the father will be of great interest to a wide general readership.

Introduction
1. The Law of the Word and the New Hell
Praying Is No Longer Like Breathing; Aphonia and the Fathers Amnesia; The Hell of Sal?; The Law of the Word; How Do We Transmit the Word of the Law?; We are A Scream in the Night; Escape From Freedom; The Fantasy of Freedom As a Hypermodern Fantasy; Mass Freedom; Dying to Work
2. The Confusion Between Generations
The Parents Task; The Law and the laws; Adulterations; Transgression, or an Appeal to the Law?; A New Discontent of Youth; The Trauma of the Non-Existence of the Sexual Relationship; Femicidal Violence; The Technological Object and Depression in Youth; Evaporation and Invention
3. From Oedipus to Telemachus
Four Types of Child; The Child-as-Oedipus; The Anti-Oedipal Child; The Child-as-Narcissus; The Child-as-Telemachus
4. What Does It Mean To Be A Rightful Heir?
Inheritance as Reclalƒ8