L'agressivité paternelle, hier et aujourd'hui

When the psychological, psychiatric and psychoanalytical literatures abound in developing the theme of the children's aggressive desires towards his father, few mentions is made of the father's aggressivity towards his child. This is much unfortunate for the theory as well as for the clinic. This paper, after having shown how this theme is though recurrent through mythology, considers the deep psychic shake-up as well as the possible uneasiness generated by the irruption of a child, from his conception, into the life of a man becoming a father. The paper reports this uneasiness by evoking various psychic processes called upon when the child comes up: appearance of a “forclos” signifier, various identifications leading to a re-update of infantile desires, namely oedipal ones, maturation in the generational axis. The paper ends up with an evocation, through short clinical illustrations, of the psychotherapeutic approaches when such difficulties occur.