LacanianOnline

  He wasn’t obviously cruel. He smiled. Sometimes, he laughed. Sometimes, he held you in a way that made you believe—just for a moment—that the world was safe. But cruelty doesn’t always announce itself with a whip. Sometimes, it seduces. Sometimes, it withholds. Sometimes, it tortures quietly—in ways so subtle, so enduring, they echo through a lifetime. This isn’t a personal diary—though it could be. It’s a map of a kind of fatherhood that has marked many lives, including mine: Fathers who love by dominating, who enjoy through deception, who mask abuse with charm and authority. The perverse father What Is a Perverse Father? The term "perverse" often gets lost in moral panic and sexualized caricature. But in Lacanian psychoanalysis, perversion is not primarily about acts — it is about structure. Specifically: a père-version — a psychic configuration in which the child turns toward the father not as a bearer of symbolic law or a storyteller of limits, but as one ...

  The Woman Does Not Exist: Lacan, Gender, and the Fantasy of Identity In the previous post, we explored Jacques Lacan’s provocative statement: “There is no such thing as a sexual relationship.” We clarified that this doesn’t mean there’s no sex — but that sex, in Lacan’s view, doesn’t guarantee mutual understanding or symbolic unity between partners. Instead, it often reveals a fundamental gap between subjects. In this post, we’ll explore another equally disruptive idea in Lacanian psychoanalysis: “The Woman does not exist.” Let’s be clear: Lacan is not denying the existence of real women. He is not saying women as people don’t exist. Rather, he’s questioning the existence of The Woman — with a capital W — as a stable, universal essence or truth about what it means to be a woman. What Does It Mean to Say "The Woman Does Not Exist"? Lacan’s phrase "La femme n'existe pas" challenges the notion of a singular, coherent idea of womanhood. In psychoanalytic terms...