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Family is usually defined as a group of persons related by marriage or blood ties, or even by adoption—and also by the family bond.

Psychoanalysis contains an implicit concept of family. It emphasizes the functions of each family member and the prescriptions and prohibitions governing the relationships between them, which influence conflicts, fantasies, and the psychic agencies. The family is a unit that consists of something more than a series of individuals; it is a group to which they belong and that provides support with its rules, which are as obscure and powerful as those of the unconscious and that thus ensure the family's coherence and cohesion. The family has many purposes: providing for its members' material and psychic needs and conceiving and developing the child until his accession as a subject. Each parent transmits a legacy that the child will have to negotiate in connection with its wishes. The family also has a function in terms of play, creating the space and time for leisure and reverie.

Before Freud, doctors took little interest in the family. The patient was studied in the present, without reference to childhood history, to the context in which he had developed, or to his father or mother, except to identify any hereditary predispositions that would reinforce the prevailing hypothesis concerning degeneration in mental patients. Freud raised the family to a preeminent position. However, after he quickly abandoned the seduction theory, the family headed by a seducer changed its status from a real entity to a theoretical fantasy. Freud still addressed the family as a real entity in the form of the primal horde (1912-1913a), with the authoritarian father put to death by his sons who were excluded from sharing the women. Freud subsequently returned to this hypothesis as to the origin of culture. For example, his group psychology (1921c) helped to explain family psychology. It may even be that he envisaged the functioning of the group and the crowd as an archaic family dominated by a leader (father) at whom his subjects direct their (ego) ideal cathexes. This model bears a curious resemblance to the family of ancient Rome, in which the father was the uncontested leader around whom the life of the household revolved. There are some revealing exceptions to this lack of interest in the real family, for instance, the account that the child's father gives to Freud in the analysis of "Little Hans" (1909b). It was not unusual at the time for a single analyst to treat different members of the same family.

As the real family receded from the picture, the representations of the parents gained ground, particularly through the increased interest in object relations. The shifting importance of the family relates to developments in the theory of trauma. However, the real problem is discovering not whether the original theory of trauma was definitively abandoned by Freud but whether it was given anything other than a factual status. It would then not simply be the presence of the object or the primary maternal care that contributed to introjections but the parent's subjectivity, desires, fantasies, and affects—in other words, the force of his unconscious desire, which orients the child's ideals by proposing an ideal that reinforces his self-esteem when he experiences it as an important part of himself and which awakens the life of the drives by seducing him.

The analytic theory of the family is based on this model. It addresses the way in which the reciprocal cathexes between its members are managed and mobilized. Donald Winnicott explained this unconscious functioning as a productive network of interrelated fantasies giving rise to a generative illusion on the part of the mother and her child, whose attuned psyches are connected by primary narcissistic identifications. This generates the concept of the bond: An object relationship would be inconceivable without its counterpart, in other words, without the cathexis that the external object creates of the former and applies to him (Eiguer, 1987).

Furthermore, the concept of the bond is complicated by the dual nature of filiation. The family romance (Freud, 1909c [1908]) is a fantasy in which the child gives himself another origin by imagining himself to be adopted or illegitimate. While assuaging his oedipal anxieties, he seeks, by inventing better or prestigious parents for himself, to preserve the previous idealization of his own parents. However, in giving himself other parents (or one other) than his own, he acknowledges an essential dimension of filiation: The parental roles are not equivalent to the procreative functions—they can even be independent of these. In matrilineal cultures in particular, the father's role of strict educator reverts to an uncle who is related to the mother. Although Freud's discovery relates to a set of fantasies, this nevertheless accords with the idea of an underlying imago-based structure. The transgenerational figure of the ancestor ultimately evokes this spiritual fatherhood in the other of the father, the fourth family member.

ALBERTO EIGUER

See also: Collective psychology; Intergenerational; Law of the Father; Psychoanalytic family therapy; Secret; Sociology and psychoanalysis, sociopsychoanalysis.