Abstract

The clinical reflection on the “maternal ravage” is an effort to analyze whether it should rise to the level of a concept within psychoanalytic theory. By naming it, Lacan exposes the constitutive nature of the phenomenon as the inherently deadly side of the libidinization that the Desire-of-the-Mother introduces in the genesis of the subject. This is how the hypothesis emerges that this term refers to a structural fact to be studied within the clinic of the neuroses, in both male and female sexed subjects. Given the ravage responds to the failure of the symbolic to envelop the mother’s enjoyment, the father-symptom’s insufficiency to interpret the maternal desire is questioned, to the extent that the latter is backed up by another void: the absence of a significant that can articulate the female sex in the unconscious. Therefore, if the father-symptom also has a structural failure to make of the mother a woman who causes his desire, then both sexes have difficulties in accepting the woman within her.

Keywords: Maternal ravage | Desire-of-the-Mother | Insufficiency of the Father | Maternal superego