ADOPTING A
FATHER: A commentary
Adopting a Father is to put into question the concept of the
normal parental role. It is not only a reversal of role but also expresses
dissatisfaction with the existing birth father. Furthermore this is the action of self-authorisation that
only an adult who is no longer dependent on parental care and authority is in a
position to carry out. Provocation
or invitation, the title invites both positions as sites to explore how we
might make sense of ourselves when confronted with a father who disappointed us
but more painfully we know we are disappointment to him
Adoption is a process where a child
is removed from their birth parents and placed permanently with new parents.
The reason for this dramatic change in a child’s life is mostly because the
birth parents are viewed as unfit to parent and potentially damaging to the
child’s physical and emotional wellbeing. The new parents are subject to
lengthy assessments in order to establish that they will be fit parents for the
child. Fit in short hand means normal, in other words not child abusers, not
addicts, not utterly neglectful and unreliable. The new parents will offer the
child a secure and loving home, a normal home. The idea that only parents who
physically and psychologically abuse their children do damage to them is a
limited perspective; in fact
in psychoanalytic thinking and also evidenced in psychiatry, over attentive
parents can go so far as to cause psychosis in their children. So it is not too little but too much
love that can also be damaging to psychic wellbeing.
It is well known in psychoanalytic
circles that Freud wrote a paper touching upon this subject called The Family
Romance. It is unsurprisingly a paper also referred to in the field of
adoption. What it explores is a common childhood phantasy that children believe
they do not really come from the family they are in, but another family where
they really belong and from whom they have been taken away. They feel they just do not belong in
their own family, that they are strangers from another family, a place often
much better than where they are.
This phantasy family has status and offers a privileged position and
special place of importance to the child.
What this speaks to is complex, but it is an expression of
dissatisfaction about feeling misrecognised, mistreated and ignored. Clearly this is a narcissistic
phantasy but it is one of great complexity, it is one which addresses the sense
of isolation and alienation felt
in childhood, it is one that many people would be ashamed to admit to as
it is about a criticism of parental love and rivalrous feelings towards
brothers and sisters. These are dangerous ideas to harbour in the close knit
life of the nuclear family; a danger like this is frequently repressed to the
site of unconsciousness, to the site of childhood amnesia.
When the helpless dependence of
childhood is outgrown the adult as an autonomous being is in a position to make
her own decisions, including how they relate to family ties. However by the
time adult hood is reached the dependence and serfdom of childhood has already
shaped who we are and how we form and conduct our relationships with others.
One of the most foundational
aspects of this childhood resides in the particularity of our family relations, how we are loved and treated and how
these are saturated with the
expectations our parents have both conscious and unconscious around our gender. The question we can see
being raised in Ilkers work is the nature of these gendered family relations,
the forms that love takes within the family and the effects they have on who we
take ourselves to be. For example
what would it be like for a girl child parented by a father who was
disappointed in her because he wanted a boy? What would it be like for a child
to be borne to a mother who hated the father for making her pregnant? What
effect would a father have upon his son if he was insecure about his own
masculinity, what expectations would be placed upon the son to compensate for
the fathers gender insecurity? How do these very problematic conflicts get
played out in the process of parenting , how does the child understand them ,
decode them if they are denied or for that matter the parent tells them they
are not wanted or should have been a boy?
Ilker’s work presents the field of
parental desire, its failures, disappointments and longings, circulating as a force field
buried in the everyday acts of parental love. Ilker’s work helps us ask
questions about the effects of the parental field on our gendered
identity. The bewildered infant
lives in an environment of confusion, conflicted desire and contradiction where
the parents say one thing and do another, where there will be no answers to his
or her questions to end this uncertainty.
Looking back on the example of the father who has an insecure relation
to his masculinity one could speculate not only on how this would be manifested
in the father but also on the expectations the father would have for the son. A
son who is burdened with the task of propping up his father’s unstable
masculinity, perhaps becuase the father may feared he is homosexual or wished
he had followed that route in his own life. Such a desire would be a continous
threat to his idea of manliness and potency and an anathema for his son.
However nothing transmits more powerfully than a repressed desire. Driven by a
relentless anxiety whatever form it takes. The son has to try to make sense of
his the father, what does he want? A question the father himself cannot answer
or make sense of but for the son is fundamental if he is to gain the love of
his father. If I do for father
what he most desires for himself he will certainly love me. Whatever sense the
son makes of his father’s desires, they may not be what the father consciously
said he wanted. The son as a young
man could to take the route of hyper macho man, a high achiever in business, an
inveterate woman user, alternatively a meek man who seeks out a place where
there is a minimal demand to be manly this could be to be attracted to certain
kinds of female partnerships, a reclusive life style or possibly homosexuality.
It could be a man who is violent towards women to prove his masculinity is not
to be doubted.
The proposition Ilker puts before
us is one which suggests all is not well in the normal biological family unit,
no surprises there, but he is clearly focused in this instance on the failure
of the father. To adopt another father one which is not your biological father
is to suggest that the adopted figure is one which has been subject to
conscious idealisation. This is then an act of choosing the form of masculinity
which offers an alternative site for the daily performance of masculinity.
Perhaps a place where there is a sense or recognition for the anxiety of not
knowing rather than its suppression and mastery in the curious masquerades
offered to you by your own father.
The instability structuring male subjectivity has become an
increasingly theorised field since it was first brought into doubt within early
psychoanalytic writing, that gender is not simply a matter of biology but also
a socially determined and profoundly psychological event. What is natural is no
longer given over to nature. It is little wonder then that looking for
alternative fathers particularly if you are a man, becomes a project about
alternative masculinity’s. The emergence of the bromate is a register of recent
manifestation for dissatisfaction, with the notion of male relations. The
softer less rigidly gendered metrosexual male and the notion of the new man
again signal a desire for a different site in which=h to be a man.
However masculinity is not simply a question of taking on new
and different roles by men. What marks a man’s gender is not what he does nor
for that matter his sexual relations, biology and gender should not be
conflated here. Famously the tale of masculinity is located in the violent and
desperate myth of Oedipus. In order to remove the curse that plagued the city
of Thebes Oedipus had to solve the riddle of the sphinx, which as we know was
man. The riddle describes man in three different modes of being in the world,
crawling as a baby on all fours, walking on two legs as an as adult and using a
walking stick in old age. The multiple images that ilker’s works and reworks draw our attention to these three different ways of
being a man and of rethinking masculinity.
Thebes is cursed because Oedipus killed his father and
married his mother. The law of the father states clearly that you can have any
women you like except the one you want who is mine. Ilker wants to question the
oedipal myths account of how we acquire masculinity. He focusses on the different modes of being a man,
relocating our focus away from the violent possession of the woman as the
primary way to secure a male identity. Ilker proposes there are many ways of
being a man and that the oedipal assurance of masculinity is the biggest myth
of them all. This idea has been with psychoanalysis since its emergence one
hundred years ago. There are many ways of performing masculinity which depart from stereotypes on offer, to
depart from them is to take a risk but at least you are not fooled into
thinking that with enough effort you can securer
masculinity as a personal possession. It was never there as an object in the
world that could be secured in the first place.
The role of the father as the
transmitter of male identity is under scrutiny in this work. We need a new myth and
Ilker proposes that the sphinx could offer a possibility. The sphinx is part bird, part animal
and part woman, a creature of hybridity that enigmatically but resolutely poses
a riddle in place of identity. Man
is the name of a creature hopelessly marked by its own organs the very site of
violence out of which its identity is borne. Oedipus when he could see was
blind to himself, he blinded himself only at the very moment he could see
himself, what he saw he never wanted to see again. However, Oedipus is not the main character to look for in
this work, this is not a son killing his father to take his place. To adopt a father does not mean killing
off your own but to find ways of being out side of the violence which inscribes
male identity, a place which is a riddle that can refuse the identifiable.
Ilric Shetland
April 2015
