Freud’s work progressively elaborates the role of the father. In Studies on Hysteria (1895), he emphasises the importance of a real seduction of his female patients by their father; in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) unconscious phantasies are discovered; Totem and Taboo introduces the notion of the distinction between the murdered father and the dead father; and in Moses and Monotheism (1939) Freud puts forward his notion of a more abstract, paternal function (Stoloff, 2007).

Lacan was the first psychoanalyst who gave conceptual status to the term dead father, utilised by Freud in Totem and Taboo, establishing the equation between the symbolic father and the dead father.  This line of thinking was further developed by Rosolato (1969) in his distinction between the idealised father and the dead father.  In my own work I have elaborated the distinction between the murdered father and the dead father and its crucial presence in the clinic (Perelberg, 2009, 2011, 2013b). If the Oedipus story represents the former – the story of the murdered father, and patricide as a universal, infantile phantasy – the Oedipus complex represents the latter – the dead father as the symbolic third. Continue reading, click on attachment below.