(Eben min enta?) — It’s a question nearly every Lebanese has heard at some point( ”ابن مین إنت؟“ On the surface, it’s a simple inquiry about family lineage. But beneath it lies a powerful cultural logic: that your identity is not just your own — it’s inherited, named, and socially situated through your father. In many Lebanese communities, the father's name carries weight, reputation, and symbolic authority. It grants access, sets expectations, and often defines how you are seen before you've even spoken.
But what happens when the father is absent, silent, or collapsed under the weight of history? What if the function he’s meant to serve, not just as protector or provider, but as a symbolic anchor is missing, idealized, or fragmented?
In this blog, we explore the function of the father in our psychical lives. Not just the man himself, but the symbolic, emotional, and cultural structures he represents. Drawing from Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, and Al-Krenawi, we will trace the father's role in psychological development, desire, law, and loss — particularly through the lens of our own sociocultural reality.
Freud: The Primal Father and the Birth of Law
No discussion of the father in the psyche can begin without Sigmund Freud, the founding figure of psychoanalysis. For Freud, the father is not only a real person but a mythical and structural function at the heart of human subjectivity. He is both the origin of desire and the bearer of prohibition, a figure we love, rival, fear, and ultimately internalize.
Freud's key contribution to this topic is best understood through two major concepts:
This process of internalization, repression, and renunciation is essential for the child to enter the symbolic world — the world of language, culture, and rules. In other words, the father mediates the passage from nature to culture, from instinct to civilization.
Totem and Taboo: The Myth of the Primal Father
In his 1913 work Totem and Taboo, Freud extends the paternal function beyond the individual psyche to the structure of civilization itself. He proposes a mythic scene: the primal horde, led by a dominant, all-powerful father who possesses all the women and allows his sons no access to them. The sons, driven by resentment and desire, band together, kill the father, and consume his body — an act of murder and communion.
This primal crime gives rise to both guilt and law. To preserve the memory of the father and prevent future chaos, the brothers institute the totem — a symbol of the slain father — and establish taboos: no incest and no murder. Thus, society, religion, and morality are born from this foundational trauma.
While clearly speculative, Freud's myth underscores a core idea: the father represents both limit and possibility. He is the one who withholds, and therefore structures desire. Without the father’s function, whether through his presence or symbolic role, the psyche remains unbound, chaotic, and prone to regression.
The Father and the Birth of the Superego
The superego, for Freud, is the heir to the Oedipus complex — a psychic agency formed through identification with the prohibiting father. It enforces ideals, norms, and social expectations. When the father’s authority is internalized successfully, the child develops a stable conscience. But when the father is absent, inconsistent, or overly punitive, the superego becomes either too weak or too harsh, leading to neurotic guilt or moral confusion.
In modern clinical work, many patients suffer not from having a father who was too present — but from one who was symbolically absent. The result is often a lack of structure, difficulty with limits, or a persistent search for external authority to compensate for internal emptiness.
Freud and the Lebanese Psyche?
In Lebanese culture, the father is still often seen as the name, the authority, the moral compass. Yet, for many, this figure has become weakened — due to war, displacement, economic collapse, or emotional unavailability. Freud helps us understand what this means: that without a strong paternal function — not necessarily authoritarian, but structuring — the subject may feel unanchored, emotionally unregulated, or locked in cycles of rebellion without resolution.
Lacan: The Name-of-the-Father and Symbolic Authority
If Freud gave us the Oedipus complex as the blueprint of human subjectivity, Jacques Lacan reconfigured it for the modern era. For Lacan, the father is not simply a person but a function — a symbolic position that shapes how we enter the world of language, law, and social meaning.
At the center of Lacan’s theory is the concept of the Name-of-the-Father (le Nom-du-Père) — a phrase that links the father to naming, prohibition, and the symbolic order. Unlike the biological father, the Name-of-the-Father is a signifier: something that stands in for meaning, structure, and the impossibility of total fusion with the mother.
What Is the Name-of-the-Father?
The Name-of-the-Father is Lacan’s reinterpretation of the paternal function in the context of language and culture. It refers to the symbolic prohibition that interrupts the early mother-child dyad. In infancy, the child experiences the mother as an all-giving, all-absorbing presence. But this unity must eventually be broken, or the child risks remaining trapped in a state of undifferentiating.
The Name-of-the-Father is the third term that intervenes in this closed circuit. It introduces lack — not as a failure, but as the condition for desire, individuality, and speech. It says: “You cannot have the mother entirely — but you can have a world.”
This symbolic “no” allows the subject to move from imaginary fusion to symbolic structure — from pure need to a space where desires are articulated, deferred, and shared through language.
The Father Is a Function, Not a Man
Lacan insists: the father is a function, not a person. A mother can “invoke” the Name-of-the- Father even in the father's absence — for instance, by referencing the world beyond the dyad, by symbolizing law, language, or social expectations. Similarly, a father can be physically present but fail to function symbolically — for example, if he is abusive, chaotic, or does not provide any structure.
What matters is not the man himself, but whether the symbolic dimension of his role is installed in the child’s psychic life.
Foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father: A Pathway to Psychosis
One of Lacan’s most crucial contributions was linking psychosis to what he called the “foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father.” If the symbolic function of the father is not introduced or is rejected entirely, the subject lacks the organizing structure necessary to enter the symbolic order. This can lead to:
In clinical work, especially in communities marked by paternal absence — whether due to war, migration, abandonment, or social collapse — this foreclosure is not uncommon. It doesn't always result in psychosis, but it may contribute to chaotic internal worlds, trouble with limits, or fragile symbolic grounding.
The Cultural Father: Language, Law, and Social Belonging
Lacan’s concept can also be extended to culture. The “father” is often represented by institutions: religion, law, education, even the nation-state. In Lebanon, for example, religious sects, political leaders, and extended family structures often act as “paternal substitutes” — shaping what is allowed, forbidden, or idealized.
In this context, the paternal function can become:
Lacan offers a useful lens to examine not only the individual psyche but the symbolic fabric of entire societies, particularly those grappling with unstable authority and symbolic collapse.
In Therapy: Reconstructing the Father Function
Lacanian therapy does not aim to restore the biological father, but rather to re-inscribe the symbolic father — to help the subject find a place in the symbolic order, make sense of their desire, and negotiate their limits.
Clinically, this might look like:
not to dominate, but to help the subject install or access a missing third term.
Winnicott: The Father as Supportive Presence
While Donald Winnicott is often associated with the good enough mother, the transitional object, and the holding environment, he did not disregard the father. Rather, he situated the father within a relational ecology — not as a distant authority, but as a psychologically active figure who enables the early caregiving environment to be sustainable, safe, and meaningful.
In Winnicott’s view, the father is not the lawgiver or the agent of symbolic order (as in Lacan), nor the rival in a primal myth (as in Freud). Instead, he is the facilitator — someone whose presence secures the mother’s capacity to mother, and whose involvement later helps the child navigate separation, reality, and individuation.
The Father Behind the Mother
Winnicott writes, “A mother can only be as good as the environment allows her to be.” In many of his clinical reflections, the father appears just behind the mother — not hovering or dominating, but holding her so that she can hold the baby.
This is a quiet but critical role. It suggests that the father’s early function is indirect, yet deeply structural. When a mother is physically and emotionally supported, she is more capable of providing what Winnicott called primary maternal preoccupation — that intuitive, near-total attunement to the baby’s needs. But when she is emotionally neglected, overburdened, or fearful of her partner, this attunement can collapse.
In this sense, the father’s emotional availability and attuned support indirectly shape the infant’s first experience of safety, rhythm, and reliability.
The Father and the Emergence of Reality
As the child grows and moves out of fusion with the mother, the father can take on a more direct role in the child’s emotional world — becoming someone to play with, to separate through, and to negotiate frustration with. In this way, Winnicott’s father introduces reality not as a cold prohibition, but as something to explore, test, and eventually internalize.
This version of the father does not “castrate” (as in classical psychoanalysis), but co-regulates, stimulates, and anchors.
In the Lebanese Context: Between Presence and Performance
In many Lebanese families, the image of the father still leans toward the provider-protector archetype. He is often the one who works outside, who is “too tired to talk,” or who is invoked only when something needs to be corrected or forbidden. The phrase “خلي بیَك ِیشوفك” (wait until your father sees you) captures this — the father as disciplinarian, judge, or symbolic sword.
But what Winnicott invites us to consider is: what does the father make possible through his emotional presence?
Winnicott gives us a framework to explore how the father can be emotionally restorative, rather than structurally repressive.
In Therapy: The Father as a Missed Conversation
In therapeutic work, Winnicott’s perspective encourages us to look for the unsaid emotional roles. Many clients speak endlessly about their mothers — her warmth, her absence, her anxiety — but when asked about the father, there is often a pause.
Not because he wasn’t there, but because his presence wasn’t emotionally registered.
What’s mourned in therapy is often not abuse or abandonment — but the father who didn’t speak, didn’t see, didn’t intervene, not out of cruelty, but out of emotional dislocation. Winnicott helps us ask: What could that father have allowed, if he were more fully there?
Al-Krenawi: The Arab Father in Historical Perspective
If Freud, Lacan, and Winnicott theorized the father from within the Western psyche, Alean Al- Krenawi helps us think about the father from within the Arab world — a world marked not only by familial traditions, but by colonial legacies, structural violence, and collective survival.
A clinical social worker and cultural psychologist of Bedouin origin, Al-Krenawi has spent decades researching fatherhood in Palestinian, Bedouin, and Arab communities, with a particular focus on how conflict, patriarchy, and displacement shape both the symbolic and emotional dimensions of the paternal function.
The Disempowered Father: Between Trauma and Role Collapse
One of Al-Krenawi’s most poignant insights is the concept of the “disempowered father.” In contexts such as Gaza or the West Bank, where fathers may be economically incapacitated, politically persecuted, or emotionally fragmented by war, the paternal function undergoes a kind of implosion.
The father can no longer fulfill the culturally expected role of:
Instead, he becomes a witness to his own inadequacy, often withdrawing emotionally or collapsing under the weight of shame.
In the psyche of the child, this can generate:
In his work on polygamous Arab families, Al-Krenawi documents how fatherhood becomes not only strained but fragmented. When a father has multiple wives and households, his emotional availability is diluted. Children experience him as either distant, inconsistent, or accessible only through hierarchy and rivalry.
What gets internalized is not a stable paternal structure, but a sense of competition, exclusion, or emotional ambiguity. The father is not a mediator of limits, but a resource unevenly distributed, this challenges the very psychical stability that the paternal function is meant to provide.
This is crucial for Arab societies like Lebanon, where tribal loyalties, extended families, and historical patriarchal expectations still shape interpersonal life.
Fatherhood Under Occupation and Political Violence
Al-Krenawi’s research also shows how colonial conditions and war distort fatherhood. In territories under military occupation, the father often loses control over the most basic domains of life: movement, income, land, safety.
As he becomes unable to protect or provide, his symbolic position is undermined. This is not merely an economic loss — it is a psychic rupture. The child sees a father who is powerless in the face of forces larger than the family — this shifts the father from a symbol of security to a symbol of exposure.
In the Arab psyche, particularly among Palestinians and displaced populations, this transforms paternal identity from a stable reference into a site of inherited vulnerability.
Restoring the Father Function in Arab Clinical Work
Al-Krenawi argues that any clinical or therapeutic engagement with Arab communities must include a reconstruction of the paternal image — not as a return to patriarchy, but as a re- humanization of the father.
This includes:
In the Lebanese Landscape
In Lebanon, the father is often both idealized and burdened. From the strongman militia commander to the silent breadwinner, Lebanese fatherhood is shaped by civil war, migration, sectarian divisions, and persistent economic collapse. The father may be asked to “hold everything together,” yet is rarely asked how he feels.
This silence carries generational weight. Many Lebanese grow up with fathers who were physically present but emotionally unknowable — men shaped by unspoken trauma, stoic masculinity, and the constant threat of collapse. Like in Al-Krenawi’s work, the paternal wound in Lebanon is not individual — it is cultural.
Contemporary Dilemmas: Fatherhood in Crisis
Across the globe — and especially in Lebanon and other parts of the Arab world — the figure of the father is under tension. Not necessarily disappearing, but shifting, questioned, destabilized. Once seen as the bedrock of the family, the guardian of rules, the provider of structure and security, the father today finds himself caught in a web of conflicting demands and broken historical promises.
Where Freud saw the father as the bearer of prohibition, Lacan as the signifier of symbolic law, and Winnicott as the holding support of emotional reality, the 21st-century father often finds himself unsure of what role to play, or whether the role even holds.
From Authority to Ambiguity
In traditional societies, including much of Lebanon, the father’s authority was rarely questioned. His word was law. His emotions were private. His duty was to provide and protect.
But in the wake of civil war, political collapse, rising migration, and economic freefall, this model no longer holds. Today, many fathers:
Lebanese Fatherhood: Between Heroism and Silence
In Lebanon, the paternal function is often doubled:
• The father is the one who sacrificed, who “held the family together” through war, displacement, or unemployment.
• But he is also the one who was never asked how he was doing, who was taught that feelings are weakness, and who passed on silence as the only language of masculinity.
The result is a generational transmission of affective numbness, fathers who don’t speak become sons who can’t feel, and the cycle continues unless consciously interrupted.
The Loss of Symbolic Anchors
Postmodernity has weakened many of the external structures that once supported the father
function:
Fatherhood in the Digital Age
Today’s fathers are also parenting in the shadow of technology, globalized values, and
increasing psychological awareness. They are expected to:
In the Clinic: Fathers as Patients and Legacies
Therapists are increasingly encountering fathers as patients, not just as figures talked about in
their children’s stories. These are men who:
The Father in Therapy: Absence, Idealization, and Repetition
In the consulting room, the father often appears not in words, but in silences. Clients talk about their mothers in vivid, emotional detail — her anxiety, her sacrifice, her presence or intrusiveness. But when asked about the father, there’s often a long pause, a shrug, or a vague sentence like:
“He was always working.”
“He didn’t talk much.”
“He was strict, but not in a bad way.”
What emerges is a psychic absence — not necessarily because the father was physically gone, but because he was emotionally unregistered. He was there, but his presence did not symbolize anything stable, safe, or nameable.
The Two Extremes: The Absent Father and the Idealized One
Clinically, the father tends to appear in one of two poles:
• Therapists they test to see “if they’ll leave too”
This is what Freud called repetition compulsion — the unconscious reenactment of unresolved dynamics in an attempt to master them. But these repetitions aren’t just behavioral — they are symbolic efforts to install what was missing.
Sometimes, the therapeutic process itself becomes the site where the father function is restaged and re-symbolized. The therapist is not a “father” — but may function as a third, a boundary, a listener who doesn’t collapse or dominate.
Naming the Father That Was Never Named
A central therapeutic task, especially in work with patients from patriarchal or emotionally reserved cultures, is to help the client:
The father is not a fixed identity, but a moving structure — one that lives across generations, languages, silences, and systems. Whether we meet him as lawgiver, playmate, breadwinner, or ghost, he leaves a trace in our inner architecture. Not always through what he did, but often through what he failed to be, what he could not say, or what he was never allowed to feel.
Psychoanalysis gives us multiple entry points:
In Lebanon, the Father Carries a Nation’s Tensions
In Lebanese society, the father is invoked in expressions like “ابن مین إنت؟” (Eben min enta?), where identity and legitimacy are often defined by paternal lineage. He is the figure we are expected to honor, the one whose name we carry — sometimes with pride, sometimes with weight.
But for many, the father is also a man whose inner world was never known. A man formed by war, debt, or disillusionment. A man whose silence speaks louder than his words. A man who loved from a distance — or who didn’t know how to love at all.
If the maternal function binds us to life, the paternal function asks us: What will you do with it? What will you stand for? Where will you go from here?
In the Clinic, in the Culture
In therapy, we do not "find the father" — we symbolize his absence, work through his contradictions, and reclaim the space he left behind. Sometimes that means mourning. Sometimes it means naming what was never spoken. And sometimes it means becoming, slowly, the symbolic third that we never had.
To reimagine the father function today is not to return to authoritarian ideals or romanticized legacies. It is to widen the frame: to see the father as a figure of responsibility, play, regulation, structure — one who does not dominate, but supports emergence.
And So...
Maybe the father isn’t only the one who gives the name, enforces the law, or feeds the family. Maybe he’s also the one who says: “You’re not alone.”
Or even: “Go — I’m here if you fall.”
And maybe that, too, is a kind of authority — not of command, but of containment. Not of fear, but of faith.
Maybe, in the end, “ابن مین إنت؟” doesn’t only ask: whose name do you carry?
Maybe it asks: what meaning have you made of that name? And what will you do with it now?
📚 References
10. Kazdin, A. E. (2007). Evidence-based treatment and practice: New opportunities to bridge clinical research and practice. American Psychologist, 62(2), 146–159. https://bpb-us- w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.udel.edu/dist/a/358/files/2011/10/Kazdin_2007.pdf
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