Belonging2

The Great Absentee

The Western world has lost sight of the importance of the father figure, the figure who transmits to the child his identity, capacity for sacrifice, and the meaning of life. Claudio Risé, a psychoanalyst and sociology teacher, talks about this

EDITED BY LUCA PESENTI

Toward the end of the 1950s, Claudio Risé was a student at Berchet High School. One of his teachers was Fr Giussani. He was struck by his encounter with this religion teacher, with whom he became friends, but then Risé followed his own path. He studied in Geneva, becoming an assistant professor of sociology, but later gave everything up to return to Italy and be a journalist. And yet, that world was not for him; things never added up, and so he went into analysis in order to become an analyst himself, dazzled by Jung and his symbols. Today he is a famous analyst and a sociology teacher at the Università dell’Insubria in Varese. He is a solitary adventurer, but one who proudly proclaims his belonging to the Church, one who, albeit at a distance, has never forgotten the lessons he learned from Giussani and he continues to read Giussani’s books.
He easily and readily talks about fathers and fatherhood, belonging and identity. These are themes he has been dealing with for years. Now he has gathered them into a book, Il padre, l’assente inaccettabile [The Father, An Inexcusable Absentee], published by Edizioni San Paolo, which will cause debate because of its radical implications.

Care and meaning of life
"I simply want to raise the question of the psychological and symbolic differences that a son ought to be able to distinguish. The mother,” Risé explains, “transmits the care of life, while the father transmits identity and a sense of belonging–in other words, what has to do with the meaning of life. The example of Jesus’ life is absolute in this sense: He can afford to sacrifice His life by virtue of His belonging to the Father. In men’s lives, this means that belonging to the father creates one’s identity and thus his capacity for sacrifice toward his children, whether they be natural or spiritual children.” This has, according to Risé’s reasoning, fundamental (and not at all taken for granted) sociological implications. First and foremost is this one: the guiding principle of the Western world is maternal, tied to the satisfaction of needs, while the (male) principle of giving is relegated to the margins. His explanation: “There are two foundations of belonging: you can live an identity-type belonging, which refers back to a father, or a maternal kind of belonging, linking you closely with need and pleasure. As a rule, these two models coexist, but the Western idiosyncrasy is that it has gotten rid of the first principle, leaving man at the mercy of the second. The dominant model is a conservative one, tending to maintain what already exists, based on personal interest and the pleasure principle.” Its archetype, Risé maintains, is the big corporation, the triumph of the Great Mother who satisfies needs and hands out power, and does not create solidarity but rather stimulates competition in order to obtain favors (in the form of benefits, incentives, and rewards).

The eternal adolescent
In short, the man pushed to belong to nothing (because of the principle of the authenticity of the individual) has nothing left but to belong to the social worlds imposed by those in power. This is not only his employer, but we can also say it is the right and the left, or a certain kind of moralistic and politically correct thought from which no one can hold back without being reduced to exile and silence, or feeling irreparably alien because he is outside Testori’s “maximum security prisons of statistics.” But let’s go back to the Great Mother: “She is the characteristic archetype of the first phase of our life,” Risé explains, “in which we are totally dependent on our mother, to whom is assigned the exclusive task of satisfying our primary needs. Well, the reigning power has adopted this principle as a criterion of social organization, which causes the process of personal maturity to stall, creating the model of the eternal adolescent so much in vogue in our day. This dynamic creates a world of insecure hedonists who do not belong to anything, whom the corporation comes to meet half-way by reassuring them and furnishing them with meanings that are obviously false.”

Traitor fathers
All this is clear. But where has the father, in his inexcusable absence, gone? Giovanni Testori wrote in 1979 in Corriere della Sera about those traitor fathers who had coined a medal with no flip side, “the medal of easiness, that did not envision its flip side: difficulty.” They then passed it on to their children, betraying the very ones they had generated. These are fathers who betray, who refuse their children, reminding us that fatherhood is not a “natural” given but is cultural and educative. He is a traitor father, or perhaps simply absent. “Absent,” Risé states, “he certainly is, but he is somewhere.” Symbolically, phenomena like Communion and Liberation, but also other contemporary religious movements, represent a formidable paternal proposal, the only true antidote to maternal and consumeristic phenomena like New Age. Besides, the only method I know for recovering the earthly father is to rediscover the heavenly Father, and many are realizing this; the reigning power has not won yet.” The reigning power, by means of two laws (abortion and divorce), has led the expulsion of the father from the world. “But, around the world, there is an air of revolt on these topics too, starting with young people, the ones who have been subjected to the absence of their fathers and for this reason know what it means to do without them. There is a news item that naturally was not transmitted around the world, but was blocked by the big networks. In a little mining town in Scotland, in East Enders, at a certain point people realized that many, too many girls (very young, on the average) were expecting illegitimate children. The English social services intervened immediately, offering abortion as the remedy to a problem that seemed socially dangerous. But the males of the town rebelled, defending their unborn children. And they won their battle.” This was a battle for life in an anti-life world, the same battle that Risé proposed last year, with an “Appeal for the Father,” published (is this really a paradox?) in the Italian women’s magazine Grazia and containing a strong proposal: a law to allow the father to “redeem” the child that the woman wants to abort, to give the father the opportunity to deny the woman the right to abortion. “This was a shocking proposal,” Risé recalls, “that was met by an avalanche of letters from enthusiastic men. On the women’s side, instead, was total silence, no reaction.” This could mean that the other half of heaven, too, awaits the return of the father, the only adventurer in the modern world. “Everything is against the head of the family, against the father of the family,” wrote Péguy in Véronique, “and as a consequence against the family itself, against family life. Only he is literally involved in the world, in the secular world. Because the others, at the most, are involved only with their heads, which is nothing.”