Abstract
Jacques Lacan made a very particular use of the “father” in his work in the 1950s, and the author starts with this notion of the Name of the Father and the place of that in psychic structure. From a strictly clinical perspective, he felt that subjects with psychosis did not do so well when treated with an analysis in the same way as those not psychotic. Now, Lacan takes this idea a step further and describes it using terminology from linguistics, which are necessary to review to transmit the full impact of Lacan’s work. Lacan adopted the linguistic terminology of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The Name of the Father is, in a sense, a different solution to the question of the desire of the mother or the meaning of the signifiers of the Other. The answer to the question of the desire of the mother is not the child, as the Imaginary phallus for the mother.