The Fragmented Mother and the Grammar of Desire. How Our Shadows Are Founded.
Three thousand years ago, in a brutally patriarchal world, the Jewish people decreed that one would be Jewish if born of a Jewish mother. It was a tiny crack in the wall of patriarchy , a silent victory that granted woman a fundamental power: to be the gate through which identity is born. But that foundational power is not innocent; it conceals the most ambiguous force, the origin of all neurosis: the desire and the gaze of the mother (Seminar X). The rabbis understood something essential: the first things a human being absorbs; language, rhythm, gestures, the gaze, the rituals of cleanliness and social communion, do not come from the father. They come from the mother. She is the first universe, the primordial filter of reality. She decides, consciously or not, what is named and what is silenced, what is shown and what is hidden. In a hostile world, the mother is both refuge and frontier: the one who protects, but also the one who limits. The father, as Lacan theorized, arrive...