Lacan upon the lap.

Lacan's psychological paradigm would make more sense if by "language" he was not actually (as I have read in a book about Jacques Lacan's Return to Freud) concerned with "dictionary definitions", but with the very specific, which is to say peculiar (in all senses) way in which language is employed within patriarchal systems. That is, his paradigm would be more structurally integrated if Lacan's understanding of what it is to speak is an implicit recognition that social meaning is constructed on the basis of a metaphysically (pro-patriarchal) loaded dice, (as the French feminists conten). Then it would be clear why we have the term, "law of the father" as the basis for induction into languistic meaning, rather than "law of the mother".

Another point of contention, which I see in the text I have linked to above, is that the "law of the father" (as opposed to the law of humanity, or indeed, the law of the mother) is deemed to be efficacious even in the absence of specific fathers. One wonders how patriarchy can function in its absence, but clearly it is such a robust system of necessity or the imagination that there is nothing really that would suffice to draw a limitation on it. Patriarchy -- love it or lump it, it's never going to leave you.

On a perhaps related note, these days I have spent some hours wondering why it is that those who are bourgeois through and through -- that is, who believe in the system of advanced capitalism as it is, and see no reason to alter it -- have such an overwrought sense of the fragility of the human psyche. I see this System Adherents literally PANIC when I do the slightest thing differently-from-what-had-been-anticipated; when I step out of line just a fraction. At such a point, they do panic, possibly on my behalf, believing me to have gone entirely mad and to have put myself into mortal danger. This fear ... this absolute terror ... of the consequences of not conforming is alien to me. It seems that some people suffer from an all too virulent superego and project their day and night terrors onto me.

On a tangential note: Using psychoanalysis to describe (or analyse) any situation, when the description is not intended to return the subject in question back to marching in lockstep with the established social order, is always going to be a risk. That is partly because of the way psychoanalysis is constructed as an intellectual lapdog of patriarchal notions and formulations. It is also because the greater masses of people are those with normative unconsciousnesses, who would quite freely, if they were more educated, use the tools of psychoanalysis, to whack down anyone who moved in manners unexpected. (It is such normative behaviour to which Nietzsche attributes the characteristic of interminable intellectual and emotional laziness.)

One uses, all the same, the descriptive and analytical methods that become available for use -- only, one avoids using them in any way conventionally.