Abstract

HURSTEL, Françoise. Authority and transmission of “life debt”: A fundemantal function of parents. Epistemo-somática [online]. 2006, vol.3, n.2, pp.163-173. ISSN 1980-2005.

At the end of an evolution of western families and societies, with the death of paterfamilias, parents’ authority grows feebler and finds itself in transformation. It has become democratic. Parents have lost traditional reference points and have growing difficulties to claim that function. One of the consequences of this fact is the difficulty in transmitting the “symbolic debt” (or “life debt”) that construes their children as links of a chain. The result consists in symptoms of confusion of genealogic places between parents and children and, for the latter, a relative subjective indifferentiation.

Keywords : Parental functions; Symbolic debt; Familiar paper; Transmission between generations.

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