Murdered Father, Dead Father and Other Work by Rosine Perelberg (review)

“Tommy, go and clear up your toys now,” Jake barked at his three-year-old son. Seemingly unmoved by his father’s order, Tommy shifted closer to his mother and asked, “Mummy, when is Daddy going to die?” Encapsulated in such a simple if dramatic encounter are the complex derivatives of Freud’s Oedipus complex. As outlined by Rosine Perelberg in her work over the last decades, these complexities cover “the murder of the father, identification and super ego, the setting up of the ego ideal, castration complex, desexualization and sublimation” (2016, p. 126). In one of her three books of selected papers, Murdered Father, Dead Father (2016), she counters what she sees as a drift away from a recognition of the primacy of the Oedipus complex. It is a compelling endeavor, placing little Tommy’s psychic construction of the world center stage. Perelberg’s prolific psychoanalytic writing is characterized by an invitation to absorb complexity but also to associate freely. In her clinical practice demonstrated throughout her work by clinical accounts, she describes how there is no place for the omnipotent analyst, but rather the analyst inaugurates a process (Perelberg, 2016, p. 76). Clinical work is characterized by such things as the open interpretation, the special form of listening, and a scrupulous and compassionate attention to the patient’s lived experience. My contribution to a wider knowledge of Perelberg’s work is offered in the context of “inaugurating a process.” Perelberg provides a rigorously argued psychoanalytic theory, never too far away from the consulting room. Throughout her work, Perelberg (2020) interrogates the centrality of what she calls the myth of origins, how can one be made of two: