In the Traces of our Name

The Influence of Given Names in Life

Juan Eduardo Tesone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367325022
• eBook ISBN: 9780429914812
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

This book emphasizes the influence of the name given at birth in terms of the construction of subjectivity. It offers the reader a fascinating journey through the meanders of culture, literary quotations, stories heard, and a difficult journey through the pain and horror of certain realities.

Chapter One
Why do we name?

"For in naming we speak, don't we?"

(Plato, 1967)

"What's in a name?" asks Shakespeare through Juliet in the tragedy whose title features the first names of Romeo and Juliet, thereby summing up an unknown that linguists, philosophers, ethnologists, and psychoanalysts have queried so frequently. She goes on with this sweet argument: "... that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet". And Romeo would like to be called Montague no longer, but instead incarnate the sweet flower of his first name without the family name that conflicts so deeply with Juliet's desire. However, as we follow the action, we see that Romeo is then unable to say who he is: "I know not how to tell thee who I am ..." And Juliet, who begs him to forget the family name, but not the first name, answers with resignation, "Art thou not Romeo and a Montague?"

Our first name is inseparable from ourselves, the essence of the person. It suffices to pronounce a few phonemes or to articulate some apparently insignificant syllables; the mere evocation of a name may provoke love or hate, sad or happy memories, clear and distinct or chaotic, confused sentiments in relation to the possessor of that name. The softest whisper of a name may make an adolescent blush, brighten a child's face, move a mother or father to tears or joy, provoke a lover's palpitations, an enemy's fury and animosity, a student's recognition and gratitude for his teacher, or a child's for his parents. The name is inseparable from the person, and it functions to individualize that person.

As Molino (1982) stresses, on the one hand, in some theories the first name has no connotation, as if it were a label whose entire meaning were no more than its phonic reality. On the other hand, we find theories that consider proper names the most meaningful of all, since they are the most individual. Molino concludes, in the terminology of Peirce, that the proper name seems to function as an empty distinguishing feature but, at the same time, refers to a number of interpretants evoked by common names (i.e., those that are not proper names). This is the literary and poetic function of proper names, which are hyper-semanticized in the interpretation of Barthes. Molino suggests that in this case, the proper name seems to refer to an indefinite number of interpretants. We agree with Molino's thesis and adopt it, but further postulate the existence of a privileged interpretant that we identify in the parental desire that presides over the choice of that name and determines the subject.

The Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée de Port-Royal (Arnauld & Lancelot, 1969) describes two types of ideas: some represent a particular thing, such as each person's idea of his father, mother, friend, himself, etc., whereas others represent things that are similar to each other, for example, the idea of people in general.

It is accepted that we use proper nouns for those that represent singular ideas, as in the name Socrates, which represents only one particular philosopher named Socrates, or the name Paris, which corresponds to the city of the same name. For this reason, "proper nouns have no plural, since by nature they fit only one", explains this Grammar.

We would in vain attempt to establish the origin of proper nouns. Just as we would in vain open a debate concerning the creation of language. I do, however, think that naming and words are indissolubly connected. This union can be seen more explicitly in societies with oral transmission, as in those of tribal Africa, as we shall see below.

"In this world and in all the possible worlds anyone could imagine, nobody can avoid having a proper name. Even if Abelard had not been Heloise's lover, he would still have been Abelard ... and more intact as well" (Slatka, 1994).

Proper names are expressions that function only as referents, that is to say, they refer to a particular entity considered to be a singular "individual": Peter is the particular man I know. However, we need to differentiate the proper name from other expressions that serve only as references: deictics or demonstrative pronouns and personal pronouns.

It is by virtue of the paradigmatic role of proper names in the sign system outside the speech system that their insertion in the syntagmatic chain perceptibly breaks that chain's continuity. For example, in French this paradigmatic value is indicated by the absence of the preceding article and the use of an upper case letter to transcribe it (Lévi-Strauss, 1962, p. 359).

A name is also a right of children and an institution that, unlike others, does not represent an anonymous social reality. It is the only institution that individualizes a person through an act of recognition indissolubly connected to the symbolic functions of maternity and paternity.

According to the logician John Stuart Mill, a name denotes a unique individual—Victor Hugo for example—without a priori recognition of any particular property. From this perspective, it may be inferred that a name is a signifier devoid of meaning or value. In other words, in Saussurian terms, a name would not be a linguistic sign. But if it had no meaning, how could a name acquire metaphoric meaning?

What the linguist Benveniste demonstrates is that a name belongs to a certain semiological system. He situates it in terms of "a conventional mark of social identification that may constantly designate a unique individual in a unique way" (quoted in Slatka, 1994).

This convention is specific to each society, each of which imposes its ways of naming individuals.

To name means to bring the child into the order of human relations; thus, the importance acquired by the name given to a child and received by that child. To have no name is a disaster, absolute disorder. To have a name means having a place in a relational system. In order to really exist, it is necessary to have first been named; names carry meaning and reveal vocation (Goldstain, 1982).

To choose and give a name to a child gives him imaginary history and family symbolism. This donation inserts the child into filial continuity and registers him in the maternal and paternal lineages, a trans generational Ariadne's thread that shows him a road but does not prescribe it: the name converts this subject into an irreplaceable being that cannot be confused with any other member of his lineages.

This donation includes something sacred, since it is not goods given or sold but something given to be kept. It would be inconceivable to imagine a contract between the unborn child and its parents, as stressed by Godelier (1998).

In this sense, life is instituted in every society as a unilateral gift and a debt. However, this symbolic debt is not necessarily paid in direct reciprocity to the elders, but through the next generation when that person in turn has descendants.

In the choice of the child's name—the first symbolic inscription of a human being—the parents' desire appears in the manner of a filigree. When the child is born it is not a tabula rasa, virgin of any inscription. A fore-text precedes it, which is also a parental intertext. The name becomes the written trace of the crossroads of parental desire. The child will inscribe his own text onto this pre-text, and will possess his own name by means of the singularity of its traces (Tesone, 1988).

The writing of the name remains as an indelible trace of a symbolic family history, a group palimpsest to which several generations often make their contribution. Therefore, we do well to go through this family book, follow its movements, reveal its characteristics, and identify this manuscript in cursive letters connected by links that run through various generations, in order to enable the child to make his name his own. Giving new life to one's name is always an unfinished task.

The choice of the name indicates the distance we may measure between biological procreation and filiation. The assignment of a name to the child sanctions the fact that filiation is not a biological, but a symbolic, fact. This choice situates it within an institutional device where each individual has a place in the family structure.

The family in which the child is inscribed has a past, an interrelational reticular weave, a transgenerational network that lodges the child who comes into the world in its midst. The family offers the child a space: a signifying structure that operates as a mould. Thus, even before birth, the child receives a message emitted by parental signifiers. A name is attributed to a child, although sometimes a child is attributed to a name.

Does the name therefore prefigure an inexorable fate? Is it true, as Diderot said with the voice of Jacques the Fatalist, that "everything good or bad that happens to us down here was written up there"? And he adds, "Oh, Sir, here you see how we are so little the masters of our fate and how many things are written on the great parchment!" (Diderot, 1796, cited by J. Starobinsky, 1984). We shall see below which routes enable us to diverge from this deterministic perspective.

In Greek thought, we find three aspects of the composite figure of fate:

• Moira, the inflexible predetermination of an existence, words spoken beforehand that all history must obey;
• Tyche, the (good or bad) encounter, chance;
• Daemon, the agency or internal character of each subject, unknown to himself, that guides his steps independently of his will.

The name joins the three aspects, condensing need and chance and leaving the subject the possibility of repossessing his proper name, which will always be his name, but enriched by the uncertainties of chance while it is constantly being rewritten. In certain cultures, as we shall see below, this possibility is punctuated by a change of proper name upon coming of age or in function of different life cycles.

In the choice of the proper name there is always "nomen-poiesis, or an act of poetic creation that is constantly re-created when the child grows able to take possession of his name. Only in the course of this process does the name really become a proper noun.

In the choice of his name, the child is enunciated by his parents. In order to become the subject of this enunciation, he needs to make the name he was given (the "given name") his own. This is what Françoise Zonabend (1977) calls "the constant dissociation between identity received and identity experienced".

The reasons that motivate the choice of the proper name may be relatively clear at first glance. However, this does not prevent the true crossroads from being unconscious, since it is a condensation or signifying over-determination that fills it with meaning. Indelible trans generational ink impregnates the name and delineates its contours.

If, at some time, the child produced a symptom, the proper name could be examined as a cryptogram whose deciphering may prove useful to liberate the child from an anchor point that is certainly necessary for filiation, but may sometimes bind him to pathology.

In this perspective, it is important that the first name does not remain sutured to the parents' desires, but opens on to other possible significations. The choice of the child's name may be the point where maternal and paternal lineages converge, with the condition that this point of intercrossing is decentred, both in relation to the guidelines of the parents' desires and of his own, and the acceptance of his own unconscious as an other.

Chapter Two
Some historical and cultural considerations with regard to naming

"... Not thinking of names as an inaccessible ideal, but as a real atmosphere into which I would plunge"

(Proust, 1929, p. 390)

The two elements of the modern onomastic system common throughout Europe are the family name and the given name. Although the last name has acquired more importance in our current system, we must not forget that, in reality, it appeared relatively recently. The use of a name begins to appear around the year 1000 and its use only spreads through Europe during the Renaissance. Only then does the formula, given name plus family name, become prevalent. During the eleventh century the most decisive mutation occurs when the system of the double name replaces the system of single names.

The Council of Trent (1563) contributes to this evolution when it orders the registry of baptismal names, a use that had begun in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in order to avoid consanguine marriages.

At the Synod, of 18th October, 1619, the Bishop of Limoges, Raymond de la Marthonie, publishes the Statutes and Regulations for his diocese, which decree, in Chapter X, On the sacrament of baptism: "No names will be given that allude to paganism and are not used in the Catholic Church, but instead those baptised will be given names of saints". This text may be analysed in two different ways, depending on whether we look ahead in time or back. Ahead, these statutes are one of the starting points of the Catholic reform that, as we know, required the whole of a long century to penetrate into the countryside in the region of Limousin in central France; this leads us at least into the mid-eighteenth century. If we go back, these statutes represent the influence on names both of the Renaissance, with its taste for antiquity, and that of the Reform, attracted by the Old Testament. But this episcopal decision does not seem to be aware of the profound evolution in Limousin that leads from a massively Germanic naming system up to the tenth century to nearly total Christianisation of baptismal names (cited in Perouas, Barrière, Boutier, Peyronnet, & Tricard, 1984).

Although we circumscribe our discussion to the appearance and evolution in modern anthroponomy of the use of the family name, it is worth pointing out that until that time (except in the Roman naming system) there had been only one name. This one name corresponded, in general, to our first name today and could not be passed on from one generation to another. Now, the family name belongs to the legitimate children. In modern societies it is a classifier of lineage.

From the legal perspective, Boucaud (1990) considers that a name is: (a) immutable (except by legal or administrative decision); (b) imprescriptible: its possession cannot be lost due to protracted disuse (for example, in the case of children "kidnapped-appropriated" in Argentina during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 and subsequently recovered); (c) non disposable: only exceptionally may the holder of a name relinquish or bequeath it or authorize its use by any other person.

It is important to underscore the salient place of names in regard to human rights. The right to a name is not included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December, 1948, but does appear in the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights which gives the former Declaration compulsory legal force. Article 24-2 of this Pact provides: "every child must be registered immediately after birth and have a name".

As Boucaud (1990) reminds us, the Declaration of the Rights of Children, signed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1959, also takes up the same principle, included in the Universal Convention on Children's Rights in 1989, signed by Argentina, and also in the Inter-American Convention on the Rights of Man.

The right to a name specifically concerns children, and this right must be situated particularly in Latin America, where we have, in the recent past, witnessed the forced disappearance of persons. The kidnapping and theft of children deprived of their filiation and identity by unconstitutional power is a separate chapter in this tragedy. We discuss in Chapter Nine the dramatic consequences in Argentina of this sinister and methodical procedure of exterminating part of the population.

In the French naming system as described by Chemin (2005), beginning on 1 January 2006, all parents may, for the first time in French history, pass the father's name on to their children, according to tradition, but also the mother's family name or even both family names separated by a hyphen. This liberty puts an end to various centuries of paternal predominance, which had been imp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PSYCHOANALYTIC IDEAS AND APPLICATIONS SERIES IPA Publications Committee
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION The proper name, infinite rewriting
• CHAPTER ONE Why do we name?
• CHAPTER TWO Some historical and cultural considerations with regard to naming
• CHAPTER THREE The meaning of names in different cultures
• CHAPTER FOUR Naming in the Old Testament
• CHAPTER FIVE Giving a name: is it imperative to name a newborn child?
• CHAPTER SIX From the name's determining force to its signifying force
• CHAPTER SEVEN Freud and names
• CHAPTER EIGHT The name in literature
• CHAPTER NINE State terrorism in Argentina and children seized by the military power (1976–1983)
• CHAPTER TEN The given name in psychoanalytical clinical work
• REFERENCES
• INDEX