The Name-of-the-Father (3 of 3) : Mary Poppins as Name-of-the-Father

Freud’s Totem and Taboo provides a valuable reference point as we try to better understand how the father functions as a symbolic operation. We gain some crucial ideas from Freud’s thinking on totemism (which, interestingly, sets in place the same key prohibitions instated by the Oedipus complex). We offer a Lacanian reading of the films E.T. and Mary Poppins, both of which can be said to epitomize how the Name-of-the-Father operates by utilizing a symbolic element from outside the regular imaginary configuration of a family to install the laws of the symbolic. Link to board: