Lately I’ve been reflecting on the role of fathers, grandfathers, and other paternal figures who come to symbolize authority, strength, and the transmission of tradition across generations. In many ways, their function is to set limits, to push us toward individuation and separateness, to stand firm as external representatives of rules, morality, and law. Their presence often provides the structure against which the child defines a sense of self.

This paternal function is often contrasted with the maternal function, which is more associated with nurturing, containment, soothing, and, at times, enmeshment. I’m generalizing here, of course, but the distinction helps highlight two complementary poles of psychic development: the need for holding and the need for boundary-setting.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, these functions are not strictly tied to biological parents but rather represent psychic positions that can be occupied by different caregivers, mentors, or authority figures. In Lacanian thought, for instance, the “Name-of-the-Father” represents the symbolic role of paternal authority that interrupts the child’s fusion with the mother, introducing separation, language, and entry into the wider social order. This symbolic father introduces the law, but also possibility—he creates space for desire to move outward, beyond the closed dyad.

And yet, what we often lose sight of is that these authority figures, whether maternal or paternal in their symbolic function, are also deeply human. They are vulnerable to their own needs, their own wounds, and their own longings. They too were once children, dependent and subject to the same structures of care, authority, and limitation.

We tend to project into authority figures a solidity, power, or omnipotence that may not actually exist. We look to them for absolute guidance or protection, and when they inevitably fail—by being too rigid, too absent, or too inconsistent—their authority may feel less like structure and more like a source of injury. Yet often what we experience as a “failure of authority” is shaped by their own history with power—how they themselves were once positioned in relation to parental authority, control, or neglect.

This creates a cycle: the very places where authority is experienced as painful are often the traces of earlier wounds, passed down across generations. Fathers and grandfathers (and those who symbolically embody the paternal role) may enact, consciously or unconsciously, the ways they themselves were once disciplined, silenced, or overpowered. The same is true for maternal figures, who may reproduce patterns of overprotection, enmeshment, or emotional absence that once shaped them.

Yet, despite this complexity and vulnerability, we still need authority figures—both externally and internally. They give shape to our psychic world. They allow us to feel a sense of order, to orient ourselves toward values, and to internalize a sense of direction. The challenge, when authority wounds rather than supports, is to step back and recognize both dimensions: authority as symbolic function, and authority as embodied human subjectivity.

When we can hold both—that authority figures symbolize something larger than themselves, and that they are also limited human beings marked by their own histories—we may be better able to integrate our experiences of them. We can mourn the ideal of perfect authority while also reclaiming the possibility of structure, guidance, and care that authority at its best can provide.

This is where psychoanalysis offers something profound: it reminds us that our projections into authority figures tell us as much about ourselves as about them. Authority is never one-dimensional—it is always a dance between the symbolic function it represents and the human vulnerabilities it conceals.