Monogamy and identity: Psychoanalytic considerations

Abstract

With the understanding that monogamy is a contingent device, the paper intends to analyze its ability to influence the processes of identity constitution of the subjects. From Heinz Lichtenstein’s elaborations on the origins of human identity, we include monogamy, or some traits present in this arrangement, in the mother-infant unit, supposing that the hegemonic status of monogamy reveals some of its connection with the fundamental anthropological situation described by Laplanche. Thus, traces of the monogamous arrangement would be transmitted to the child in its “organ” state and would be compulsively repeated as constitutive points of identity, in order to maintain the cohesion of this identity.