Recognizing a Jewish-Christian ethics of paternity the article exams the function of the father in psychoanalysis. This function is related to the affiliation and later to the separation of the religious ethics in which it is founded. It then refers to examples of clinical cases presented by Freud and comments made by Lacan on the father, both in obsessive neurotic and paranoid cases, intends to study the place of the father, not only in pathological cases but in the constitution of the subject of desire. It concludes by pointing to the psychoanalytic ethics of paternity in which the commandment of the father institutes a division in the subject and a non-removable conflict that constitutes him as the one whose better way to live relates always with the evil.
psychoanalysis; paternity; religion; good; evil