On March 26, 2026, at 5:00 PM, within the framework of “Ilia’s Thursdays,” a public lecture by Giga Maminashvili, organized by the International Research Center for Georgian Studies at Caucasus University, was held on the topic: “The Function and Place of the Father in Psychoanalysis – Socio-Cultural and Psychic Meanings in Freud’s Classical Theory and in Contemporary Georgia.”

The lecture was delivered by Giga Maminashvili, Doctor of Psychoanalysis and Psychopathology (Université Paris VII Denis Diderot), Associate Professor at Caucasus University, and President and Co-founder of “Espace géorgien pour la psychanalyse.”

The lecture addressed the following issues: Sigmund Freud, who made a crucial contribution to the dismantling of patriarchy at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time assigned immense importance to the function and place of the father in psychoanalytic theory and practice. The complex question of the father ran like a red thread throughout his entire body of work—from his early studies on hysteria conducted with Josef Breuer, where the real father was presented as an agent of seduction and an incestuous object, to his 1938 work Moses and Monotheism, where, as in Totem and Taboo, the central figure was the murdered and symbolic father. This is not to mention the imagined versions of the father in the case of Little Oedipus, where the father appeared as treacherous, punitive, and castrating, embodying the child’s primary rival and simultaneously an object of hatred, love, and idealization. It is this object whose removal is energetically pursued by the innocent yet father-killing hero of Greek tragedy—a hero who shares his mother’s bed and ultimately blinds himself for the crime he has committed.