Salvador de Bahia – III° Congresso Latino-Americano de Psicologia Analitica

The dark face of the archetype of the divine child.
Pedophilia and the transference relationship.

Brigitte Allain-Dupré, Paris

ABSTRACT
The author examines the issue of pedophiliac fantasies and acts from three standpoints. Firstly, because children were originally analyzed by their parents, the transference remained unanalyzed. Secondly, little research has been done in the field of counter-transference in child analysis. Lastly, the archetypal figure of the divine child is an approach to understanding the psychic events at the genesis of pedophiliac perversion.

Keywords:
Alterity, counter-transference in child therapy, double, divine child, ethical ego, Laius, pedophilia, perversion.

The hysterical adolescent girls who sought treatment from Dr. Freud had indeed been seduced — that is, in today’s parlance, they were victims of adult sexual abuse. That fact is now known. And yet, Freud found a way to abandon his neurotica in favor of an explanation by and in fantasy, according to which they would merely have secretly desired the seduction, more or less consciously. The event would never have actually taken place.

What terrifying reality prevented Freud from considering the hypothesis of a trauma – while enabling him to invent psychoanalysis? The story of his father, Jacob, would no doubt provide a clue. However, in 1914, when Freud began to formulate a theory of primary narcissism, he understood that “the most prickly aspect of the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, found a safe place in taking refuge in the child.”1 Today, it is easier for us to see how this “immortality refuge”, which seduction by an adult might represent, becomes a suffocating prison for the child who finds his psyche so confined.

The very etymology of the word “seduction” is a clear indication of the duplicity of the seducer. It stems from the Latin term for the subject who is led elsewhere, or astray; i.e., misled, betrayed, or tricked. From the original idea of corruption, we have arrived at the modern definition of leading the other (a woman, a man, or a child) to yield. But the Greek origin of the verb “to seduce” signifies “to destroy”: phteirein, and it is important to keep this in mind. When Freud wrote to Fliess between 1895 and 1897, he used the term Verführung, which, in German, has the same etymological background as the word “seduction”, connoting “misleading” or “leading astray”.

Until now, how many complaints from children and young people, as well as women, have been ignored by those in power (who are men) because, with Freud’s approval, we have preferred to believe that the violence they denounced was a matter of fantasy, irrelevant to the world of reality? Useless as it may be to direct our criticism at this blindness, it is nevertheless time to seek the reasons why, in psychoanalysis, the acting out of pedophile fantasies2 still seems to be sealed up within the envelope of the unthinkable, despite the fact that its reality screams out at us nearly daily in newspaper stories.

There is much explicit evidence of this willful blindness to a painful truth. For one thing, the term “pedophilia” is absent from the index of a number of French psychiatry textbooks, even the most recent ones. Moreover, “pedophilia” is an ambiguous term whose etymological structure does not match its semantic weight. “The misdeeds to which the word refers are incompatible with its strict definition.” 3 Etymologically, “pedophile” means “the friend of the child.”

It is also surprising that most of the psychoanalytic research in the field concerns the child-victim rather than the abusive adult perpetrator. This is all the more striking insofar as the literature published in France, in the past ten years has been dominated almost exclusively by the theme of sexual abuse.

Regarding the pedophile himself, excepting the rhetoric of denunciation from victims’ advocates, or the relatively moralistic tone of the media, little research has been done. It is imperative for us to ask ourselves why. It is indeed a challenge for us to examine the feelings the pedophile arouses in us, feelings which remind us of a side of ourselves we would rather not see. Psychoanalysis itself must be wise enough to admit that it has been guilty of this omission, close to denial...

Our books, journals, and conventions are filled with innumerable case studies, each more fascinating than the previous one, but the clinical aspects of the treatment of the pedophile are only rarely mentioned. Claude Balier’s remarkable book “Psychanalyse des comportements violents”4 is a significant exception of the rule. A survey of recent Jungian literature reveals that the theme is practically absent, although there have been a number of studies of the abused child.

Our intentions in adopting a somewhat accusatory tone in the introduction to this article should not be misconstrued. We simply hope to define the terms of a doubt and concern which are increasingly profound. To pursue the question further: to our knowledge, after several years of research in the field, we are forced to admit that psychoanalysis has never really been able to examine the question of adult-child transference. Our theories have never gone beyond the symbol of the parent-child relationship (as a “must”) on the basis of the classic triangular structure of the Oedipus complex. Granted, this is only the logical outcome of the fact that, in the beginning, it was parents who analyzed their own children. How can one simultaneously be parent and analyst? In any case, it is legitimate for us to wonder about the price we pay today for the fact that the roles were once one.

It is fruitless to blame our founding fathers for this denial or omission, insofar as they were not yet aware of the need to elucidate the particularities of the transference bond. However, it is necessary to make an effort to detect the traces of this denial or omission which may still be at work in child psychoanalysis today. It is true that our reflection on transference – “this necessary evil” – has evolved since the early years of psychoanalysis, and continues to be refined. It is a means of identifying the contours and unconscious components of the intimate in psychoanalytic practice with adult patients. Conversely, practice with child patients has not been subjected to the same scrutiny, and our silence on this matter is, at present, downright frightening.

In the infancy of the art, each practitioner struggled to cope with a situation heavy with fantasy: a child delivers up his soul to an adult, who pierces it with his scholarly gaze and the acuity of his comprehensive and/or interpretative listening skills. Freud, as Little Hans’s doctor, was quite willing to accept the idea that the child thought of him as God. Melanie Klein was bold enough to allow herself to perceive the anxiety a threatening penis might arouse in the young child, although the image was still confined behind the barrier of fantasy, and thus entirely unrelated to any possible reality. Interpreting her transference with children, Klein saw herself as a huge body filled with combined parent figures indulging in an endless coitus, but the body was first and foremost that of a mother… necessarily.

As for Jung, when he symbolically revisited the womb of the great mother, he emphasized the primordial archetypal energies which were intertwined there. Yet he said nothing about the primal mutual pleasure that this return, which he preferred to perceive as symbolic, could procure for its protagonists. To detect the slightest eroticism, in the fleshly, voluptuous sense of the term, in the images of the Rosarium requires a great deal of imagination on the part of the reader.

Moreover, didn’t Jung declare that incest5 was so rare that it only occurred in backwards rural communities, or among primitive tribes with no concept of privacy? Like Freud, he dismissed the sexual traumata of hysterical individuals as mere fantasy (“the so-called traumata”). Yet, in a letter to Freud concerning transference,6 he managed to “confess” that he himself had been the victim of “a homosexual advance from an older man whom he had once venerated.”

Ferenczi7 alone ventured to explore the confusion of language between the child and the adult. It is a landmark text, but it is liable to be used to justify a number of our silences today.

It is true that analysts working with children often attempt to say something about the seduction games which are played in sessions with children and the troubling feelings they arouse in the analyst. This thing remains difficult to express, and thus to understand, due to the instinctual violence often auto-erotic which prevails.

The French Freudian psychoanalyst Gérard Gasquet seems to be the exception who confirms the rule. He relates in detail the intensity of the counter-transferential emotions by which he is buffeted as he engages with the psychotic child he is treating. Between what he senses (with increasing urgency) of the equivocal mood the child creates during the session, and his often desperate attempts to rescue himself from his primal emotions via an inner debate, Gasquet gives us an excellent illustration of the risk of acting out a pedophiliac fantasy in the therapeutic relationship with a child.

He tells us: “One day, when he came toward me and ran between my legs, I was seized with violent sexual excitement and became quite troubled, and, while Jean-Christophe was laughing and jubilating, I felt a sort of elation, due to the illusion that I was released from the impasse of being locked out of his pleasure, a fact which had hitherto triggered my bitterness and hostility. For me, the most upsetting part of the subsequent sessions, over the months which followed, was not to have experienced sexual arousal, but the desire to experience it again...”8

This is a case of erotic transference which is hardly ever mentioned in psychoanalytic literature on the subject of child therapy, or the theoretical question of transference in this particular context. However, we must force ourselves to admit that if the rule of abstinence in work with adults really does apply to sexual acts, it must also come up in therapy with children, where sexual acting-out constitutes pedophilia. It is significant that professional child-care providers (like teachers, social workers, counselors, etc.) who have not necessarily undergone psychoanalysis, and thus have never confronted their counter-transferential projections onto children, are in the greatest danger of acting out pedophile fantasies.

The eroticism of transference arises from an energetic intensity indicating that the source of its power, and the cause of the pedophilic numinosity in the analyst’s transference, is a violently constellated archetype. Once again, Jungian dynamics enable us to picture the forces at work in this extremely violent erotic experience, without reducing it to the Oedipal triangulation which is not especially appropriate to this particular child. The child psychosis Gasquet mentions does indeed lead us to think that extremely archaic components of the self are being activated in their primal expression of sensuousness and eroticism.

Analyzing this scene between the child and adult on another level, we distinguish a certain Judeo-Christian image of the child, particularly prevalent until the 19^th century.9 On one hand, the child is a vicious little beast, embodying something akin to the polymorphous pervert. On the other, the child is the perfect symbol of the pure, asexual angel – at least, ideally.10 This vision of innocence and purity is depicted in the divine features of the infant Jesus in the paintings of the Renaissance. However, in the shadow of this purity and innocence, one can sense the power of evil and death, like the sacred beauty of the ultimate sacrifice which is to come.

It is as though good and evil are intertwined in the form of a child’s features... the struggle between the values of innocence and guilt which is the basis of the Christian concept of salvation is undoubtedly intrinsically related to the representation of the child.

When Freud described the child as a polymorphous pervert, he was simply acknowledging the existence of an image which befitted his time, widely shared, and, for the most part, widely repressed. It was impossible for him to imagine the backlash which would be caused, both in culture in general and in his theory in particular, by his quasi-scientific classification of the child as a polymorphous pervert. Indeed, by imputing perversity to the child, the adult (and thus the culture) was thus implicitly shielded from any genuine challenge to the “sexual usage” of children. Under the circumstances, such practices were considered a “normal perversity.” It would take a whole century for psychoanalysis to admit that the young Dora of “Studies of Hysteria” had been the victim of Mr. K.’s violent impulses, rather than having unconsciously elicited them.

Nevertheless, it would be an error to suggest that this silence on the subject of the pedophiliac fantasy is entirely and exclusively due to the short-sightedness of the founding fathers of psychoanalysis. True, the omission, by Freud himself,11 of the pedophiliac crime perpetrated by Laius, father of Oedipus, on the young Chrysippos, still arouses our curiosity. We must thus look deeper into the pedophiliac fantasy, and the radical unthinkability it contains.

Reading newspaper accounts of pedophiliac crimes, one is likely to be struck by two different perceptions. Firstly, the fact is that it is usually men who are convicted of perpetrating the deeds. On the rare occasions when a woman is implicated, she almost always plays the role of an accomplice rather than actual rapist. We shall subsequently return to this observation. Secondly, the compulsion to repeat is usually suggested as a plausible explanation, sufficient unto itself, for the pedophiliac act – despite the fact that it defies sheer common sense. Why would any individual who had been the victim of such painful torments in childhood subject another person to the same experience – especially another child? André Green goes so far as to say that “there is certainly something insane about imagining that a pedophile draws upon his unconscious memories of his own painful childhood to inflict such torment, repeating the traumata of the past by forcing another person to submit to them.”12

The question which then confronts the analyst is thus: what unconscious contents are constellated in this repetitive quest which is allegedly transmitted from generation to generation? How do they animate the tragic pedophiliac act? “Pedophile Laius” questions the quality of the primal fantasy of the father-son relationship. Might one suppose that this scene of the rape by a father of his own son, which some analysts call “homosexual incest,” or the rape of a child by an adult male, represents an archetype?

The scene is represented several times in Greco-Roman mythology. Cosimo Schinaia has catalogued the variations on this theme, and insists that a clear distinction be made between pederasty and pedophilia. “Between eros paedagogos (that is, the psychic and intellectual love an adult feels for a boy who is his disciple, being educated and trained by him), and the drift towards sensual pedophilia, the distance is short.”13 Here, we should specify that, in ancient Greece, the times in a boy’s life when he was to be educated by a pederast were explicitly set out; moreover, love between a young child and an adult male was severely punished.

On Laius, Aeschylus and Euripides tell us that the oracle had intervened prior to the conception of Oedipus to warn Laius against fathering progeny, prophesying the ruin of his house if he did so. One might then deduce that the succession of the Labdacide line had been cursed due to the sin Laius had committed in sexually abusing the son of his host. But we also know that Laius’s refusal to father a son is betrayed by Jocasta, who gets him drunk to arrive at her ends. Oedipus is born, and his father is determined to do away with him, for, as Marie-Claire Durieux emphasizes, “he represents the chronicle of a foretold death, a foretold homosexual incest, a prospect of unbearable anguish.”14

Greco-Roman myth presents us with the theme of the child, bearer of a complex symbolic burden in which a number of opposing aspects are intermingled: vitality/fragility, longevity/brevity, levity/gravity, freedom/dependency; sexuality/asexuality, etc. Naturally, the theme is a rich source of meaning, because the child is above all the future of man. Archetypal representation shows us the child interacting with his origins on the maternal side, in all the declensions of the symbol of the great mother-goddess endowed with phallic power from which the archetype of the father must struggle to emerge. Indeed, the paternal archetype should often be considered as an image the subject constructs and differentiates within the personal relationship he develops to his individual history. It is not usually an archetypal figure in the conventional sense. As Luigi Zoja expresses it so accurately: “The father is a colossus with feet of clay. His institution, originally all-powerful, is in fact quite vulnerable, for, unlike the maternal line, the paternal line must continually be reconstructed, from one generation to the next.”15

The pedophiliac fantasy and its acting-out challenge the type of archetypal dynamic generated by this aspect of the father/son and adult/child relationship. Could it be an avatar of the psychic tendency to unite opposites – perhaps an integration of the child into the adult? Or is it an archetypal dynamic related to the principle of enantiodromia – in this case, a lopsided, unilateral growth towards adult maturity which would demand that the subject remain erotically united with the child... But, then, what can be done with the sexual stakes staying at the core of the symbolic scene, as well of the acting out, and with the resulting destructiveness?

Allan Guggenbuhl-Craig has chosen to examine the image of the child constellated in the pedophiliac scene and act: “As soon as the divine child appears,” he tells us, ‘the child-assassin, his destroyer, also appears. When Jesus was born, Herod had all the infants slaughtered. The archetype of the divine child, the hope for humanity, on one hand, and, on the other, the child-murderer, annihilating all hope, are polarities which belong to each other.”16 Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the opposite of the divine child is not the “evil” child. Instead, it is an adult figure who is striving to destroy the divine child. This adult figure, a man or woman, who terrifies children, is a familiar figure in European folklore; cf. the bogey-man and the wicked witch.

It is striking to observe the degree to which a sexual threat, which is never explicitly stated in folktales or children’s stories, lies just beneath the surface in the minds of parents warning their children against vagrants, vagabonds, and similar rag-and-bone men. It leads one to think that the fear of a man who devours children, inspired by protective parents (mothers?) is a theme which stands for all the archaic fears, notably and foremost the fear of a wild, instinctual, primitive sexuality.

From exactly what threat is it necessary to protect the child? Simply from the return to the mother’s womb, which reflects the mother’s fantasy of re-absorbing the child? Taking the theme of the child-eater (which might also be applied to a female figure, such as an elderly hag or witch) to its ultimate magnitude, one might also see a primitive sexual aspect of the cannibalistic fantasy. It appears in the image of the ogre, the giant who steals children for his dinner: a dionysian, orgiastic cannibalism outside the law of the in-corps, the incorporation of young flesh. We are reminded of little Carl-Gustav Jung’s phallus dream: “That is the man-eater!” or “That is the man-eater!” (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 12)

At this point in our reflection, we can see how the contribution of the archetypal figure of the child (called “divine” by Jung) makes it possible to retrace the genealogy of the pedophiliac fantasy – the kernel of the brute, to quote Goethe. It can be related to the numinosity of the effects of the self, in terms of the confusion or lack of differentiation of opposites, their instinctuality: that of the instinctual disorder.

This thought elicits a number of comments. In the first place, let us consider the paradox whereby childhood is designated as being both a paradise and the source of the defeats of adulthood. Moreover, the gravitational pull of this world is so strong that the subject is always liable to yield, and fall back into it. It certainly justifies ruling out the idea that Jung is referring to the infantile, in the Freudian sense of the word. Instead, he is describing the numinous dimension of an archetype – that of the divine child, which gives eternal life to archaic forces so powerful they inspire awe and terror.

In the wordless story of the pedophiliac act, this numinous power seeks a fleshly outlet, as if sexual congress with a child could indeed serve as a means of re-kindling the marvelous aspect of the divine child. This aspect may be deficient for lack of a maternal capable of awe, or its transformation may be incomplete, for lack of a maternal capable of humanizing it – that is, capable of giving up eternal amazement.

According to Jung, the paradise of childhood contains the seeds of hell, which will not fail to germinate and thrive when the adult subject expects it the least. If our interpretation is correct, the hell contained in the paradise of childhood is not the disgrace and fall of the divine child into the polymorphous pervert, but the fact that life inevitably leads to death. A unilateral possession of or belief in the symbol of the divine child is a means of forgetting this knowledge.

The second point we would like to remark upon is the concept of the self, described in this instance as characteristic of the child’s naïveté and lack of self-awareness. Throughout his work, Jung suggests a number of metaphors as a means of explaining the Self. Naïveté and a lack of consciousness of the self – does this mean that unless the self is fulfilled within a discriminating ego, an ethic-ego which evaluates and chooses, the self would be deprived of meaning and worth? Undoubtedly -- and with this image, we are once again far from the idea of marvelous completeness. Likewise, it is significant that the elements of human sexuality need to be taken up again in a differentiated ego in order to avoid their acting-out according to archetypal rules – that is, in an unawareness of the other, obeying the laws of omnipotence alone. Jung is explicit about the archetypal dimension of sexual behavior when he writes: “If Freud had better understood the psychological truth which demands that sexuality be numinous – both a deity and a devil – he would not have remained the prisoner of a narrow biological concept of sex.”18 

Jung’s essay entitled “Contribution to the archetype of the child,” published in conjunction with a study by Kerenyi, is exceedingly complex. However, it does provide us with a key to understanding the bond which exists between the archetype of the divine child and the issue of pedophilia. Jung’s short article emphasizes the value of the archetype and the need to find one’s roots in the life of the past. He likens these things directly to the representation of the archetype of the divine child.

The loss of the past, which has become less valuable or positively “insignificant,” to which value can no longer be restored, is also the loss of one’s savior or redeemer. The savior is defined as that good which is insignificant, or at least the emanation of it. Commenting on a work by Ziegler, Jung continues: “The ‘insignificant’ always appears as the herald or first born of a new generation; appearing unexpectedly in the most unlikely places (arising from a stone or a tree, a furrow in the earth, or a spring, etc.) in an equivocal form (tiny person, dwarf, child, animal, etc.). This archetype of the “god-child” is extremely widespread and happens to be mingled closely with all the other mythological aspects of the theme of the child.” Apparently there is a connection in the meaning of the past, the insignificant, also to be understood as the redeemer or savior, and the archetype of the child.

However, before we go into an interpretation of the “god-child” idea, we must be careful not to associate the archetypal image of the divine child too closely with that of the Christian symbol of the divine infant Jesus. Were we to assimilate the two ideas, we would again be deluding ourselves with a unilateral perception of the image: that is, we would lose sight of its negative properties or dimensions. We would then be blind to its polarized components of life yet also death, insignificant yet also redeeming.

“The theme of the child represents the pre-conscious, infantile aspect of the collective soul,” Jung also writes. “We can indeed observe certain chapters in an individual’s life becoming independent and acquiring their own personality, to a degree such that the result is a kind of detachment or “autospection”; for example, one may look upon oneself as a child. Experience proves that such visionary impressions – whether they occur in a dream or a waking state – are related to a tendency to dissociate the present state from that of the past [...] The individual perhaps may have been able to separate himself violently from his original character, and pass into another individuality...”19

This last observation of Jung’s conducts us to the possibility of conceiving of the pedophile fantasies, and especially acts, into a  psychogenesis. Note that if we amplify the splitting-off Jung comments upon between the “present state and that of the past,” a splitting-off between the state of childhood and the state of adulthood which causes the subject to tear himself away from his original character, violence plays a central role. What sort of event would lead a subject to “separate himself from the state of the past”, i.e., his own childhood? A trauma, or traumata, of course – understood here in the psycho-emotional meaning of the term rather than the objective one. It would lead to the creation of “another individuality,” which could be defined as a false-self – rather than an organized psychosis.

At this point, it would be useful for us to review the landmarks in the journey towards psychic birth and access to symbolic life. This process enables the subject, even as a baby, to recognize himself as an individual endowed with his own  personality, and also to recognize the other as “a separate self, distinct from oneself:” the same, and yet not the same, as it were.

Our journey along what is assumed to be the “ordinary” path to psychic birth will enable us to construct an aetiological hypothesis which may provide a clue to understanding the accidents which can occur early in the process of psychic construction. The pedophiliac fantasy and act may serve a purpose for the wounded self, as a means of seeking to resolve a conflict of the past by re-enacting it again and again.

In the first weeks of an infant’s life, the relationship with the mother shapes up into what Winnicott described as “shared madness,” as a metaphor for the “primary maternal preoccupation. This phase is what enables the mother to care for and understand her baby using on the basis of instinctive sensorial responses rather than any rational thought process. One of the effects of this “madness” might be that, within the constellated archetypal field, the mother is highly sensitive to the marvelous aspects of her child, whereas his darker side is censored; i.e. prevented from emerging into her consciousness. The duet Winnicott described is a mirror game in which each feeds into and upon the other. The theme of the double is intrinsically connected to it. Paul Denis,20 a Freudian, takes his description of this relationship even further, daring to describe it as pedophilia: “It is impossible to be a mother without being in some way pedophiliac. A child who is not invested as an erotic object by the mother would have little chance of developing.” Later, he adds: “The idealization of maternal love or the vocabulary of naturalistic observation of these first relationships usually censor the sexual nature of the exchanges between mother and infant.”

Daniel Stern21 describes the first months of life in great detail, showing how the ongoing interaction with another human being (the mother or the primary caregiver) enables the baby, as he attunes himself to that other person and vice-versa, to progress along the path to individuation, a process which is ineluctably programmed into both the species and the individual self. To sum it up rapidly, Daniel Stern is saying that because the mother believes her baby is a small miracle, the infant proceeds along the path towards humanization – an illustration, we might say, of the purpose of the marvelous numinosity of the relationship constellated in the maternal archetypal field.

Because even the best things must come to an end, the development promoted by these first experiences gradually yet inevitably yields to a difference in the tonality of interactions between mother and infant. The mother’s body-and-soul devotion slackens somewhat, and she becomes capable of frustrating the baby, of disapproving of certain types of behavior, of demanding that the baby wait for satisfaction, etc.

The marvelous aspects of the child archetype are no longer so intensely activated within the mother, or in her relationship to the baby. In real experience, often the signs of this psychic diminuendo or transition are the mother’s renewal of interest in the erotic aspects of her marriage, and/or a re-investment in her professional activities.

In terms of the infant’s psychic genesis, these steps accompany the child’s feeling of his own identity (“the sense of a subjective self,” to quote Daniel Stern). He has acquired more autonomy; that is, there is a greater distance between his own desire and that of the other, his mother. Nevertheless, even after the other-ness has been acknowledged, the shared history of the mother-infant pair will leave an indelible trace upon the child. He will always contain something of the mother’s reflection, regardless of its emotional hue. The young child will already have acquired the beginnings of a sense of the quality the other conveys: his mother is at the same times good and bad, she is capable of satisfying his needs, but she may also make him forego that satisfaction. And yet his psychic life does not undergo any traumatic collapse.22 It is a threshold which marks the real child’s entry into the human heritage.

Winnicott coined the expression “good-enough” mother to describe the changes which occur. The dimension of narcissistic whole-ness awakened in the first weeks of relating to the child is less intensely constellated in the mother. The good-enough mother23 survives the passing of the divine child. She is able to see and accept in herself, and in her child, how a real mother and child (as opposed to divine archetypes) interact. In psychic terms, it is an intense experience of integrating her shadow.

We can now attempt to draw parallels between the release of the archetype of the divine child and the birth of the ethical subject – the individual formed by a differentiated ego capable of recognizing the other-ness of the other, the Me and the Not-Me, their similarities, differences, and boundaries. We are assuming that it is necessary to examine the process of building the ethical subject because we wish to test a hypothesis: that a “fundamental deffect” may be at work inside the pedophile, and that this deffect occurred during the process of ego differentiation. For some reason, the pedophile’s conception of other-ness failed to enable him to differentiate between the internal world and the external object. At this point in our reflection, an essay recently published by Hester McFarland Solomon will be quite useful to us.

One aspect of Solomon’s research on the development of the ethical subject provides essential information on the father’s role in helping the mother mourn the passing of the divine child. Indeed, Solomon suspects that “the notion of the discerning, discriminating thinking function which is often imaged symbolically in masculine, paternal terms” is integrated by the mother on the foundation of her “primary maternal preoccupation” to constitute the psychic and relational space in which she can become an ordinarily devoted mother.24 In other words, the “shared madness” is not really that mad, insofar as the mother’s relationship to her baby is structured by the image and energies of a differentiated parental couple which she embodies with her maternal attitudes. We might go so far as to say that the parental couple present in the mother’s psyche is the bridge which helps her cross the gap from devotion to dedication.

Solomon emphasizes the activation of this dedication/thinking pair both in the unconscious psyche of the parental couple and of its ethical resonance in the self-ego couple within the baby. She stipulates, “The function of the ordinarily devoted mother is a deeply ethical mode in her instinctual and unconditional dedication to another, her infant; she overcomes her narcissistic needs and frustrated rages, projections of her shadow, and resisting by and large the impulse to skew her infant’s development through undue acquiescence to her requirements."25

Obviously, the mother’s psyche as described here is capable of introducing her child to other-ness (alterity), both unconsciously and consciously. The concept of alterity is essential to the growth of the ethical ego, due to the sacrifice involved: the mother must be willing to forego being the marvelous mother of the divine child, and, by the same token, open her psyche to engaging the father in a role which she acknowledges only he can fulfill.

A failure to leave behind this primal fusion would seem to be a severe threat to the child’s development as a subject. There is a significant risk that narcissistic defense mechanisms will be set up according to a perverse, defensive pattern, as Solomon confirms: “To the extent that the other is used as an object of projection, the self remains thereby split and diminished, evoking narcissistic self-care defenses, that are often perverse in nature. The knowledge of the true and subjective reality of the other can be lost.”26 Rather than allowing the child to assume his place as “the other,” the perverse scenario puts the child in the place of “the same.” The adult presumes that he knows the needs and requirements of this “same” entity (the child), knowledge which he will skillfully deploy to seduce, if not constrain, the child, who must yield.  The need for an affectionate bond from adult towards child is the repetition via projection of the quest for a particularly well differentiated eroticism, i.e. that of the primal bond of the mother to the child. The pedophile projects this eros onto the child in undifferentiated terms which permit a sexual act.

The theme of the primal bond often comes up in research on the psychology of the pedophile, especially in work involving clinical material from psychotherapy or analysis. From analysis of the counter-transference, the analyst who treats pedophiles notes the theme of the double, a portent containing a number of significant indicators when they are compared to the mother-baby relationship: an identity of perception between the patient and the analyst which enables the former to construct a symbiotic, mirror-like relationship with the latter and thus avoid the feeling of craving, if not emptiness, and at least separation. Quite often, the clinical records show that a pedophile act was the direct and unforeseen result of some sensation aroused by the skin, smell, or voice. Obviously, these enter into the register of perception and sensoriality, which is solicited much more than contents referring to the function of representation.

Sarà and César Botella, in their study of the ability to represent extremely early experiences, defined these experiences as never having reached the level of consciousness, alive in the unconscious only as sensorial imprints rather than representations. Their research led them to hypothesize the figure of a psychic double they call the “animic.”27 According to them, “the animic double is a thought process in which representation, perception, and motor functions are equivalent and indistinct. As a product of the regredient process, this animic double overflowing with sensoriality is ruled by the perceptive and/or the hallucinatory, and entirely unaware of alterity. This state of the psyche draws from the world only what it is itself, because to it, the world is simply a mirror in which it sees itself reflected by projection.” This conception might enable us to understand the unconscious process whereby the pedophile acts out his inner world, obeying the lost primal sensoriality. It would then be a matter of the constellation of the archetype of the divine child, in its most “innocent” form. This state of primordial whole-ness would be lacking of the encounter with the separating masculine, both in the psyche of the mother, and, it would follow, in the couple she forms with the father; its role is to potentialize symbolic life by implicating it in the confrontation with external reality.

The genital aspect of child rape is often denied by the active pedophile, who prefers to emphasize the initiatory aspects of the sexual act. One sometimes hears such justifications from incestuous fathers. The genitality expressed in this way eludes the taboo prohibiting incest, and we might say that the symbolic castration which imposes the sacrifice of omnipotence is also absent from this field. It would appear to be a sort of perversion of the “shared madness,” and therefore a compelling reason to refine our examination of what transpires in the symbolic area of the “primary maternal preoccupation.”

The woman’s genitalized libido is subject to “the censorship of the female lover”28 which enables the mother to touch her baby’s body without being sexually aroused. Her experience of symbolic castration might be represented by the psychic and emotional space mobilized inside her in order for her to accept that she cannot be everything to the child. Opening this space to the father is indeed the work of an ethical ego, according to Solomon’s understanding of the term.

In the course of their analysis, patients enabled me to understand how, when they were confronted with the problematic of a defective father, they could elaborate the fantasy of being sodomized by their father. This fantasy might be understood as a plea with the father to express his virility, in relation to a mother who is still dangerously seductive, in the erotic sense of the term, despite the fact that infancy is long past. With this in mind, we can interpret a son’s fantasy of being sodomized by his father as a means of differentiation from the primal mother, when she is all-powerful and omnipresent.

Other patients, on the level of object relations, seem to be frightened out of their wits when confronted by their child’s physique, due to a fantasmatical fear that the “censorship of the male lover” will fail to do its duties for them. In this case, the fantasy involved could be described as being both incestuous and pedophiliac, and its source should be sought in a deficiency of the primary self. It is as though the numinosity of the child’s figure unconsciously induced the quest for a genitalized erotic bond. Recognizing the fathers’ problems with this relational field, Paul Denis, commenting on the sexual nature of the relationship between mother and child, specifies, “It is questionable whether a father, new or not, is capable of as great a freedom as the mother from this point of view, even though a father may share the joys of maternal care-giving.”29

Claude Balier, commenting on the pedophiliac act, refers directly to the mother, “from a psycho-pathological point of view, there is little difference at all between rape and murder. It involves appropriating the missing mother for oneself, while leaving her outside, because the dangerous object is simultaneously outside and inside the mind, invading it to the point of madness.”30

Before we conclude, it is time to turn to a question we asked at the beginning of this article. That is, why is it so rare for a woman to be implicated in a pedophiliac crime as the perpetrator?

First of all, we must make a slight detour and recall the feminine context which gave rise to the field of child psychoanalysis. The first child analysts were women: Hermine Hug-Hellmuth, Eugénie Sokolnicka, Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, and many others. Perhaps they were simply unequipped to notice the fantasy of pedophiliac seduction inherent to the counter-transference relationship. After all, from a cultural standpoint as well as an unconscious one, they were much closer to the potential victims of such abuse than they were to the perpetrators.

Moreover, we might assume that the seduction of a child by any adult woman, whether she is an analyst or not, might and must be understood within “the censorship of the female lover.” This would enable the seducer to experience the erotic aspects of the relationship on a level which involved auto-erotic, narcissistic tendencies rather than genital arousal. That would provide some explanation as to why women are rarely involved in crimes of pedophilia. Julia Kristeva seems to confirm this assumption when she postulates that “the experience of motherhood (real, imaginary, or symbolic) teaches the woman to a dual attitude in relation to the object, and, from that point on, to the patient as object. On one hand, like a man, the woman makes the patient into an erotic object, subject to the vicissitudes and risks of counter-transference. On the other hand, insofar as a mother invests her child as a love object (could it be the prototype of the beloved object, the other? Could it be the dawn of alterity?), the woman analyst may be better suited by nature to distance herself from the erotic aspects of counter-transference...”31

Nevertheless, as analysts who sometimes encounter the ravages of feminine perversion, we are forced to confront that issue as well. When it develops in the mother-child relationship, it draws that bond into the register of reification, in which the child is literally and overwhelmingly used as an object. The subtlety and complexity of this abuse may not immediately strike the observer. At most, one might be intrigued by the excessive attention the mother gives to her child. But, looking more closely, one is likely to note the rigidity of the mother’s control over the child’s body and/or thoughts, a violation which highly resembles a psychic rape, even though the connotation of sexual arousal may not necessarily be explicit.

Anne Springer, exploring the matter of perversity in women, explains: “the key difference between the fantasies and perverse acts of women and men resides in the orientation of their goals. Whereas men assail external partial objects, in women, perversion involves their own body,  in its integrity... the perversion simulates the feeling of wholeness and completeness in a defensive way, the goal of which is to eliminate the reality of the other sex, which is non-self, using a pseudo-androgyny, the hermaphrodite of the very beginnings...”32

How can we draw a parallel between the issue of pedophilia and feminine perversion? We are forced to return to the mother motivated by an ethical ego; that is, a mother ready to sacrifice her own feeling of wholeness and thus open within herself a space for that which she is not: a man. Because the man is alive inside her, she communicates the prospect of lack to her child, and enables the relationship with the father. In the active pedophile this lack is missing; the experience of this structuring non-wholeness  is vital to the process of psychic development.

Think of the image of a father lifting his child up in his arms: as Luigi Zoja reminds us in Le geste d’Hector, he understands that he must take off his shield to enable the child to nestle safely against his chest. “This vertical movement, accompanied by a vertical gaze, will always be the body language of fatherly love... It means the effort to raise one’s son above oneself, to raise civilization above nature. To progress from maleness to fatherhood, and from erection to elevation.”33