To the Editor

As a service to our readership, James S. Grotstein's paper, “Why Oedipus and Not Christ? A Psychoanalytic Inquiry into Innocence, Human Sacrifice, and the Sacred, Part I: Innocence, Spirituality, and Human Sacrifice,” appearing in Vol. 57, No. 3, September 1997, pp. , was made available on the private Internet service directed to the psychoanalytic profession, The Psychoanalytic Connection (psychoanalysis.net). The following correspondence was selected, compiled, and edited with the correspondents' approval by Mariam Cohen, M.D., the Journal's Online Editor, from the lengthy e-mail exchange focusing on this paper. The paper's author was a participant in the electronic conversation.

Grotstein's clear discussion (Grotstein, J. S. []. Why Oedipus and not Christ? Part I) of the object relations of abused patients and their suffering caused me to think about the relationship between abuse, intense negative affect, object relations, and morality. Because abuse results in the internalization of “bad objects,” a simple view of abuse is to say that these “bad objects” must somehow be replaced with better objects, and the therapist must not allow himself to be seduced by the patient's pleas or upset by the patient's complaints. Patients who present negative symptoms—distress, depression, despair, fear, anger—may want to be rid of these parts of themselves.

The intense suffering of abused patients is often perceived as “irrational” in a society that requires us to learn to control our emotions and be responsive to the feelings of other people. Those patients who do not control their affect may be seen as deficient or defective by themselves and others, including sometimes their therapists. These judgments also express a morality in the sense of ideals of how we should treat one another. However, the patient's distress and anger also express a moral judgment—the feeling of being unfairly mistreated.

I think that it is common to believe that negative transference reflect