The Infanticidal Attachment*

When I first embarked upon my training programmes during the late 1970s, virtually none of my otherwise inspiring and, often, brilliant teachers and supervisors ever mentioned the notion of “child abuse” or, indeed, “trauma”, and certainly no one ever referred to the concept of “attachment”. Fortunately, as an historian of long-standing, I feel honoured and grateful that I had always immersed myself in the works of our iconic ancestors such as Herr Professor Sigmund Freud and Dr John Bowlby and, hence, I became much more aware of these vital topics, even though most clinicians at that point in time had never even considered the full impact of actual abuse.

Thankfully, as the 1980s and 1990s unfolded, the field of child abuse studies developed in a much more serious manner and, after many centuries of negligence, the British government finally banned teachers from slapping their students in classrooms with a ruler—a long-standing, traditional component of the educational process!

But, even though mental health practitioners became, at long last, increasingly aware of the impact of child physical abuse and child sexual abuse on the development of psychopathology in adults, virtually no one ever spoke about the role of parental death wishes as potential aetiological contributors.

Having benefited hugely from my association with the iconic historian of childhood, Mr Lloyd deMause, I became increasingly aware of the long-standing ancient heritage of infanticidal attacks on babies. But, the vast majority of our colleagues had never properly examined the impact of psychological death wishes on the development of living human beings. Hence, owing to my early work with schizophrenic patients, I soon developed the notion of “psychological infanticide” (Kahr 1993, p. 269)—the presence of parental death wishes—instead of “biological infanticide”—the actual murder of the babies.

I remain truly grateful that Dr Joseph Schwartz, the inau