Traumatic scars and maternal function. FILICIDE. Destructive maternal actions, which in extreme cases may result in filicide, reveal the importance of traumatic experiences in early infancy and particularly of primitive death anxiety and of alienated pathological identifications (maddening objects). It is especially in relation with a child that the past lives again in the present, even more specifically if it is recalled by «the crying of the child». Interesting points of contact emerge between cases in which the violent acts seem to become irrepressible, so as to maintain unity in order to face the re-presentification of an internal persecutory (almost delusional) chaos, and cases in which the acting is controlled with difficulty while assisting at the beginning of a psychotic disintegration.

KEY WORDS: Filicide, early childhood traumas, death experiences, maddening objects, sensory and emotional fragments residual to trauma, threat of psychotic disintegration.