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The person with a major system in dissociation may recall from his sleep very vivid and blatantly meaningful dreams as long as nothing provides a path between these dreams and his security (Sullivan, 1956, p. 180).
THE TENDENCY TO VIEW THE mother-infant relationship as being ideal is virtually universal, transcending the boundaries of culture and geography. Not only does this image dominate in primitive societies, but it is also the centerpiece of Christianity, where icons of the Virgin Mother swaddling the infant Christ are familiar. And yet, buried in that image of perfect harmony and bliss, other forces of a dark and destructive nature may be present as well. These sinister forces of maternal rage are encountered in cases of infant physical and sexual abuse, announced in lurid tabloid headlines describing mothers who have suffocated or strangled their infants, evidently while in the throes of depressive or psychotic episodes.
For most of us, these images are repellent and it is relatively easy to condemn the perpetrators of these crimes who have vented forces of seemingly irrational anger against innocent babies. We are incredulous at their ability to harm that which is so precious and unable to defend itself and can only attribute these behaviors to the most disturbed psychological conditions. We comfort ourselves by labeling these acts of violence as extreme aberrations from the norm.
Several prominent theorists of human behavior and its underlying motivations, including Freud (1920), (1930), Sullivan (1940),