Pseudo-stupidity enables children as well as infantile adults to participate to an amazingly unlimited extent in the sexual life of parents and other adults. In my cases the manoeuvre of the children was fully reciprocated emotionally by a parent or sibling, because it met the adult's own unconscious desire, isolated from his feelings of guilt. This utilization of stupidity is widespread because mutual sexual desires are gratified on a pre-verbal affective level, without becoming conscious through word pictures, and this renders repression or other defence measures unnecessary. Thus children and parents are able to maintain a distorted but gratifying affective communion which would otherwise be limited to mother and infant.

Author's Summary.