Beginning with the story of Bluebeard, the author considers how traumatic overwhelm can occur in everyday childhood situations of a psychically murderous quality; for example, a nanny's totalitarian regime may be invisible to parents ruled by collective social and cultural norms. A child who is remote from mother and idealises a father embodying a powerful patriarchal system may remain naïvely dependent in marriage and unable to cope with the realities of human aggression. The paper describes analytic work with a woman who had suffered repeated breakdowns and needed to relinquish a fragile, socially constructed identity in order to establish her own true orientation.