Case Response III

I will treat this vignette less from a traditional clinical perspective and more as a subjective document of the intertwining of individual and collective destructiveness. I do not claim to comment on every possible aspect of the text.

When I let the text and the drawings sink in, the first thought that comes to mind is that a sacrifice is being made here in the sense of the Old Testament's scapegoat motif, as a variant of the “discarded child” (Bovensiepen, 2022). I have the impression that Alice experiences herself and her inner world as deeply evil. She possibly feels burdened with the sins of her parents and grandparents, and I suspect that she feels as if she were born evil. Perhaps this is expressed in the black, ink-like substance, as the analyst notes, flowing from the girl's vagina in the pictures: “She also had detailed knowledge of ‘the black inky substance’, which often covered the floor and flowed from the tortured girl's vagina as a confirmation of her innate evil and the just cause for her necessary punishment and purification.”

For Alice, the cruel and violent psychological and physical abuse she has actually experienced seem to be a confirmation of her unconscious conviction that she was born as a child filled with malice and therefore has no right to participate in “Christian” life. All the cruelty inflicted on the patient by the family (especially the grandparents) is an attempt at atonement through a kind of archaic “human sacrifice”; in sacrificing Alice, the family tries to cleanse itself of the guilt it has accumulated by abusing Alice. The patient's individual life, that is, everything that is alive and independent as a person, is to be destroyed, discarded or expelled.

The segregation of otherness, of strangeness and the incomprehensible—which from the point of view of the family's Christian ideology is perhaps perceived as “Satanic”—seems to follow a “tradition” within the family: “The full extent of the beleaguered history of the