The Central Phantasy of Acted Violence

Sometimes, we can have access to the central phantasy of patients who resort to violence that is acted out. This phantasy is often an account of the primal scene in which their pre-oedipal and oedipal theories appear. In Freud's work, moreover, it is almost exclusively within the context of the primitive scene and Oedipus complex that the term “violence” (Heftigkeit) appears.

In the very first meeting, the patient communicated a question that, for him, amounted to an obsession. He was wondering about his parents' sexuality. He was convinced that they indulged in sadomasochistic games. He had always “known” this. When he was a young child, he and one of his sisters would hide behind the bedroom door to listen to them. They had caught them reading out loud passages from a book that described games of this kind. Later, they had heard them putting them into practice.

During this first consultation, the patient's account was extremely confusing. When he talked in confidence about the scene in which he was spying on his parents with his sister, it was as if he was speaking of a screen memory that allowed him to project an initial depiction of the primal scene. Then he talked about his own violent behaviour. At university, he took part with other young people in various disturbing practices and, with a girlfriend, he had organised games based on a constant escalation in sexual violence. In the course of the analysis, what was quickly striking was the fact that each time an interpretation helped the patient to understand what was happening in him, he had the feeling he was going mad and immediately had to retreat. If not, he ran the risk of ceasing to exist. As soon as he had the impression that the analyst understood him, he felt he had to take leave of his sessions for a while. He was capable of missing a whole week of sessions without being aware of the time that had gone by. Often, he would fall into a deep sleep from which nothing could awaken him, neither the alarm cloc