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The original title of this paper was announced as The Passions of Adults and Their Influence on the Sexual and Character Development of Children. It was Ferenczi's last congress paper, read in 1932, and is a short extract of his carefully weighed views on the important role which adults play in the child's development.
Adults, not infrequently the parents themselves, can traumatize the child by subjecting him to one or more of three different attitudes: 'the passionate love', 'the passionate punishment', and 'the terrorism of suffering'.
The passionate love of the adult will all too frequently lead him to misuse the child for his own sexual gratification. Ferenczi emphasizes the fact that such abuses in childhood are not always just the fantasies of hysterical patients. Patients whose complete confidence had been won were able to 'establish a contrast between the present and the unbearable past', and by so doing could re-experience the past as an 'objective memory' rather than as a hallucinatory reproduction. Furthermore, patients in analysis often confess their sexual attacks on children.
The child who, even if playfully seductive, has only affectionate feelings for the adult, will be overpowered by the adult's sexual advances and paralyzed by pain and anxiety. 'The same anxiety, if it reaches a certain point, will compel the child to subordinate himself automatically to the will of the aggressor; to divine his desires and to gratify them; to completely efface himself, identifying with the aggressor.' The most important effect of this identification is the 'introjection of the guilt feelings of the adult'. Thus, the child, guilty through identification, does not dare to reveal his secret. Such a child can go through a profound character change: his sexual life may remain undeveloped or he may become a pervert; neurosis and psychosis are also possible consequences.
In the case of passionate punishment the child may experience a similar reaction. Ferenczi s