The author presents the psychodynamics of the distorted patterns of family interaction encountered in a study of sixty cases of child abuse. Sixty nonabusing subjects served as controls. Child abuse is regarded as a dysfunction of parenting in which the parent misperceives the child due to his or her own frustrating childhood experiences. The beating represents the parent's attempt to master trauma passively experienced as a child. The child abuse syndrome is conceptualized as the product of three factors: the parent's abuse-prone personality, the child's abuse-provoking characteristics, and environmental stress. The techniques, aims, and pitfalls of psychotherapeutic intervention with abusing parents are described.