Considering Ibsen's Little Eyolf and other plays, Goldman discerns the image of our secret self in the image of a beautiful child, always already abused. The feeling of belatedness, that there is no substantial reality to hold on to, of being controlled from outside, of thinking one is being thought instead of thinking, all these feelings have analogies with the symptoms of child abuse. In the intertwined fantasies of victim, abuser, and observer, a story which can never be told outside the fantasy, lie the foundational traumas to the imagination upon which the mental life of the adult is built.