The Cannibalistic Impulses of Parents

If one has humbled oneself all one's life long in order to avoid painful conflict with facts, one tends to keep one's back bowed in one's old age before any new fact which may appear.

The present study has two purposes:

1. It seeks to present data pertaining to the cannibalistic impulses of parents and to demonstrate that these impulses underlie a psychic structure which—qua structure—originates in adulthood, and therefore cannot be considered either as a simple elaboration of infantile cannibalistic impulses, nor as a reaction to the cannibalistic impulses of children, i.e., it is not “counter”-cannibalistic. On the contrary, it is proposed to show that an objective scrutiny of enormous masses of psychological, historical, ethnological and zoological data make it imperative to assume that the specifically cannibalistic—as distinct from simply oral-aggressive—impulses of children are reactive and “counter”-cannibalistic, being elicited by the cannibalistic impulses of the parents. The term “children”—as distinct from “infants”—is used advisedly in this context, since the infant is, because of its inability to think conceptually, as incapable of having specifically cannibalistic fantasies as an animal is incapable of committing “incest” in the human sense of that term. (22)

2. An attempt will be made to examine the problem of the singular lack of psychoanalytic interest in the problem of adult—and, a fortiori of parental—cannibalistic impulses, as shown by the topical index of Grinstein's work, (17) and to suggest that this systematic neglect is not fortuitous, but represents a both psychologically and culturally determined scotomization of this important problem.

Parental vs. Filial Cannibalistic Impulses and Acts

In a previous paper (7) it was shown that the so-called counter-oedipal attitudes of parents are actually prior to the oedipal attitudes of children, and serve as triggering mechanisms for the latter.

The present study proposes to demonstrate the prior