The film The Passion of the Christ, by Mel Gibson (2004), recalls Freud's (1919/1955a) paper “A Child Is Being Beaten.” In 1919, Freud described a triphasic progression to the fantasy of witnessing an adult administering corporal punishment: father beating another child, the reporter-child being beaten by the father, and ultimately, a father surrogate beating other children, usually boys. Reactions to witnessing the unrelenting tortures endured by Jesus in The Passion of the Christ led to a psychoanalytic examination of the metaphors conveyed by its images, plot, and characters. This film contains unconscious themes of sexual identification and disidentification, incest, guilt-induced masochism, and the convergence of pain and love in the parent-child relationship.