Feelings that Kill: The Effect of the Wish for Infanticide in Neurotic Depression*

Cases of actual infanticide are comparatively rare. The parent's wish to commit infanticide, however, may be much more prevalent than any of us would like to think and more deadly in its effects than we have any way of calculating. I am not referring to the kind of wish that arises in a momentary fit of rage and is communicated directly in simple terms, but to one which, although rarely expressed openly, is absorbed by the child.

In my recent treatment of two patients, one of whom suffered from a neurotic depression and one whose severe depression had eventuated in a psychosis, I have been led to believe that the child may respond to what it senses of this feeling on the part of the parent by becoming neurotically ill. Although my experience indicates that it may be an essential element in the genesis of neurotic depression, I surmise that it also plays a major role in other types of illness.

Among the patients whom I have treated, there is no lack of evidence that such a wish exists. A mother who brought her twelve-year-old son for treatment had been helped over the acute phase of a post-partum psychosis and described her overpowering wish to kill him and herself during his first two years of life. Although she felt that she had recovered from this feeling, her communications established an intensely destructive attitude towards him. In another case of an adolescent boy who tried to commit suicide, the mother revealed that her first impulse after his birth was to “shove him back up.” The mother of a four and a half year old girl informed me in