The Threat of Infanticide and Homosexual Identity

Although the assumption of a different identity has been most frequently associated with the psychotic states encountered in mental institutions, I have concluded from my psychoanalytic treatment of child and adult patients that it is a common defense against the parents' threat of infanticide. In a previous paper I proposed that the fear of the parents' wish for infanticide is the prime source of most defensive fantasies.* The intense conviction that life depends on the parents' love which we encounter later in adult patients, as well as the scale of the child's investment in maintaining the illusion of it, suggests that it may be the one ameliorating force that counteracts the parents' murderous feelings. In order to preserve an image of the parents as potentially loving people, the child therefore blames himself for their negative and destructive feelings. In a complex system of self-deception which may pervade every area of his life, he very often adopts a fantasy and a life-style which may continue until his death that substantiates his concept that he has provoked his parents' destructive feelings by his “badness” or inadequacy or worthlessness. The underlying purpose of this effort is to defend himself against the fear of infanticide by perpetuating the hope that whenever he changes and becomes worthy, his parents will love him. His feelings of worthlessness are therefore a reliable measure of the hating and the destructive feelings he has absorbed.

Where the child encounters an actual threat of infanticide and where there is an absence or an insufficiency of genuine love, however, the defensive fantasy by itself may no longer suffice. In almost all cases that have come to my attention, the child is forced to defend himself under such conditions by acting out his fantasy and psychologically transforming himself. Depending on the intensity of