Child Sexual Abuse, Baby Gender, and Intergenerational Psychic Transmission: An Exploratory, Projective Psychoanalytic Approach

The aim of this article is to present a French psychoanalytic model of how and to what extent the sequellae of sexual abuse by a male during a girl's childhood are transmitted to the next generation, as a function of the gender of the abused mother's children. The authors conducted a qualitative exploratory study based on the longitudinal follow-up of a woman who had two boys and a girl. They focused on the impact of two general sequellae: separation anxiety and negativity-disqualification of the paternal and/or male figures. From the methodological standpoint, they used a clinical interview to assess the mother, and a projective tool, a storytelling test, to assess the child's personality using content analysis. The results confirm both the merits of the theoretical framework and the relevance of the projective methodology for grasping sequellae transmitted to the child. The sequellae turned out to be markedly different for the two baby genders: rejection for the male, overprotection and ghostly encryption for the female. Avenues for using this tool and model in future quantitative, comparative studies are suggested.