Abstract The author seeks to explore the possible connection between the currently highlighted phenomenon of child abuse and what almost may be an atavistic socio-religio-mythic rite of infant sacrifice, the latter of which may occupy the role of a virtual 'culture gene' that descends generations. While put forward as a group socio-mythic ritual, the author regards this propensity as inherent only in the psyche of the individual, but it is one that emerges in and is catalysed by the presence of the family, group, culture, etc. The author believes that child abuse may be but a part of the individual's, the family's and the cultural group's propensity unconsciously to employ projective identification specifically in the form of human sacrifice, literally or symbolically (scapegoatism), on onesef, one's dear ones and/or on selected strangers in order to achieve magical solutions to individual and collective family and group emotional problems. Further, the author believes that human sacrifice is an ineluctable component of the oedipus complex, one that Freud and his followers seemed to have left unnoticed. The tendency toward the exercise of abuse by one person on another, particularly by a parent toward a child, may issue, consequently, not only from and enactment of the individual dynamic vulnerabilities of the abusers in impoverished and/or dysfunctional home settings, but also from what one may term an 'inter-generational' and 'trans-generational neurosis', a concept that addresses not just the intersubjective effects of the infantile neuroses of the parents (individually and collectively as a group process) as it interacts with that of the child. It also addresses a larger cultural-group process in which one may detect the continuing presence of ancestral ghosts in our present lives. Behind all this is the author's contention that there exists a hitherto insufficiently recognised ambivalence toward infants which has never been adequately represented in traditional psychoanalytic theory. As a postscript to this summary, it is no great leap to implicate this propensity as one of the major hidden organisers of warfare, where millions upon millions of youths, to say nothing of others, have been needlessly sacrificed.
...I the LORD thy GOD am a jealous God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations ... (Exodus, 20:6), yet ...
The son shall not bear the sin of the father, neither shall the father bear the sin of the son ... (Ezekiel, 18:20)
The expansion of our consciousness about the phenomena of child abuse and molestation has begun to make a significant impact on the caring world at large and on the mental health public in particular. Belsky (1993) has recently reviewed the subject from an empirical perspective and isolates the following 'contexts of maltreatment' as etiological factors: 'developmental context' (including inter-generational transmission); the 'immediate interac- tional context' of maltreatment; and the 'broader context', including community, cultural and evolutionary contexts of child maltreatment. Belsky concludes that poverty and un- availability of infant and child care helpers are significant but remediable factors. This contribution acknowledges the problem of the breadth of this phenomenon and seeks to isolate only a single factor within it, that of infant sacrifice, which would roughly correspond to Belsky's idea of inter-generational transmission and evolutionary contexts. The thesis of this contribution is that child abuse-and abuse in general-constitutes a complex individual-family-group-cultural-religious phenomenon, one isolated aspect of which is the need on the part of the troubled abuser individual or group to 'cure' himself or themselves of emotional illness by a primitive form of'exorcism', that is, by a violent projective identification of their individual or collective emotional pain into whomever may be arbitrarily chosen to bear the 'exorcism' from the abused abuser and thereby become the 'sacrificial lamb'.
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