The article interprets maternal suffering and its implications on a psychotic child's psychoanalysis. Parental suffering interferes with a child's treatment when it induces the repetition of fantasies generated in traumas whose messages, once intruded, were not worked through by the parents. As the clinical case demonstrates, the mother's phallicism and the foreclosure of the paternal function are not necessarily present in the origins of the psychosis. Far from being his mother's phallus, the boy received a role to replace a hated object in a traumatic scene lived precociously by his mother, during her childhood, when she received intrusive sexual messages related to birth and death, relived imaginarily by her during the boy's psychoanalysis.
Child psychoanalysis; parent-child relations; suffering