This article discusses the violence of the enigmatic messages that the adult always communicates while caring for a child. It is the repressed sexuality of the adult himself, therefore unconscious to him, which pervades every situation of attachment, on one hand initiating seduction toward the child - therefore traumatizing - and, on the other, calling on the child to start a task of translation, the metabolizing of excess. This task of translating the seduction by the adult is structuring to Laplanche, because it not only founds the psyche of the child, but opens an organizing and humane psychic activity through a constant après-coup movement of translation and retranslation of the enigmatic. On this movement of translation, culture, as an assistant in the translation, mitigates the violence of the messages. We illustrate this discussion with the Biblical story of "Susanna and the elders" and its pictographic representation by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1651), in which an Oedipal setting results from the translation.
Theory of generalized seduction; psychoanalysis and art; bible
