NCJ Number
156966
Journal
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry Volume: 65 Issue: 1 Dated: (January 1995) Pages: 39-47
Date Published
1995
Length
9 pages
Annotation
This article discusses how normal attachment between parent and child can be overridden to the point of parricide by extending recent work in social cognition on the tunneling effect in the thought processes of suicide contemplators and seeking to integrate it with clinical observations on project-introjective cycling of aggressive impulses.
Abstract
In chronically abusive homes, extreme disturbances to the self are generated as a function of abuse. These disturbances, including denigration of the focal self, shame-based experiences, and the perception of the self as aversive, tend to be exacerbated during adolescence, when self issues are paramount. The affective projective-introjective cycling concept shifts the perceived source of aversiveness and aggression from the self to the abusive parent, so that the adolescent's impulse shifts from suicide to parricide. In adolescence, where the developmental task of self-integration is particularly salient, the deconstruction of focus functions in the parricidal act as it would in a suicidal act. 49 references