6

Child health care practitioners are increasingly faced with pornographic images intruding into the psychic life and intimacy of children, including during the so-called “latency” stage. How do these images collide with or crush infantile sexual fantasies and theories? What happens to the child’s sexual curiosity and his/her “investigative impulse” once they have been short-circuited in this way? During session work, it takes all of the therapist’s creativity to contain the excessive excitation and to thwart the paralyzing effect of the images. This can be seen in the therapeutic work undertaken with Selma, an eight-year-old girl. In this case, Selma’s infantile sexuality—with its plasticity, mobility, and reservoir of fantasies—enabled her to free herself from her repetition compulsion and to relaunch her fantasy life.