Neau, Françoise

A Daughter Is Sacrificed - 2010.


71

Starting from the representation « I was given as an offering by my mother to my grandmother », a key moment in the treatment of a 50-year-old patient, the author considers the sacrificial fantasy. Having been a stake in the parricide, women are then moved away from the culture-founding sacrifice illustrated by Freud from Totem and Taboo to Moses and Monotheism, amid crime and deification, to be sacrificed to the « new realm of intellectuality » (1939, p. 113). They nevertheless return to the sacrificial scene, even as its uncanny or petrifying agent, or as close as possible to the melancholic tradition of the masochistic fantasy. The clinical development of this sacrificial fantasy, in the form of the offering but also of rejection (« my mother gave that to her parents, my mother dumped me »), leads to a delineation of its polysemy – behind the positive or negative idealisation, the passivisation, the murder and the loss – but also the paths of separation opened up by the treatment.