ABSTRACT

Attending Winnicott Memorial lecture, given by Lloyd de Mause, was an experience for Mander Gertrud that had a powerful impact on a professional audience which is used to the subject of child sexual abuse. Going to a website on child sexual abuse Gertrud read that this has only recently become a subject of interest in particular countries and cultures, where it is seen as a social problem and a main source of many people's suffering and personal problems. Welldon calls incest the pathological solution of a family to the problem of sexual perversion: "Keeping sex in the family". The process of incest begins very often with the wife refusing to have sex with her husband. This makes the husband feel insecure and inadequate and leads to the marked regression which is characteristic of the incest perpetrator.