ABSTRACT
In fact, Professor David Buss (2005), an American research psychologist, published a landmark study of the ubiquity of death wishes that adults harbour towards one another. David Buss's work on aggressive fantasies, and my own study of sexual fantasies, focused predominantly on hateful wishes and feelings directed principally towards adults. But what happens when a grown-up expresses death wishes towards a baby? However, the nature of unconscious death wishes towards infants and children remains a much more murky terrain, in large measure owing to its invisible and unquantifiable, yet none the less profound, nature. Death wishes, including neonaticidal wishes towards newborns, infanticidal wishes towards babies, and filicidal wishes towards young children, certainly exist. As the psychotherapist or psychoanalyst becomes more vigilant to the reality of parental death wishes, and to the possibility of the transmission of psychological infanticidal messages, one becomes increasingly sensitive to their appearance in the clinical material.
