ABSTRACT
Retroactive insight gives sexual meaning to the past "I love you"s, so that they can no longer hold on to their status as an innocent piece of play. Play-words have become serious words relating to things, objects, and acts, all of them equally anxiety-arousing. Words like "effort", "separated", and "individuation" have some connotation of violence. There is violence when a child decides to speak: an act of appropriation and of individuation based on the mutual acknowledgement by mother and child of their separate identity. It is impossible to pronounce the words of betrayal, impossible to hear them without a fresh surge of anxiety. The primal scene reawakens the pain of separation and exclusion by the third party / "outsider", and revives the excitation and narcissistic wounds of the failure to fulfil the Oedipal desires. The warmth of the Oedipal transference creates the conditions for the traumatic scene to re-appear and enables it to be processed.
