Le Point – How can we explain this series of children left in cars?
Jacques-Alain Miller – The holidays, fatigue, concerns, inattention … We feel however that this doesn’t explain it all, that a desire is involved, a desire unknown. That is what’s scary, because what if myself… The fact is that we may unwittingly desire to destroy what is most dear to us. Sometimes a mother is obsessed with the thought that she will suddenly kill his beloved child. This is called a phobia pulse. It is the other side of forgetting a child.
Le Point – This drama seems to happen more often to men than to women.
JAM – Infanticide mothers retain the object: they freeze it, they reduce it to ashes or cut it into pieces. Fathers lose it, they forget about it. From the psychoanalytic point of view, the subject is responsible for everything: parapraxis (actes manqués), dreams, and absences. That is why Freud could say that in the unconscious, we are all criminals. For the judiciary, fortunately, it is otherwise. The judges did not know of desire, but of will. There was homicide, was it wanted, premeditated or not?
Le Point – Can one be a good parent and forget your own child?
JAM – Of course. Love is never a whole, except perhaps the love of God. If only because it puts you in dependence vis-à-vis the loved subject, it raises necessarily aggressiveness, even hatred. Forgetting is already in itself a symbolic murder.
Le Point – Can a baby become the symbolic object by which spouses settle the score with the one another?
JAM – It is not implausible. A child is both the result and the cause of at least two desires. Hence a complex combinatorial. Homicide may target the victim, or maybe the other partner. Or it could spread into self-destruction or self-punishment. To find out the subject must undergo analysis, yet this testimony is not admissible in court.
Le Point – Some psychiatrists suggest that this would be the exacerbated manifestation of a hidden depression.
JAM – This would entail to regard the event essentially as a self-destruction in disguise. What we should understand is that memory and awareness have functions other than the cognitive ones – pure and straightforward ways to know the reality. Except where there is a physiological impediment, to forget means to repress. It is therefore also a matter of libido, desire.
Le Point – Doesn’t the response of the law reveal a double standard? Or does it help the psychic repairing?
JAM – When there is murder, the justice of men must act. And it is indeed as therapeutic for society as it is unfortunate for the guilty.