[Psychopathological study of parents who abuse their children]

After recalling the studies of French authors, especially those of P. Parisot and L. Caussade at the Congress of Legal Medicine in Nancy (1929), and more recent, those of the Nancy school, and, in Paris, those of P. Straus and A. Wolf, of L. Kreisler and P. Straus, the author studies Anglo-Saxon research on subject, particularly that undertaken in the U.S.A. The study by Steele and Pollock on the psychology of parents of battered children has shown anomalies with an infantile characteristic in the psychology of some parents (apparently having no problems and living in easy circumstances, but demanding of their children a constant reassurance which the latter are unable to give, hence a permanent frustration leading to agressivity and actual tormenting. Eight observations are presented, covering the whole range of clinical forms observed with parents of battered children: psychopathic personality with perverse sado-masochism, affective immaturation with decompensation during pregnancy, lack of psycho-affective balance with aggression upon some of the children (target-children), a need for domination in the form of tyrannical matriarchate, nevropathy with aggressive perfectionism, and finally subnormal personality with nevropathy, the latter categories leaving a hop for a possibility of attaining transformation through analytical psychotherapy, such as practised by the author in one of his cases.