The relevance of the Oedipus myth to fostered and adopted children

The paper makes a conceptual distinction between aggressive phantasies and acts against the object and a destructive form of potentially objectless violence resulting from attacks on the mental capacity for linking terms of –K. In thinking about the issue of the internal states leading to mindless destructiveness, the author suggests that such behaviour may result from active envious attacks on the capacity for linking, but that, in some cases, early trauma may result in a more passive breakdown of the human disposition for creating emotional mental links. The discussion of the clinical history of a destructive latency child who was born at six months of gestational age connects the traumatic beginning of his life with his violent behaviour.