The Ethical Seduction of the Analytic Situation: The Feminine-Maternal Origins of Responsibility for the Other (The International Psychoanalytical ... Psychoanalytic Ideas and Applications Series)

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From this distance Hamish now understands he was just a child when the abuse occurred; he was unable to consent to sex with an adult in a position of power. One gentleman, sadly, was completely house bound. He basically just felt that it was completely impossible to trust anybody or to be out in society because he had so little self-regard,” she says. Despite growing up in a wealthy suburb and going to a private school, home life was difficult. His single mother suffered frequent physical illnesses, such as pneumonia and pleurisy. In retrospect Hamish thinks his mother was also mentally unwell.

About 10 years ago a television news story prompted him to briefly mention the childhood sexual abuse to his wife. After the disclosure he promptly told her: “I never want to talk about it ever again, ever.” As adults, the majority of men in Lucetta’s study felt “very trapped, very isolated, very afraid and very unsure of how to go about getting help and understanding the power dynamics that they had been subjected to.” Ian describes “a paralysis” inside him and states: “I don’t think I’ve loved anybody in my life [and] didn’t know what love was.” I was born illegitimately,” Ian says, “and he [John] knew that because he wasn’t sleeping with my mother.”Lucetta says men who were victims as boys are deterred from disclosing what happened due to the very real fear of not being believed or being blamed for their maternal abuse. I was shunned, I wasn’t wanted. I felt that even from my cousins, uncles and aunties, grandparents,” Ian says. I’ve] spent most of my life trying to repress these thoughts and memories,” he says, “I haven’t talked to anyone for 30 years about it.”

Although Ian is still married to his wife and has been for nearly 50 years, he confesses to having a number of extramarital affairs and visiting escorts for sex. The family dynamic was complicated. Ian, his two brothers, mother and her husband — we’ll call him John — lived in poverty in rural South Australia.

Only in the last six years — and after decades of counselling and therapy — does Ian feel he’s started to recover. For Ian, the childhood abuse “manipulated my sexuality and impacted my ability to operate as a person.” She preyed on the fact I was coming into puberty and made me feel important and special,” he tells me.

I hated her because of abuse,” he says, “I had a list of people who I wanted dead and she was on that list.” She saw me as like some sort of de facto relationship, I’ve got no doubt about that. She’d say: ‘You’re the man of the house’,” he recalls. Since she met him, Lucetta had witnessed Marcus struggling to come to terms with what happened to him in childhood. True to his word, Hamish never did discuss it again with his wife — something he has lived to regret.

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I love my wife and for a lot of the time we had a good relationship but this thing [the abuse] came between us,” Hamish says, “it did slowly poison our relationship.” You can’t just bottle it up and think that it will go away, because it doesn’t ever go away,” he says. And he would know.