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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The sentence that stayed with her was this one: “The only course of action is for you to do something positive, like finish the PhD.” I AM very sorry I brought you so much pain,” Marcus* wrote in his final letter, “Thank you for caring for me. I know I didn’t deserve it.” He worked damn hard to do just that. Hamish married in the early 90s and fathered two sons of whom he’s extremely proud. There seemed to be a recurrence of the trauma building up over the years,” she says, “so from the late 30s onwards, it was really starting to become an issue for them.”

To an outsider, these could be understood as simple words of encouragement. Lucetta knew their real meaning; this was an urgent final plea. It’s an incredibly confusing situation for victims, explains Lucetta, because “the boys still love their mother” and just like Hamish, “they don’t want the family to break apart.” At the time though, it was a different story: “I thought I was enjoying it and I thought I was grown up.” For Ian, the childhood abuse “manipulated my sexuality and impacted my ability to operate as a person.” The sexual abuse of “these men when boys is often highly traumatic and at times extremely violent and impacted on their psychological, biosocial and physical development,” Lucetta says.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.” Marcus died by suicide two years ago and when he did, he left University of Canberra researcher Lucetta Thomas a message. 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. Far from healing over time, the impacts of this mother-to-son childhood sexual abuse seem to continue.

When he was just 15, Hamish’s mother died. While making it clear he didn’t wish for her death, Hamish is blunt: “She did me a favour … I’ve always felt that it enabled me, in some respects, to get on with my life.” Ian,* 70, was also sexually abused by his mother. Unlike Hamish, it happened when he was a much younger child.

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According to Lucetta, society’s beliefs about gender are effectively stopping a cohort of male victims disclosing their abuse and accessing support. I hated her because of abuse,” he says, “I had a list of people who I wanted dead and she was on that list.” Only in the last six years — and after decades of counselling and therapy — does Ian feel he’s started to recover. She says: “Out of all the males that I spoke to I would say only one had actually come to terms with what had happened to him.”