My break-out session lecture at the 22nd IAAP congress focused on the collective psychic roots of ecocide in Christian and Oedipal myths. It revealed the existence of a parental counter-oedipal complex unexplored by psychoanalysis. Unconsciously at work at family and social levels, it maintains sacrificial and dominant positions. Like the Oedipus complex, it involves incestuous and mortifying feelings and impulses, but on the part of the parents towards their child. When it is powerful, this complex, occulted familialy and societaly, triggers the activation of the child's archetype. But activation on its negative pole, which I call diabolic. Jung did not theorise polarisation solely in relation to this archetype. The study of this shadowy area of psychoanalysis, which has remained unexplored until now, seems essential in order to accompany problems that are as yet incomprehensible and for which the clinic shows the parental projection of this negative pole onto the real child. This archetypal projection mechanism needs to be recognised and worked out, because it drives us to behave in ways that are both suicidal and murderous towards our children and descendants. It can be seen in a literal reading of myths and tales.
It underpins the ecocide that is taking place worldwide but also individual and family problems such as incest. As for clinical anorexia nervosa, it reveals the prior presence, with transgenerational roots, of an unconscious family anxiety blocking the becoming woman of the adolescente. The parental oedipal complexes, trapped in an archaic world dominated by the archetype of the great mother, are in fact powerfully reactivated during the girl's adolescence. In their counter-oedipal form, they generate feelings of envy, jealousy, incestuous desire and fear which defensively trigger the activation of the child archetype and its projection onto the real child on its two poles. The divin pole, of the perfect child in childhood, and the opposite side, of the diabolical child in pre-adolescence. The adolescent, by turning this violence against herself, embodies the violence of the parental drive fantasies about her and the mortifying archetypal projection. The de-eroticisation of her body, through its extreme thinness, comes to signify the mother's unconscious terror of her daughter's oedipal desire, fantasised as all-powerful, and impedes the awakening of the father's counter-oedipal desire for his daughter, fantasised unconsciously by the parents as inevitable. The deserotization of her body, by its extreme thinness, come to signifies the mother's unconscious terror of her daughter's oedipal desire, fantasized as all-powerful, and also prevents the awakening of the father's counter-oedipal desire for his daughter, unconsciously fantasized by the parents as inescapable. The anorexic symptoms can thus be seen as a final unconscious attempt by the adolescent to express her evolutionnal blockage, both narcissistic and impulsive, in the face of the required sacrifice of her place as a woman: status fantasised by the family as unique and occupied strictly by the mother.