« Through these stories, we will, I hope, open our eyes and see what a small child can endure without society coming to his aid. We will also understand how a hatred is created that leads to innocent children turning into adults capable, for example, of organizing, approving, executing, justifying and forgetting the monstrous holocaust. »

« The truth about childhood that many of us have had to suffer is inconceivable, revolting, painful, monstrous at times, always repressed. To learn this truth at once and integrate this knowledge is simply impossible, even if we long for it. The capacity of the human body to endure suffering is - for its very protection - limited, and all attempts to ignore these limits, to brutally lift refoulement have only negative and often dangerous effects, like any other form of rape. The after-effects of a traumatic experience can only be liquidated once all the traumatic aspects of this experience have been revecused, linked together and denounced as part of a therapy that will reveal them with caution. Focus: It is clear that it is not enough to feel the old wounds to free us from the past, because therapy is not limited to that, far from it. And it is not always necessary, it seems, to confront the past as intensively as I personally did. It depends on the current situation, the psychic resources and the relational network of the individual. »

« I was struck recently by a book in which fourteen fathers, convicted of sexual abuse and who have long followed a well-structured group therapy in their prison, tell their story. It is encouraging to see how quickly these men have changed their thinking when, for the first time, they were able to talk about their distress, feel understood and accepted. Not surprisingly, they all suffered from severe deficiencies in childhood. Deficiencies that had been camouflaged under sexual exploitation, serving as a substitute for the love they were deprived of. What seems encouraging to me is that it was enough explanatory interviews to get these men to want to transform themselves. They lived thirty, forty or fifty years without ever having the opportunity to question what they suffered as children, or, let alone, to discern that it was an injustice. Naturally, they inflicted the same suffering on their children under the same pretexts. Until they understood the relationship between their past and their current conduct, this process of repetition, it was impossible for them to free themselves from this inner constraint. Today only they are able to assume their responsibility and are ready to do so: because they stop considering their fate as an abused child as the normal state of affairs. »