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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How can you have a healthy sexual relationship? How can you become a father, husband, grandfather?” he asks. 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. 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.” 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. 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 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.” 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.

I was born illegitimately,” Ian says, “and he [John] knew that because he wasn’t sleeping with my mother.” To an outsider, these could be understood as simple words of encouragement. Lucetta knew their real meaning; this was an urgent final plea. Lucetta recruited the men for her research with relative ease. This may lead one to assume this type of abuse is common. Frustratingly though, there seems to be no reliable data on its prevalence — including the Personal Safety Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. 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.”

Ian,* 70, was also sexually abused by his mother. Unlike Hamish, it happened when he was a much younger child.I honestly believe she [his mother] had probably been sexually abused herself,” he says, adding: “I feel pity for her.” True to his word, Hamish never did discuss it again with his wife — something he has lived to regret. He worked damn hard to do just that. Hamish married in the early 90s and fathered two sons of whom he’s extremely proud. The PhD she’s currently writing is about sons who were sexually abused by their biological mothers — just as Marcus had been.

At the time though, it was a different story: “I thought I was enjoying it and I thought I was grown up.” University of Canberra researcher Lucetta Thomas has interviewed dozens of men who have been sexually abused by their mothers. Picture: Ginger Gorman Only in the last six years — and after decades of counselling and therapy — does Ian feel he’s started to recover. According to Lucetta, society’s beliefs about gender are effectively stopping a cohort of male victims disclosing their abuse and accessing support. 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.”

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.” Society says that males are actually instigators of any sort of sexual relationship, so the child copes with the trauma by telling himself: ‘I must have actually instigated it,’” she says.

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. 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. They have experienced the same forms of trauma, the same forms of sexual abuse and emotional and psychological abuse as any victim of sexual abuse or sexual assault and they need to be taken seriously and they need to be believed.

I wish we’d got help together, you know? I might still be married now if I’d got help. But I’m not,” he says with unmistakeable grief. 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.” Three years ago Hamish had an affair and his marriage unravelled. As a result he lost his wife and his business. This isn’t an easy interview. When I ask what went through his head during that period in his childhood, Hamish struggles to form an answer. Like so many men in his position, the distress lies not in the words but in the silence.