Perversion the Social Relation

"I Know Well, but All the Same ..." 77and so on—to the point that she sometimes fears that Throne and Altar,to use Freud's expression, will be endangered if someone suggests disabusingthe victim. Because of our geneticist preconceptions, we makechildhood a means of diachronic explanation. But, in synchronie perspective,the child can, as someone who is both present and an outsider,play a non-negligible role by assuming, as he does among the Hopis, theburden of our beliefs after disavowal. He is not privy to the adults 9 secrets.This may seem to go without saying; but we know well that, inthe case of certain perverts, it is the normal adult who is assumed to becredulous and ignorant of the child's secrets. To put it differently, thesituation is not as natural as it may seem; if psychoanalysis has deliveredus of the myth of children's purity and innocence, it has not gone veryfar in analyzing the function of this myth. Dazzled by the resistance thatthe revelation of infantile sexuality initially provoked, analysts were persuadedthat, by pointing to the repression (the amnesia) of adults, theywere on the vtxf to clearing everything up. But if we admit that invokingthe ostensible innocence of children is only a way of talking about theircredulity, the picture is considerably altered. As with the Hopis, if moreconfusedly, infantile credulity helps us disavow our own beliefs: needlessto say, even if we have no direct contact with children, our mental representationof them suffices. Many adults would readily confess—they aresometimes struck by the absurdity of the situation—that they are religiousnot for their own sake, but for their progeny's. This reasonableconcern for children's spiritual education is not the whole explanationfor the large place that children hold in the organization of beliefs. Yetthis concern alerts us to the interest that specialists in belief of all kindstake in children, in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of the Katcinas',even if the social institution that regulates Verleugnung is much less wellorganized in our societies.This very clear-cut example is more a model than anything else: itquite plainly shows how a belief can, if transformed, survive even if itflies in the face of reality. It will be readily granted that the structureconforms to this model in those cases in which what occurs is ratherwell concealed from the consciousness of the subject; but, as will soonappear, we also have to admit the possibility of other kinds of structures,not all of which correspond to the same model. For the moment,let us content ourselves with noting that a belief may be retained without