We have seen that the psychotic transmits to those around him, through induction, his own emotions that he censors because they upset him. His family members feel these emotions, and since their psychotic relative gives no outward signal of being the origin, the members of the family act as if they were their own. Feelings of guilt relating to the child's illness, which all parents immediately attribute to their errors in upbringing, also belong in fact to the sphere of elements that the ill child censors. Parents feel what happens to their children as if it happens to them.
This is a normal fact of common knowledge. In the case of a feeling of guilt, it manifests itself in a way which is very similar to what the parent might feel. In reality it is the guilt that the child feels for having damaged himself, since he refused what he needs to succeed in living, in other words the experience of the primary relationship, of love with the samisen parent. We call this attitude the Judas Syndrome.
As we know, Judas Iscariot did not betray Jesus in the sense that we give to betray today, in the sense that he did not deny him, or side with the enemy, as we consider betrayers do. He limited himself to selling Jesus, for thirty silver pieces (the price of an adult slave) and then he handed him over (and this is tradere in Latin, with the noun traditor) to the buyers, as if he were an item of commerce. It was really Peter who betrayed Jesus, who denied him before the Sanhedrin, who declared that he did not know him, that did not know who he was, three times before the cock crowed...
The story of Judas is very different. He sold Jesus because he was disappointed by his political activity. This was a time, we can deduce from the account of The Judean War, written shortly afterwards by the historian Joseph Flavius, when resistance against the Romans was carried out by a large number of armed groups. They often fought amongst themselves (as almost always happens in these cases) partly as a result of action by the Roman secret services, who were experts in divide and rule, and in making the enemy wrangle amongst themselves so as to dominate them better from a third position.
In this climate, it was not so strange that Judas should despise the Jesus' ideas, which were so pacifist. But like all the disciples he considered him as if he were a father. From a theological point of view, in the gospels the figure of the Messiah is a paternal figure, a figure of the Father par excellence. It thus becomes very credible that through selling Jesus, Judas intended to create a situation - however anomalous - where he could have been the only one to decide on relations with Jesus.
The turn that events took however was a catastrophe for him, his own personal catastrophe. He showed without any doubt that he realized the wrong he had done himself, that he had brought about, although involuntarily, the loss of Jesus, that the relationship with him was indispensable, like that with a same-sex parent: the moment he realizes that Jesus will be killed, he exclaims "But this wasn't what we agreed!" The reactions of the priests is threatening; the deal is done, take the money, and go.
But Judas doesn't want the money; he throws it to the priests and desperate, seeing that his own reason for living is gone for ever, he finds no other possibility apart from death, and kills himself.
The situation in which a psychotic child finds himself as regards his same-sex parent is very similar: he realizes that in order to live he needs to have the experience of love with him, which he has inside him, but to maintain anaesthesia of feeling, he removes this possibility, and puts into practice various expedients to defend himself from this, physically distancing the parent, since he fears what is true: in his relationship with him his own sensitivity increases, and with it, his own exposure to suffering.
He is in the position of a person who needs someone who they are afraid of, so more often than not he tries to exercise physical possession over the parent, without letting him understand this (and feeling great envy towards the other members of the family, who in his view are favoured in their relations with the parent) and indeed he acts with hostility and aggression towards the parent. In this way, clearly, even if the operation succeeds, the problem is not solved; what is the point having your parent under control if you still continue to reject emotional relations with him or her? So we see children who are particularly close to the family and who when the same-sex parent falls ill never abandon them an instant (because the fear of losing them is very high), but who are still isolated, and ill.
They practise physical nearness, or rather economic nearness, as a surrogate of an emotional relationship, which they are afraid of, but cannot achieve. So they can never begin to live, and the situation will remain rigidly repetitive, unchanging, and accompanied by fear of physical loss of the parent. And when the loss occurs, as for Judas, their precarious equilibrium, based on physical closeness to the parent, vanishes, depriving them of every reason for living. The awareness of being themselves the origin of their inability, the impossibility of living, generates - as we can easily image - enormous feelings of guilt. A feeling of guilt follows the realization that one is damaging oneself by rejecting the parent, or rather the relationship of love with him, because it is a source of too much emotional suffering, and this feeling too is subjected to anaesthesia, and to censorship.
On the outside there is nothing to reveal their true state of mind, but these emotional states that they deny and censor in themselves do not escape the emotional sensitivity of those around them, especially parents. In the absence of visible proof of illness they feel as their own the emotions they pick up from the child himself; this is the phenomenon we call psychotic induction.
When the parents feel in themselves the feeling of guilt, they certainly never imagine that it belongs to the child, the ill person, who is hiding it from himself, unless they have been correctly informed of the phenomenon. Instead they attribute to themselves guilt which is not theirs. The biggest problem is seen when operators - educators, teachers, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers - involved in a case are unprepared, and find it almost natural to confirm (although they may be saying the opposite in words) that the parents are more or less the direct cause of the child's illness. The parents are confirmed as guilty when operators substitute them in the treatment of the ill child. And hence any possible cure is blocked. The ability of guilt, originating from the ill child, to be transmitted by emotive induction to the parents (not only them, but usually, and with greater probability of it being accepted as theirs) has other effects which are just as negative; the most serious is that is pushes couple in difficulty to worsening conflict, to separation and to divorce.
When parents take the road of increasingly serious marital conflict, they do not realize they are doing it under induction, and very soon, as well as an ill child, the family will be destroyed, and the cure and recovery of the ill person with be considerably more difficult.