The title of this volume - derived from the eponymous essay it contains - does not refer to a humanistically inspired psycho-pedagogy nor to a denunciation of child abuse. On the contrary, for the Freudian perspective, corporal punishment within the human encounter becomes a means to channel the capillary flow of desire. The punishment emerges from the "paradise" of pleasure or from the "hell" of the unconscious, and becomes that cunning needle that, by unraveling the skein of sadomasochistic fantasies, will weave the demand for love between children and parents.

Therefore, we cannot help but wonder whether the physical contact implied by corporal punishment could be marked in a new way within our educational perceptions and in the conception of human interface in general. In the essays of this volume, narcissism, fetishism, masochism, and other deviations, or perversions as Freud would have called them - terms that have entered the lexicon of mass culture, indicating painless and charming types of behavior - are examined with their full sexual, conflictual, and inevitably, fatal burden.

“When one observes the attitude of loving parents towards their children, one must recognize in it the revival and reproduction of their own long-abandoned narcissism. The crucial mark of overvaluation, which we have already assessed as a narcissistic stigma in object choice, dominates, as is well known, in this emotional relationship. Thus, a compulsion arises to endow the child with all the virtues - something that sober observation would not permit, to cover and forget all its flaws, which is, of course, related to the denial of childhood sexuality.” (Sigmund Freud)