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Volume 7, Number 2
July-December 2003


L'incesto ieri e oggi: dal conflitto all'ambiguità.
(Incest yesterday and today: from conflict to ambiguity.)
Simona Argentieri Bondi


SUMMARY

This paper deals with incest from the theoretical and clinical psychoanalytical viewpoint, without overlooking the various biological and socio-anthropological theories. Incestuous acting is differentiated from general sexual abuse and from incestuous phantasies. As well as the phenomenic aspects, the author analyses the conscious and unconscious levels that lead individuals to practice incest, as well as the damage that incest inflicts on developmental processes. The traumatic effect impairs psychic organization by disarticulating the oedipal developmental stages and related drive vicissitudes as well as the real roles of the family members. The theme of incest is discussed regarding the two crucial post-Freudian psychoanalytical achievements: "the exploration of early developmental aspects of the psyche (pre-oedipal stage), and the knowledge about the 'feminine' and about women acquired for the most part - although not only - by women analysts. This leads to the discussion of different psychoanalytical paradigms while constantly underlining the complexity of matters connected with incest and with the interaction between oedipal and pre-oedipal levels.

The main point - and the most difficult one in the Author's opinion - is not to anchor one's own thinking (and the patient) to one single developmental level, but to try to explore the ways in which archaic functioning and early defences seep through the oedipal cross-roads, deforming it and in their turn being distorted as well. The problem thus regards, on the one hand, the theoretical and clinical discrimination of the confusive weft between the various developmental levels, and, on the other hand, the integration within oneself and within the object relationships of the different areas of psychic functioning that have been deeply split and disorganized on account of the incestuous acting.

The Author further remarks that one of its most devastating effects is the consequent failure to differentiate, both at the intrapsychic and the interpersonal dimension, aspects of sensorial tenderness from the erotic.

The last part of the paper begins with an observation on socio-cultural change such as the abolishing of differences between adults and the young, between masculine and feminine, and the progressive weakening of the value of gender identity and individuality. Attention is then focused on the alteration of defences: from repression to splitting and denial; and, furthermore, to the blurred boundaries with so-called normality and with the primitive defensive organizations of non-integration and ambiguity - a condition in which the persistence of pre-oedipal defences strongly mortgages the oedipus solution. Within this context of a generalized tendency of regressive defences towards indifferentiation, in which the oedipal crux seems slackened if not avoided altogether, the Author wonders whether perhaps incest provokes less anxiety, less guilt and less horror, but no less damage.