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Volume 7, Number 2
July-December 2003


L'incesto e la negazione dell'alterità.
Discussione del testo di Simona Argentieri: "L'incesto ieri e oggi: dal conflitto all'ambiguità".
(Incest and the negation of the 'other',
on S. Argentieri's paper 'Incest yesterday and today: from conflict to ambiguty)
Juan Eduardo Tesone


SUMMARY

Incest, an ignominous and vile act, undoubtedly forms part of the most obscure features of a human being. But beyond the awe and at times the hypnotic fascination that the transgression of the most ancient tabou of humanity can produce, how do we think the unthinkable?

This paper deals not only with the Levy-Strauss type of incest; the author also deals with a second kind of incest described by Francoise Heritier.

The author affirms that the incest does not inscribe itself in a linear continuation of the oedipus complex. On the contrary, in the serious psychopathological configuration of an incestuous family a massive attack is produced against the oedipal triangulation, with the blurring of the vertices that outline the places described for the functions of father, mother, son or daughter. In opposition to the oedipus that links desire to the symbolic law allowing for the emergence of alterity, incest blurs the boundaries of the members of the family and introduces confusion among them.

Confusion of roles (it is hard to know who is the father, the mother, the son or the daughter) and thus confusion between the gender and generations.

Eros is placed at the service of Thanatos and achieves a traumatic laceration in the psychic life of the incested child, generating a state of cosmic de-structurisation and thus annihilating its psychic life. The incestuous sexual relation becomes frozen in a kind of objectual auto-eroticism: the body of the child is experienced by the incestuous father as a part of his own body within an omnipotent narcissistic attitude.

The child expects love and tenderness from his/her parents and a tragic confusion instals itself when the father or the mother responds with the language of eroticism, thus imposing an apparent banalisation almost as a style of communication that sometimes lasts for years, in a situation where all the family knows and at the same time denies. The prohibition of incest is not based on moral precepts; it is universal and includes all cultures.

It guarantees the psychic constitution of the human being and regulates the laws of social interchange.

The author wonders if the horror connected to the incestuous act is only due to the transgression of the prohibition or whether it also includes the simultaneous transgression of the narcissistic taboo which increases its devastating effect.