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The topic of this panel, and the clinical cases presented, gave rise to an interesting debate on theoretical and technical questions regarding seduction and the psychological effects of incest. The panel moderator, Eloisa Castellano, pointed out at the beginning that actual incest is talked about very little, since it remains masked by the theory of seduction. The force of this avoidance shows that the topic of incest is taboo and implies unconscious complicities; it may be thought that incest, being a step towards the real act, is not a matter for psychoanalysis but rather a subject for forensic psychiatry.
The first panel member, Juan Eduardo Tesone, presented two cases of women who had suffered sexual abuse by their parents. One of them had been deflowered digitally by her father during puberty, a practising gynaecologist; she had not found any help from her mother and felt frozen when the act was repeated. For a long time her real first name was kept from the analyst, since in the transference she feared that through the possession of her name the analyst could ‘take over’ her body. The author considers that the incestuous trauma causes stupor in the person who suffers from it, and that the effects can reveal themselves for years, lodged within the psychic system. This kind of patient needs a type of listening on the part of the analyst that alternates between phantasy and reality, without judgment being passed on the perceived reality of the story.
The other of these two patients had been sexually abused by her father without explicit physical violence since she was 10 years old. The patient had reproached her father for ‘having deceived her’ owing to her need for tenderness. The death of her mother, which took place shortly after, left the patient doubly orphaned: on the part of the mother because of her death and on the part of the father because of the disappearance of the symbolic function. Bereft of parental figures, she felt herself filled with persecutory