The Impact of Incest on Identity Formation in Women

From its inception, psychoanalysis has been concerned with the subject of incest and childhood sexual abuse and its significance in determining or effecting neurosis and psychopathology. In what is now a commonly known and repeated segment of psychoanalytic history, Freud originally believed in the widespread occurrence of incest and hypothesized the seduction theory of neurosis. This theory focused on childhood sexual abuse and its relation to symptoms in adults that were a result of reliving the trauma with affective, somatic, and behavioral manifestations. He later abandoned the seduction theory in his move from a reality-based theory focused on actual sexual abuse to a fantasy model. He nevertheless did not deny the significance of these events, but rather denied the widespread occurrence of them for a theory of neurosis.

Since that time, much controversy has centered on Freud's decision, as well as the subject of incest itself. This controversy concerns the nature of the trauma, its historical validity, and the role of fantasy. On a more pragmatic level, questions arise regarding the interpretation of symptoms in adult survivors. Greenacre (as reported in Ulman and Brothers, 1988) described dissociative and posttraumatic symptoms in her patients who presented with childhood sexual abuse. She attributes the incest as being traumatic as it occurs in conjunction with the witnessing of the primal scene and the fantasies this evokes in the child. Abraham (1907/1948) in his paper “The Experiencing of Sexual Trauma as a Form of Sexual Activity” defines incest as traumatic due to the child's provocation