Incest in Psychic Reality

Susan, aged nearly sixteen, was the first of a recent burst of referrals of sexually abused children to the clinic where I work. This dramatic increase is, I believe, a typical experience in Child Guidance Clinics throughout the country and provides some food for thought. Over a period of some eighteen months I found myself engaged in therapies of different durations with six such children, all girls, four of whom had experienced an incestuous sexual relationship with their natural father within a family situation.

Susan, as the eldest and most ready to link her difficulties openly to the incestuous relationship to her father, which had taken place in latency, provided an interesting but brief insight into the problem. She withdrew from therapy after only four months, maintaining that she was better. My sense of the unfinished nature of the work with Susan, together with my awareness of the increasing number of such referrals raised the question of how to respond to a growing problem which might require particular understanding. My interest was less in the reasons for this sudden increase, about which I could speculate, than with what it could mean to a child and some of its likely consequences. I felt the need to look beyond what Freud (1913) called our instinctive “horror of incest”, and our natural revulsion on hearing accounts of some of the sexual exploits small children are subjected to by adults in their environment, to try and come to some clearer picture of its significance in terms of a child's development. In particular, I was concerned with its meaning in terms of psychic reality and the kind of defence mechanisms which might come into play.

In presenting some ideas from the available literature together with reflections based on my own experience, I have used clinical material from Susan in some detail as well as extracts from the therapy of a much younger child who recently started weekly sessions with me, six-year-old Kali. The focus here most directly