Incestual and Incestuality

We are indebted to Paul-Claude Racamier for these notions. Their success partly resides in their author's characteristic way with words, for what they designate seems immediately familiar and unusual. For Racamier, the terms incestual and incestuality can be employed when, in the subject's psychic history, something took place in the register of incest but “a genealogical distance was established in which the issues became confused” (Racamier, 1995, p. 98). For him, this situation is a source of destructiveness in a very particular mode. “Instead of a seism, it is a sort of fabric: instead of an aggressor and a victim, here it is two accomplices who meet up and gain satisfaction from their incestual relations” (p. 63). And he adds: “Above all, the incestual relationship is a narcissistic relationship. The incestual object is invested like an idol. But this investment is not at a loss: the idol necessarily has the function of illuminating the idolater in return” (p. 74).

It is no doubt in the register of transgenerational clinical work that the notion of incestuality is of most significant interest. Thus, in clinical work with infants, who immediately bring into play three generations, it helps to throw light on certain configurations of severe disorders in the early infant/mother relationship. Indeed, in the period of upheavals that accompanies the establishment of the relationship with their child, sometimes to keep an awakening of the incestual register at bay, and sometimes to reproduce it unconsciously, some mothers feel obliged to cathect their newborn baby immediately in a narcissistic mode without any restraint. It is often a defence in reaction to the revival of sufferings caused by certain “incestual” dimensions of their own history. No place is accorded to the real needs of their child; no place is given to the exigencies of its development. Massive disorders can result in the register of feeding, sleep, or at times of separation. In consultations, the moth