SEXUAL ATTACHMENTS: A THEORETICAL PSYCHOANALYTIC PERSPECTIVE ON INCEST

Abstract

A psychoanalytic framework for understanding the incest‐spectrum group of disorders is outlined. Incest disorders are viewed as a group of perverse activities representing a dynamic solution to developmental conflict or, alternately, as compensatory enactments that serve the function of re‐regulating a defective or fragmenting self‐structure. While incest is typically thought of as behavioural in nature, it also involves particular psychodynamics that underpin the sexualized behavioural enactment. Incestuous activity employs sexualized, bodily engagements to restore self‐regulation or to regulate intense adverse affective states. This perspective emphasizes the need to understand the developmental and psychostructural features of the incest patient. Case material is provided to illuminate aspects of this understanding.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of colleagues from the Association of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy of Western Australia (APPWA) for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. In particular, the thoughtful and sensitive critiques by Paul McEvoy, Jim Crawley, and Dr Wendy‐Lynne Wolman are particularly noted.

Notes

1. It should be noted here that this paper is concerned exclusively with the explication of selected theoretical ideas that pertain to understanding the nature of incest enactments from a psychoanalytic perspective. Case material provided in this paper is employed exclusively to illuminate theoretical‐clinical issues concerning incest. The psychotherapeutic implications of these ideas will be considered in a subsequent paper.

2. The term ‘incest patient’ is used within this paper to denote the person who enacts incestuous behaviour. It is argued that no satisfactory clinical term exists to describe such patients. The terms ‘perpetrator’ or ‘offender’ have been expressly avoided in this paper because of their forensic/criminological implications. While incest is understood to also represent both a Criminal and Child Protection issue, the employment of these descriptors drawn as they are from non‐analytic literatures is regarded as unhelpful in addressing the salient psychoanalytic‐clinical issues involved in understanding these cases. The use of the term ‘incest patient’ should not be interpreted by the reader to suggest an ignorance on the part of the author to the broader contextual issues regarding the investigation, assessment, and treatment of cases of incest. These issues, important as they are, have already received significant attention elsewhere, and the reader is referred to Sgroi (1982) for an explication of them. Finally, the use of the term ‘incest patient’ in contradistinction to terms such as ‘perpetrator’ or ‘offender’, should not lead the reader to infer that the author condones the inherently destructive nature of this activity.