ABSTRACT
The importance of family dynamics in incest can hardly be over-stressed, but somehow this has not always been acknowledged, since it was overshadowed by a marked adherence to the seduction theory, with its emphasis on unconscious fantasies. Secrecy is the new taboo that has emerged from the breakdown of the taboo against incest. Secrecy is pervasive and may be disguised as confidentiality, threatening the therapeutic process in individual psychotherapy, re-enacting a symbolic incest, and recreating an ineffectual locked-in stalemate position between two people. Assessments of victim and victimizer patients can easily trigger off emotional responses in the professionals that may interfere with clear and unbiased treatment recommendations and are at times a re-enactment of early family situations. V. Sinason has described how the therapist’s most painful interpretations were connected with trauma of an abusive nature and with difficulties in linking internal and external worlds. The chapter focuses on the transference– countertransference issues involved in “incest with a consenting child”.
