Coline Berry Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #337.1
Coline Berry is a french psychoanalyst. She studied at the School of Advanced Studies in Psychopathology (EPHP), founded by Charles Melman and completed an internship at the Épinay-sur-Seine Community Health Center. She is a member of the Sainte-Anne Psychoanalytic School (EPSA), created by Marcel Czermak.
Winnicott writes: “A good-enough environment allows the true self to emerge.” What made it possible for you, in your case, to speak?
CB: The true self is undoubtedly one of Winnicott’s concepts that has helped me most in thinking about what incest produces. It is sometimes translated as the ‘vrai soi,’ but that phrase is misleading. The true self is not a hidden identity that merely needs to be rediscovered. It refers to that fundamental experience of a subject who can feel that what they experience, think, desire, and express truly belongs to them. It is the intimate sense of existing from oneself. For Winnicott, this feeling is not built alone. It arises from an encounter with an environment reliable enough to receive the child’s spontaneous gestures without subjecting them to fear, control, or confusion. When a child is confronted with incest, this spontaneity becomes dangerous. To survive, the child learns to anticipate the adult’s expectations, to mask what they feel, to conform to what is demanded of them. Winnicott then speaks of the false self: not a lie, but a psychic organization of survival that protects the subject’s most living core. I believe many victims know this experience. One continues to live, to work, sometimes to love. But part of oneself remains as if suspended, prevented from fully coming into being.
Reconstruction, then, consists less in recovering a lost identity than in recreating the conditions in which gestures, affects, and speech can become spontaneous again. It is not about becoming someone else; it is about finally being able to live without every movement of the self being dictated by the necessity of surviving the other’s desire. I believe that what Winnicott calls a good-enough environment is not only a maternal quality. It is also a social responsibility. Because when no adult turns a child’s expressions of distress into effective protection, the entire containing function collapses. Speaking became possible the day I finally met people able to stop asking me to protect the family system before protecting the child I had been.
Klein speaks of very early unconscious guilt. Did you experience this kind of guilt when it came to putting your story into words?
CB: Yes, but I think incest also forces us to clarify what Klein means by guilt. For Klein, guilt appears when the child discovers that they love and attack the same object. This ambivalence is constitutive of psychic development. In incest, this ambivalence no longer comes from the child’s fantasy. It is produced by reality. The child truly loves the one who does violence to them, because they depend on that person to live. It is this reality that is overwhelming. The child cannot resolve this paradox. So very often they turn the violence back against themselves. I never felt guilty for having been a victim. On the other hand, I felt guilty for a long time for speaking out. As if revealing the incest constituted an even greater violence than the incest itself. I believe this guilt is less moral than structural: it protects the illusion that the parent remains a parent. Because recognizing that the person who was supposed to keep you alive is also the one destroying you is probably one of the most unbearable thoughts for a child.
Klein speaks of introjection and the confusion of internal objects. In incest, how is one’s self-image built when the protective figure is also the source of violence?
CB: I think Klein puts her finger on something fundamental: we build our inner world from our earliest attachment figures. They become our first internal objects. They organize the way we love, fear, and think about the world. But incest comes to shatter this construction. How can a child introject an object that is both the one who nourishes and the one who destroys? The one who reassures at times, and who, a few hours later, rapes? They cannot. Or rather, they do so at the cost of immense psychic confusion. I believe this confusion explains why so many victims speak of difficulty knowing what they truly feel. For a long time, I was not only afraid of my father. I also kept expecting from him something a father should normally give: protection, acknowledgment, perhaps even an apology. This contradiction is unbearable for a child. So, very often, the child chooses the only solution that allows them to keep living: they preserve the image of the parent and alter the image of themselves. It becomes easier to think, ‘I am the one who is bad,’ than, ‘the person my survival depends on is destroying me.’ I believe this is one of the psychic tragedies of incest: it destroys not only trust in others; it forces the child to build themselves against themselves.
Winnicott describes the false self as an adaptation to the environment. Did you feel you had to adapt in order to survive psychically?
CB: Yes, but I think we need to understand what Winnicott places behind this notion. The false self is not a lie. It is an extraordinarily intelligent psychic organization. When the environment is no longer able to receive the true self, the child fabricates a personality that will nonetheless allow the bond to survive. In incest, this adaptation becomes extreme. I often think of the child I was, who stopped eating during school holidays so as not to be sent back to her father’s. Even today, this image overwhelms me. Because it shows that at ten years old, I had already stopped trying to convince the adults. I was simply trying to survive. I wove a web around my bed. I organized my own safety. I deprived my body of food, at the risk of a danger that seemed to me smaller than enduring the continuation of the rapes. In other words, I alone fulfilled the functions that a good-enough environment should have carried out for me. I believe this is precisely where the false self is born: when the child becomes, themselves, the parent they never had.
Dolto asserted that the child is a subject in their own right. Isn’t incest precisely a rupture of this position of subject?
CB: Dolto insisted that the child is a subject even before speaking. They are already a being of desire. Already a being of speech. Already a being with rights. Incest comes precisely to abolish this position. I even believe this is what makes incest so specific. When Dolto asserts that the child is a subject from birth, she reminds us that the child is never an extension of their parents. They are already a singular being, with their own psychic life, a body that belongs to them, a speech that deserves to be recognized, even when it does not yet pass through words. For a long time, people spoke of family conflicts, private matters, ambiguous relationships. No. Incest is, first and foremost, a negation of the subject. The child becomes the object of the adult’s desire. They are no longer encountered in their otherness; they are used. And this objectification does not stop at the sexual acts. It gradually colonizes the entire psychic life. The child learns that their limits do not count, that their body does not fully belong to them, that their refusal can be ignored, that their word can be denied. From that point on, the construction of the subject becomes extremely fragile. What should allow a child to differentiate themselves — safety, trust, the ability to say ‘I,’ recognition of their intimacy — is profoundly attacked. I believe this is also why incest can produce extremely severe forms of psychic disorganization. Not because it would create psychosis in the structural sense of the term, but because it attacks the very conditions that allow the subject to constitute themselves as distinct from the other. I believe this explains why reconstruction takes so long. It is not simply a matter of healing from a trauma. It is, at times, a matter of resuming a process of subjectivation that was severely compromised in childhood. And this is perhaps what makes incest so singular among crimes: it does not only destroy a child’s integrity, it attacks the very foundations from which they might one day be able to say ‘I.’
Freud made the incest taboo a foundation of culture. How do you perceive this prohibition in light of your experience?
CB: Freud makes the incest taboo the foundation of all civilization. It is often reduced to a sexual prohibition, but it is far deeper than that. This prohibition protects, above all, the loving relationship that binds a child to their parents. A child’s first object of love is their parents. This dependence is absolute. It is vital. It is precisely because this love is so total that the child must be protected from the possibility that an adult might turn it into an object of gratification. The incest taboo tells the adult: you cannot dispose of the child who loves you and depends on you. In other words, it protects less the domain of sexuality than the fundamental asymmetry between a child and the person who keeps them alive. When this prohibition is transgressed, it is not only a sexual crime that is committed. It is the attachment relationship itself that is perverted. The child continues to love the person who does them violence. And this is probably what makes incest so singular. Unlike other crimes, the victim cannot simply flee their abuser. They continue to need them. They sometimes continue to seek their gaze, their affection, their recognition.
That is the whole tragedy of incest. I believe this is where Freud remains extraordinarily relevant: he reminds us that the incest taboo is what allows filial love to remain love, and not be diverted for the adult’s gratification. But my story also taught me something else. When the incestuous parent frees themselves from this prohibition, they are in fact freeing themselves from the third party. They grant themselves the authority to become the law itself. There is no longer any limit between their desire and the child. And this is precisely why justice is so essential. It is not only there to condemn. It represents that symbolic third party that the incestuous parent refused to recognize. It comes to remind us that no father, no mother, no adult is above the law. That there exists a limit that does not depend on their desire. For a long time, I thought that when I filed a complaint, justice would restore this function.
That it would come to tell the child I had been: “You were right. That limit existed. You were not the one who was wrong. It is the limit that was violated.” I believe this is what victims ultimately expect. Not only a conviction. A restoration. The restoration of the Law with a capital L. Because when a father destroys the limit that protects his child, he destroys far more than a legal rule. He destroys the child’s ability to believe that there exists an order to which even their father is subject.