Coline Berry Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #337.2
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.
And when this restoration cannot take place — because the facts are time-barred, because the testimony is discredited, because the proceedings turn against the victim — a particular wound remains. Not only has the prohibition been transgressed. But the third party who was supposed to reaffirm it sometimes seems to be absent. I believe this is why victims often say they are not only waiting for a judicial decision. They are waiting for society to tell them that they never stopped being protected in law, even if they were not protected in fact. Because a society does not hold together only because it forbids. It holds together because it shows, every time the prohibition is crossed, that no one has the power to free themselves from it.
Lévi-Strauss saw the incest taboo as the basis of the social bond. Do you think society truly protects it?
CB: I believe Lévi-Strauss helps us understand that the incest taboo does not only protect the child; it protects society as a whole. By showing that every known culture organizes, each in its own way, a prohibition of incest, he tells us that this prohibition is what allows the other to be recognized as other. It introduces a separation. It ensures that a child never belongs to their parents. Incest is therefore much more than family violence. It is an attack on the social bond itself. And this is perhaps why it still provokes so much denial. Because to recognize incest is to accept that this fundamental boundary can be destroyed at the very heart of the family, precisely where we spontaneously imagine the child to be most protected. My story taught me that society very clearly affirms this prohibition in its texts. But I also discovered how difficult it is to make it real in practice. When victims speak out, they still very often encounter suspicion, statutes of limitation, proceedings that turn against them, discrediting campaigns. In other words, the prohibition is proclaimed, but its effectiveness remains fragile. I believe the real question is therefore no longer simply: ‘Is incest forbidden?’ It is: “Are we collectively ready to bear all the consequences of this prohibition when it is transgressed?” Because protecting a prohibition is not just writing it into law. It is protecting the person who reveals that it has been violated.
Lacan writes that “the incest taboo is the condition of desire.” What becomes of desire when this prohibition is transgressed in reality?
CB: Lacan reminds us that desire does not arise spontaneously. It is built through a limit. Desire presupposes that a separation exists between beings. Incest destroys precisely this separation. When the parent draws the child into their own desire, before the child has even been able to build their own, something fundamental is damaged. It is not only sexuality that is disrupted. It is the very possibility of desiring as a subject. For a very long time, I did not really know where I stood in my relationships. I had learned very early to detect the other person’s expectations, needs, and movements. I was far less able to hear my own. I believe many victims know this difficulty. They become extraordinarily attentive to the other’s desire because their psychic survival depended on it. So reconstruction consists less in rediscovering a desire than in discovering that one has one at all. And this often demands immense work. Because one must accept that one’s own desire may differ from that of others. That it can say no. That it can introduce a limit. In the end, I believe that rebuilding one’s desire after incest means rebuilding the possibility of separation.
Lacan writes that “the Law and repressed desire are one and the same thing.” How does this idea shed light on your experience of incest?
CB: I believe Lacan helps us think through what makes incest so specific. He writes in Seminar VII that “the Law and repressed desire are one and the same thing.” This sentence is essential because it overturns a common assumption: the Law is not what comes to block desire. It is what gives desire a human form. Without Law, there is no longer any desire; there is only limitless gratification. Incest is precisely this abolition of the limit. For Lacan, one must distinguish the real father from what he calls the Name-of-the-Father. The real father is a man. He can be loving, absent, violent, or incestuous. The Name-of-the-Father, on the other hand, is not a person. It is a symbolic function. The one that introduces a third party between the parent and the child. The one that reminds us that no adult can make a child the object of their gratification. In other words, the symbolic father protects the child… including against the real father. This is why I believe incest is such a particular form of violence. The real father does not only transgress a law. He acts as though the Name-of-the-Father, as though this Law that transcends him, did not exist for him. He grants himself his own authority. He makes the third party disappear. The child no longer encounters a Law that protects them; they encounter only the adult’s desire. And this is perhaps what is most destructive. Because a child builds themselves precisely by discovering that they are not everything to their parents. That there exists between them a limit, a separation, a space where each can become a distinct subject. In incest, this separation is destroyed. The child is assigned to a place that is not their own: that of an object of gratification. It then becomes extremely difficult to discover what one desires oneself. For a very long time, I did not only live in fear. I lived in constant attentiveness to the other’s desire. I knew what he expected. I knew how to avoid his anger. I knew how to survive. But I no longer really knew what I myself desired. I believe this is what incest attacks: the very possibility for a subject to come into being. And this is also why justice seems to me to have a function that goes far beyond punishment. When the real father has freed himself from the Law, justice represents that symbolic third party who comes to remind us that no father can grant himself authority by will alone. It reintroduces a limit where it had been abolished.
Ferenczi speaks of a “confusion of tongues” between adult and child. Is this a key to understanding what you experienced?
CB: In my view, Ferenczi is probably the one who describes with the greatest precision what a child victim of incest experiences. He explains that the child speaks the language of tenderness. The incestuous adult answers in the language of passion and sexuality. These are not two different languages in the sense of using different words. They sometimes use exactly the same words. That is precisely what is terrible. The word ‘game.’ The word ‘secret.’ The word ‘love.’ The word ‘cuddle.’ All these words change meaning. In my family, the rapes were called ‘the orchestra games.’ That expression says it all. It shows how extreme violence is covered over by the vocabulary of play. And it is precisely because the child still speaks the language of trust that they cannot immediately understand what is happening to them. I even believe this confusion does not stop at the facts themselves. It continues afterward in social discourse. When people speak of ‘touching’ rather than rape. When people refer to ‘inappropriate gestures.’ When people speak of ‘early sexuality.’ Language sometimes continues to protect the adult rather than the child. Ferenczi then reminds us of something essential: Trauma does not come only from the acts themselves. It also comes from the destruction of meaning. And I believe that to speak today is, first of all, to give words back their true meaning. To call a rape a rape. To call a child a child. To call a crime a crime.
Lacan writes that “man’s desire is the desire of the Other.” How does one reconstruct oneself when the Other’s desire was imposed too early?
CB: I believe this sentence takes on a particular meaning when applied to incest. For Lacan, the Other’s desire is not simply what another person wants. It is that within which the subject is constituted. A child always grows up under the gaze of those who care for them. But normally, this gaze progressively recognizes the child’s otherness. It allows the child to become a separate subject. In incest, this gaze changes in nature. The child is no longer recognized as a subject. They become the object of the Other’s desire. They are captured. And I believe this is what is so difficult to repair. Because one is not only rebuilding self-esteem. One must rebuild the very possibility of existing outside the gaze that had constituted you. Lacan also writes, in his Seminar on Ethics, that “the only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire.” When one is a child victim of incest, one precisely cannot uphold one’s own desire. Psychic survival consists, on the contrary, entirely of giving ground. Giving ground before the adult’s desire. Adapting. Anticipating. Staying silent. Sometimes disappearing. A child cannot do otherwise. They depend on the person doing them violence. So I believe this sentence of Lacan’s takes on a particular meaning when we think about incest. It is not the child who gives ground on their desire. It is incest that steals from them the very possibility of having a desire of their own. For a long time, I felt that my worth still depended on that gaze. Even when I had distanced myself from it. Even when I had filed a complaint. It takes a great deal of time to understand that one’s existence no longer has to be organized around the desire of the person who destroyed you. Reconstruction, then, consists in shifting the center of gravity of one’s life. In no longer seeking one’s legitimacy in the gaze of the abuser, nor even in that of the family clan, but in one’s own words. And perhaps this is, at bottom, what psychoanalysis makes possible: Moving from an existence organized around the Other’s desire to an existence in which the subject can finally uphold their own desire. Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Ferenczi, and Racamier each show, in their own way, that a subject is not born alone: they come into being because a Law protects them from the Other’s gratification. Incest is precisely the moment when this Law fails. The question, then, is not only one of trauma, but of the restoration of the symbolic third party without which no subject can durably construct themselves. Incest is not only a crime against a child; it is a crime against the subject-in-becoming. The function of the Law is therefore not only to punish its transgression, but to restore the symbolic conditions that allow this child to become a subject again.