Uncanny Guilt of Incest Victims: Standing Outside the Matrix, Looking In

ABSTRACT

Chronic guilt appears frequently in incest victims. It has a distinctive hue that can be described as uncanny, defined by Freud as a feeling produced when openly confronting that which is supposed to be hidden away, or—in the language of trauma—dissociated. In this case, what produces the uncanny is re-encountering Oedipal desire within a specific social context that represses the existence of incest but at the same time depends on an incestuous social order. Recurrence of the dissociated Oedipal desire within this cultural climate produces guilt through a particular etiology, unique to incest, which may be of explanatory value. In this article I aim to show how dealing with the guilt that is so characteristic to incest survivors evolved through three therapy sessions. This evolution occurred as the therapist—using counter transference—understood better the uncanny hue of the patient’s guilt.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the authors(s).

Filmography

The Matrix. (2001). Warner Bros. Pictures. Film.

Notes

¹ I use the concept of “incest” broadly to refer to any “sexual abuse of a child by an older relative” (Seligman, 2004, p. 15).

² This article specifically spotlights the way in which the concept of the uncanny contributes to the understanding of guilt of incest victims. Important questions with a broader perspective are left out for further discussion. To mention only a few: the broader perspective of the inner drama of cultural/private unconscious concerning incest (Harris and Gentile, 2019); the huge question of consent and cultural power; how language itself takes part in dissociating and ways in which “the symbolic itself is a political and cultural structure that does not allow for the containment, acknowledgement and recognition of such experiences” (Gentile, 2013 p. 11).

³ See a thorough review in Blass (2004).

⁴ I refer here to a “father,” but the discussion is relevant for any abuser who stands in a position of power or authority over the abused child.

⁵ “Seduction connotes something desirable [though forbidden] not just in the mind of the seducer but also in that of the one seduced” (Blass, 2004, p. 436).

⁶ These few words do not represent the complexity and nuanced concept of guilt in Davies and Frawley. For further reading see Davies and Frawley (1994).

⁷ “Uncanny,” the English translation for unheimlich, obviously does not cover every sense of the German word. For one thing, opposite meanings converge in the German unheimlich, making it an especially intense term. While heimlich and unheimlich are antonyms, their core senses—the homey as well as the alien—collapse into one another in the term unheimlich. Thus, the threatening, alien undertone seeps into heimlich—which is supposed to be cozy, pleasant, and familiar, while unheimlich soaks up a certain longing to the old homey comfort. At the same time, unheimlich conveys a physical sense of something unpleasant crawling up one’s back. For further elaboration of the term see Royle (2003, p. 1–2).

⁸ Ginsburg (the translator of The Interpretation of Dreams into Hebrew) commented that in general, Freud`s use of terminology is not accurate but rather diffuse and ambiguous, always searching for ways to speak about phenomena that cannot be precisely expressed in language (private communication, June 15, 2016).

⁹ For a further account of Freud`s abandoning of “the dissociative” see Davies and Frawley (1992).

¹⁰ The importance of these realizations stemmed—as is the case with most incest survivors—from the fact that they placed me, at least ostensibly, by Tamara’s side rather than in an accusatory position; they portrayed me as someone who could understand Tamara’s living reality at the time of the abuse.

¹¹ A theoretical issue that comes to mind when dealing with the Oedipal and the cultural place of fathers and daughters, specifically, concerns the question of the way guilt is or is not shaped by gender: How would this article look if Tamara were a boy? Her father—Mother?

¹² This is very true concerning Tamara, who grew up in a very conservative Orthodox patriarchal family. I accept Stav`s position in seeing the tacit endorsement of incestuous desire as essential to the reality in which girls live, since underneath the declared values of gender equality and women’s rights, and in spite of real and significant changes in social norms, the Western social order is still basically a patriarchal one.

¹³ Referring to the film The Matrix (2001), written and directed by Lana and Andy Wachowski. It depicts a future in which reality as perceived by most humans is actually a simulated one, called “the matrix.” Only a few have been freed from the “dream world” and realize that the world most people live in is a false one.

¹⁴ For example, “the critic Harold Bloom … has argued that Freud’s ‘conceptions […] have begun to merge with our culture, and indeed now form the only Western mythology that contemporary intellectuals have in common” (Mitchell, 1995, p. xix).

¹⁵ This social order is well represented in the superego, which Adorno so adequately defines as “the conceptual representative in psychoanalysis for all that is other to the subject’s singularity, for society, ideology, and history” (Rozmarin, 2011, p. 198).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ephrat Havron

Ephrat Havron, Ph.D., is a bibliotherapist and psychotherapist; fifth-year candidate at the Human Spirit Psychoanalytic-Buddhist Training Program; teacher at the David Yellin Academic College of Education at the M.A. Bibliotherapy training department, and at the special education department; co-founder of the “Yoga-Therapy” project for sexual assault victims; and therapist in a private practice, Jerusalem.