[To begin to believe. Working notes on a mother-daughter incest case and its implications on the formation of the...

Most psychoanalytic literature dealing with incest holds the premise that the act took place between a parent and a child of opposite sex. Incidentally, most of these cases involve a father-daughter incest (e.g. research by Julien Bigras). However, this is only one of four mathematically possible combinations. For instance, we tend to underestimate the occurrences and, consequently, the repercussions of mother-daughter incest relationships. The biological and psychological importance of the mother in the child's development radically influences the mother-daughter incest. In the reactualizing of transference, analysts, especially if they are female, often find themselves confronted with some of the most fundamental choices in the life of an infant, such as to live or to die, to grow or to cease to grow. It then becomes crucial to understand the most primitive components of the infant's early life. In such a case, an analyst must consult some of the most complex theoretical work covering the subject. The author, for her part, has greatly referred to the experiences of Renatta Gaddini, who insists on the importance of developing a pretransitional space during the analysis. This pretransitional space, however, is useless if the analyst is unable to follow it up by becoming a transformational object in the eyes of the patient, in the way described by Christopher Bollas: an object suggesting that the patient relive the steps leading from pre-thought to thought, from real to symbolic. Indeed, Bollas' research has allowed the author to develop a more accurate vision of what is at stake. At the same time, she was able to assess the amount of work still needed in that area of study, an area which, up to this day, offers only very little research to support the author's exploration.