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........

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