Case Reports

The displacement of roles in an incestuous family is described. As the daughters grew up, the mother abandoned early her rôle as a mother and nurturing, protective figure. She became one of them, playing the rôle of oldest daughter who, however, had passed the age of being the object of the incestuous wishes of the father (her husband). For his part, the father ignored her as a wife and in many ways this abandonment was a confirmation that she was no longer playing her rôle as spouse. On the other hand, the husband was unable to be a mature, responsible father who could take care of the affective needs of the family, so he gradually looked to his oldest daughter for a love relationship. In doing so he was himself abdicating as a father, perceiving himself as in his daughter's peer group. The second daughter, a pre-pubertal girl, out of jealousy and self-defence, assumed the rôle of ‘guardian’ of her older sister in trying to stop the relationship with the father and eventually refusing the advances he made to her. In the end, she revealed the ‘affair’ that took place between the father and the oldest daughter to the mother. The many changes in family relationships described, arising out of the incestuous relationship, shows that the disturbance in rôles leads in the end to the destruction of the family. Whereas there might have been many reasons to justify incest taboos for millenia past, in contemporary society the major reason justifying this taboo is that tolerance of it leads in fact to the destruction of the nuclear family, which is still, despite many changes, the key group of society.