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.

Winnicott writes: “A good-enough environment allows the true self to emerge.” What made it possible for you, in your case, to speak?

CB: The true self is undoubtedly one of Winnicott’s concepts that has helped me most in thinking about what incest produces. It is sometimes translated as the ‘vrai soi,’ but that phrase is misleading. The true self is not a hidden identity that merely needs to be rediscovered. It refers to that fundamental experience of a subject who can feel that what they experience, think, desire, and express truly belongs to them. It is the intimate sense of existing from oneself. For Winnicott, this feeling is not built alone. It arises from an encounter with an environment reliable enough to receive the child’s spontaneous gestures without subjecting them to fear, control, or confusion. When a child is confronted with incest, this spontaneity becomes dangerous. To survive, the child learns to anticipate the adult’s expectations, to mask what they feel, to conform to what is demanded of them. Winnicott then speaks of the false self: not a lie, but a psychic organization of survival that protects the subject’s most living core. I believe many victims know this experience. One continues to live, to work, sometimes to love. But part of oneself remains as if suspended, prevented from fully coming into being.

Reconstruction, then, consists less in recovering a lost identity than in recreating the conditions in which gestures, affects, and speech can become spontaneous again. It is not about becoming someone else; it is about finally being able to live without every movement of the self being dictated by the necessity of surviving the other’s desire. I believe that what Winnicott calls a good-enough environment is not only a maternal quality. It is also a social responsibility. Because when no adult turns a child’s expressions of distress into effective protection, the entire containing function collapses. Speaking became possible the day I finally met people able to stop asking me to protect the family system before protecting the child I had been.

Klein speaks of very early unconscious guilt. Did you experience this kind of guilt when it came to putting your story into words?

CB: Yes, but I think incest also forces us to clarify what Klein means by guilt. For Klein, guilt appears when the child discovers that they love and attack the same object. This ambivalence is constitutive of psychic........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)