Incest Family Dynamics

Abstract

A self-administered questionnaire study in a self-help group for incest families focused on individual family members'perceptions of their interrelationships before and after participation in therapy. The results show that perceptions of the same relationships varied greatly among family members. Before therapy, the father-daughter relationship received the most divergent ratings,with fathers rating it as extremely good and daughters as extremely bad. The mother-daughter relationship was seen as the most neutral by all family members. After therapy, while the parents improved their perceptions of family relations, daughters (victims) continued to rate them as bad. It is suggested that the emphasis on teaching victims to externalize the blame in order to diminish unjust shame in effect means shifting the blame to the father (the offender), which again serves to maintain stressful family relations for the daughters in these families. The clinical implications of this dilemma are discussed.