L’amnésie traumatique et ses implications judiciaires dans les faits d’inceste

Abstract

In continuity with our previous article (Francols et Ravit, 2025), in which we identified the main factors associated with traumatic amnesia in the context of incestuous violence, we propose here to discuss the judicial implications of traumatic amnesia among victims of incest. Today, in France, 7.4 million people are recognized as having been victims of incest (Sondage IPSOS, 2023) and among them, 89% have suffered (and continue to suffer) from traumatic amnesia (Francols et Ravit, 2025), with 50% experiencing it in its complete form. Furthermore, for 28% of individuals who experienced complete traumatic amnesia, the condition lasted for more than 30 years. Traumatic amnesia, also referred to as “dissociative amnesia” in the scientific community, is defined as “an inability to recall important autobiographical information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature, that is inconsistent with ordinary forgetting” (American Psychiatric Association, 2015). Beyond this psychiatric definition, traumatic amnesia bears witness to the extreme nature of psychic survival mechanisms in the face of the psychic disintegration and destruction brought on by incestuous acts. Incest is not merely an assault on the body; it is, first and foremost, an assault on the psyche — a kind of death, an erasure of the other as a singular and differentiated subject. By taking possession of the child's body, the incestuous parent also attacks the child's mind, denying their otherness, their desire, and their inherent need for existence. The child is no longer a subject, no longer the bearer of a singular identity differentiated by age and gender; they become an object — an object of other — reduced to a body with forms and orifices, transformed into a toy whose sole function is to entertain, to give pleasure — and, in the worst cases, to provide gratification. To survive, the individual has no choice but to erase the reality of the act, to render it non-existent within the self. Symbolization processes break down, preventing the transformation of “initial perceptual traces” into conscious and meaningful representations of experience. Ego-splitting and repression operate to keep the threatening representations of sexual trauma out of awareness. Due to its complexity and radical nature, traumatic amnesia places significant limitations on victims’ ability to report what happened and on the expected judicial response. Based on a national epidemiological study conducted between November 2022 and March 2023 with 400 participants who experienced incest in childhood or adolescence, we identified the specific temporality associated with the phenomenon of traumatic amnesia and the psychic processes necessary for constructing representations of incestuous traumatic events. However, the French criminal justice system is bound by statutory time limits that fail to account for the extended psychological timeframe needed by incest victims to fully process and integrate these traumatic experiences. Moreover, the language used by victims of incest does not align with that of the French judicial system. The victims’ subjective reality consists of partially symbolized elements — fragments of explicit, verbalizable memories that are often confused and discontinuous — and, more significantly, non-symbolized elements, accessible only through the body in the form of sensations, impressions, unrepresented perceptual traces that are “unutterable.” In contrast, judicial proceedings are based on facts and require a clear, structured, and coherent narrative. Faced with such a gap, communication between victims and the French legal system becomes difficult, and this misunderstanding carries serious consequences for victims seeking recognition and reparation.