This article will propose a theoretical elaboration of the psychic impacts specific to sexual abuses lived during the latency period. During this period, the child develops his fantasies and reorganizes the way his identifications and ideals are set. With the help of his family and a tender environment, he develops his fantasies, in parallel with reworking his identity which imposed by the oedipal interdiction. A psychic play is thus put into place in the quest for substitute love objects, a project later to come. Clinical analysis of incest during the latency period shows us that such a quest is made difficult and problematic because of the fixation to the aggressor/object and the suffered scene The confusion provoked by the incestual abuse and the attack of the intersubjective link brought by the denial of the mother has a destructive effect on the feeling of the continuity of existence of the child and the foundations of thought and dream. The environment necessary to the construction of the subject is thus aggressive and defective. Using a clinical case we seek to illustrate how this psychic play which is proper to the latency period, is fixed and propels the subject into traumatic latency. Nevertheless, psychoanalytical psychotherapy by its holding space and transference dynamics, can propose a resumption of the psychic play and the possibility of a libidinal shift toward other objects. © 2013 Elsevier Masson SAS.

Tenderness Project Latency period Traumatic latency Incest

fantasy play therapy environmental factor dream psychotrauma identity child sexual abuse psychoanalysis denial Article mother child relation thinking human psychic play transference psychosexual development incest