Dr. Tesone’s pioneering work has confronted incest and child sexual abuse, a subject psychoanalysis long kept at a distance and translated that understanding into a prevention program protecting schoolchildren in Argentina. While psychoanalysis has extensively theorized incestuous desire, Tesone engages with what he calls “the unthinkable and unthought-about taboo” as it actually occurs. His central theoretical contribution distinguishes the seduction that helps form a child’s psyche from traumatic seduction, in which an adult’s sexuality intrudes destructively and erases the boundaries between generations.
In Trauma: A Pain Without a Subject (Routledge, 2024), Tesone draws on law, anthropology, linguistics, and mythology to show how sexual violence and psychological trauma may compromise psychic organization, symbolization, and the capacity to articulate suffering. Inspired by Canada’s “Feeling Yes, Feeling No” program, he created, and supervised through 2023, a child sexual abuse prevention program in the primary schools of San Miguel de Tucumán, in partnership with local government and the city’s professional associations of psychologists and lawyers. The program reached children ages six to ten, along with their parents and teachers, and in later years added content on the risks of online predation.
A Professor Emeritus at Buenos Aires’s Universidad del Salvador, Tesone has taught nearly 300 Latin American doctoral candidates in the doctoral program “The Disruptive and Psychoanalysis,” and has trained professionals for emergency work in disasters and catastrophes. His books have been published in eight languages, and his short story collection, Impure Tales (2024), explores trauma, memory, and unconscious transmission across generations. A training analyst of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association, he was named a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques by the French government in 2021.