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In 1891, the Finnish sociologist Edward Westermarck published The History of Human Marriage, considered one of the founding texts of modern study of the family in that it broke sharply with certain evolutionist presuppositions. Westermarck asserted that the incest prohibition derived from an innate aversion to sexual relations between persons who had lived together at a young age. This claim was immediately contested, by Emile Durkheim and Sigmund Freud among others. The important discussion that ensued constitutes a fundamental source of debate between sociology and psychoanalysis. The aim here is to reconstitute the development and configuration of this controversy. The main issues are the unconscious meaning of the dread of incest, the cultural dimension of the prohibition and the social status of transgression. Identifying them leads to underlining the differences in how the theme of incest has been handled not only in the social sciences as opposed to psychoanalysis but also within the social sciences, in sociology as opposed to anthropology. The necessarily transferential aspect of this kind of problematic is highlighted.