Back to Main Sexual Health & Guidance

Incest

Oedipus Wrecked

Provided by Psychology Today

Oh no, says a young California psychiatrist. We've been thinking about incest all wrong. As a result, we are missing the real reasons for rampant sexual abuse in families. In fact, we may actually be abetting it by common practices.

Freud had us believe that humans are innately incestuous, and that the dire act is held in check only by the fears of castration that arise as children grow up in the overheated sexual triangle he felt families to be.

But people are not innately incestuous, insists Mark T. Erickson, M.D. They acquire a "natural aversion" to incest during the first few years of life, and it is activated by early dose proximity of parents and other kin. According to Erickson, the process of attachment, or bonding, establishes a familial bond that operates later in life not only to ensure incest avoidance, but to foster altruism to one's near and dear.

Freud simply assumed that animals, including early humans, mated incestuously. But that was before ethology evolved as a science.

Starting in the mid-1960s, a number of studies began to examine whether incest is in fact common in nature. Since then, observers have decreed that mother-son, father-daughter, and sibling incest are rare in our first cousins, the primates, and all the way down the animal kingdom. The prevalence of incest avoidance in nature suggests it has biological underpinnings conserved through evolution.

For Erickson, the clincher is the human evidence. There are actually two test cases of the incest-avoidance theory, first put forth a century ago but discarded during the rise of Freudian psychology. Both involve cultural groups in which there is close proximity of individuals during childhood but no later restriction on sexual interaction.

One is the tradition of simpua marriage in Taiwan, in which children are betrothed by their parents in infancy. Before age one, the bride moves into the groom's home to be raised by his parents. In reality, simpua couples wind up developing a mutual sexual aversion so strong that, as adults, they often fail to consummate their bond. Their divorce rate is far higher, and their birthrate far lower than for other couples.

Then there are the children of the kibbutz, where Israeli boys and girls are raised together in very close peer groups from birth through high school. Extensive studies show that those raised together avoid each other sexually when the time comes.

A study of 65 teenagers turned up only one instance of heterosexual activity between peers-and then it involved a boy who hadn't moved into the kibbutz until age 10. In another study, among more than 2,700 kibbutz-reared people there wasn't one marriage between those who'd been raised together from birth to age six.

In his Old Testament-style psychology, Freud saw incest held in check by fear of retribution in the form of castration. Erickson, by contrast, sees incest avoidance as a natural outgrowth of "a nurturant childhood."

Indeed, says Erickson, "the lives of both the perpetrators and victims of incest are marked by rejection and emotional deprivation during childhood." When attachment is impaired early in life-through separation or parental neglect-people grow up confusing familial attraction with sexual attraction.

Even the Oedipus myth supports this view, Erickson observes in the American Journal of Psychiatry (Vol. 150, No. 3). "The typical story line in poems, novels, and plays in which incest is a theme is one of separation in infancy with later incestuous reunion."

There's much in modern culture that disrupts the kind of parent-infant bonding evolution has prepared us for. And so we may actually be manufacturing risk of sexual abuse-not by any single act of pathology but by widespread cultural practice. Erickson suggests it may be better for parents to be at home during a child's first year than to hire a nanny or use daycare. And fathers would do well to be involved early on in raising their daughters.

Maybe what threw Freud off track was that he was raised during his earliest years by a nanny.

Originally published by Psychology Today:Jul/Aug 93