Freud, Kinsey, Feminists & Incest
Experts Agree that Father-Daughter Incest is More Common Than You Think
Hey Folks,
As you know, I like to write about taboo subjects. And the biggest taboo of them all remains incest.
So of course I’ve got to write about about that.
For much of the 20th century, many intellectuals were heavily influenced by Freud, who had what I consider quite batshit views on incest, as well as many other things.
To be honest, his bizarre ideas probably did have something to do with his heavy use of cocaine, which he was a major user and proponent of.
I am in total agreement with Jordan Peterson’s take on the Oedipal Complex.
Fun fact - do you know that Freud might have been actually paid by Merck to promote cocaine? I haven’t seen a smoking gun, but the circumstantial evidence is strong.
I learned that from the Mad In America podcast, which I highly recommend.
But one must be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to Freud. Anyone who has watched The Century of Self knows how influential his ideas have been on propaganda and advertising.
If Freud wasn’t right on some level about the subconscious mind, techniques based on his ideas wouldn’t have worked so well. So he was definitely right about something, even though he was incredibly wrong about a hell of a lot.
Wait, what? You haven’t watched The Century of Self?
Get the fuck outta here! Are you kidding me? Go watch it!
For Fuck’s Sake, it’s available for free on YouTube! What are you waiting for?
Okay, for those of you that haven’t been snoozing and losing your whole lives, let’s continue.
What you are about to read is a critical take on Freud written by a feminist psychiatrist by the name of Judith Lewis Herman. She also comments on the work of an even more controversial figure - Alfred Kinsey.
This passage is excerpted from Father-Daughter Incest, considered a classic study of that subject.
I hope that you find this as illuminating as I did!
Yours truly,
Crow Qu’appelle
P.S. For an interesting take on Freud, I suggest checking out the Machinic Unconscious Happy Hour. If you’re a theory nerd, this is the podcast for you!
A Common Occurrence
By Judith Lewis Herman, M.D.
Excerpted from Father-Daughter Incest (1981)
Almost all of my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that the hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences . . . It was only later that I was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women.
—Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis, 1933
Female children are regularly subjected to sexual assaults by adult males who are part of their intimate social world. The aggressors are not outcasts and strangers; they are neighbors, family friends, uncles, cousins, stepfathers, and fathers. To be sexually exploited by a known and trusted adult is a central and formative experience in the lives of countless women.
This disturbing fact, embarrassing to men in general and to fathers in particular, has been repeatedly unearthed in the past hundred years, and just as repeatedly buried. Any serious investigation of the emotional and sexual lives of women eventually leads to the discovery of the incest secret. But until recently, each investigator who made this discovery has ended by suppressing it. The information was simply too threatening to be maintained in public consciousness.
Our own discovery of the incest secret took place when, as beginning clinicians, we encountered many incest victims among our first patients. Consider these cases, all of which were seen during the course of an ordinary psychiatric residency:
A forty-year-old mother of six children was admitted to the hospital after ingesting an overdose of sleeping pills. Suicide appeared to her as the only means of escape from a twenty-year marriage to a brutally abusive husband. In psychotherapy, she confided that as a child she had been repeatedly molested by her stepfather. Her husband was the only person who knew her secret. She found it impossible to leave him because she feared he would expose her incest history. He had often threatened to use this history to prove her unfit as a mother and obtain custody of the children should she attempt to divorce him.
A fifteen-year-old girl appeared in the outpatient clinic asking for tranquilizers. She had a history of addiction to alcohol and barbiturates, had been hospitalized several times for detoxification, and had had multiple unsuccessful placements in various residential treatment programs for adolescents. She revealed that from the age of eight, she had been involved in a sexual relationship with her father, which included fellatio and mutual masturbation. She ran away from home at age twelve when her father attempted intercourse and had essentially lived on the street since then. She expressed the hope, which seemed quite unrealistic, that her mother would divorce her father and allow her to come home.
A twenty-five-year-old office worker was seen in the emergency room with an acute anxiety attack. She was pacing, agitated, unable to eat or sleep, and felt a sense of impending doom. She described a vivid fantasy of being pursued by a man with a knife. The previous day, she had been cornered in the office by her boss, who aggressively propositioned her. She needed the job badly and did not want to lose it, but she dreaded the thought of returning to work. In psychotherapy, it emerged that this episode of sexual harassment had reawakened previously repressed memories of sexual assaults by her father. From the age of six until mid-adolescence, her father had repeatedly exhibited himself to her and insisted that she masturbate him. The experience of being entrapped at work recalled her childhood feelings of helplessness and fear.
The histories these women reported had all the vividness, accuracy of detail, and internal coherence characteristic of real memories. Moreover, in each case, the incest trauma was directly implicated in the patient's presenting problem. Nevertheless, in every case, the veracity of the patient's history was officially questioned. We were reminded by our supervisors, as if this were common knowledge, that women often fantasize or lie about childhood sexual encounters with adults, especially their fathers.
Increasingly troubled by the number of incest cases we had seen, we decided to explore the literature. We wanted to find out what was known about incest and learn the source of the prevailing belief that women lie about it. What we discovered was a vastly elaborated intellectual tradition that served the purpose of suppressing the truth about incest—a tradition which, like so many others, originates in the works of Freud.
The patriarch of modern psychology stumbled across the incest secret in the early and formative years of his career. It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him. Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma.
But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to publicly identify fathers as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governesses, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies on Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosalia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information.
A Common Occurrence
The Incest Secret
Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period reveals that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had recently died.
In 1897, Freud wrote to his confidant, Wilhelm Fliess, explaining why he had finally rejected his seduction theory:
"Then there was the astonishing thing that in every case blame was laid on perverse acts by the father, and realization of the unexpected frequency of hysteria, in every case of which the same thing applied, though it was hardly credible that perverted acts against children were so general."
Freud concluded that his patients' reports of sexual abuse were fantasies, based upon their own incestuous wishes. To incriminate daughters rather than fathers was an immense relief to him, even though it entailed a public admission that he had been mistaken.
As he continued in the letter to Fliess:
"It is curious that I feel not in the least disgraced, though the occasion might seem to require it. Certainly, I shall not tell it... in the land of the Philistines but between ourselves, I have a feeling more of triumph than of defeat."
At the moment that Freud turned his back on his female patients and denied the truth of their experiences, he forfeited his ambition to understand the female neurosis. Freud went on to elaborate the dominant psychology of modern times. It is a psychology of men. The incestuous wishes of the male child, his hostile rivalry with his father, and the struggle to master these feelings and enter into the world of men became the central focus of psychoanalytic inquiry. The incestuous wishes of parents, and their capacity for action, were all but forgotten. This does not matter much in the case of boys, for, as it turns out, boys are rarely molested by their parents. It matters a great deal in the case of girls, who are the chief victims. Since much of psychoanalytic theory originated in the refusal to validate a common and central female experience, it is not surprising that Freud and his followers were never able to develop a satisfactory psychology of women.
For years after Freud disavowed the seduction theory, clinicians maintained a dignified silence on the subject of incest. Helene Deutsch's massive Psychology of Women, published in 1944, makes no mention of it whatsoever. As recently as 1975, a basic American psychiatry textbook estimated the frequency of all forms of incest as one case per million.
The legacy of Freud's inquiry into the subject of incest was a tenacious prejudice, still shared by professionals and laymen alike, that children lie about sexual abuse. This belief is by now so deeply ingrained in the culture that children who dare to report sexual assaults are more than likely to have their complaints dismissed as fantasy. Within the medical profession, denial persists even in the presence of incontrovertible physical evidence, such as venereal disease in children. Rather than acknowledge the possibility of sexual abuse, physicians have been known to assert that children can contract venereal disease from clothing, towels, or toilet seats, an idea that transcends the limits of biological possibility and which would be considered laughable if applied to adults.
Prejudice against the child victim within the medical profession bolsters a similar prejudice within the legal profession. The most famous legal text ever published in this country, John Henry Wigmore's Treatise on Evidence (1934), set forth a doctrine impeaching the credibility of any female, especially a child, who complained of a sex offense. Wigmore warned that women and girls were predisposed to bring false accusations against men of good character, and that these accusations might convince unsuspecting judges and juries. He therefore recommended that any female complainant, but especially a girl who accused her father of incest, should be examined by a psychiatrist to determine her credibility. To support his opinion, Wigmore drew upon the pronouncements of eminent psychiatric authorities. Where their published case reports suggested the possibility of real sexual abuse, Wigmore, like Freud, falsified or omitted the evidence. For example, in his discussion of incest, Wigmore cited case reports of two girls, ages seven and nine, who accused their fathers of sexual assault. In both cases, the original clinical reports documented the fact that the children had vaginal infections. The seven-year-old had gonorrhea, and the nine-year-old's vagina was so inflamed and swollen that the doctor could not make a physical examination. This and other corroborating evidence was systematically omitted in Wigmore's presentation, and the cases were discussed as examples of pathological lying in children. Wigmore's assertions, supposedly based upon medical expertise, remained unchallenged for decades in the legal literature, and still retain great prestige and influence in the courtroom.
A half-century after Freud repudiated his seduction theory, incest was "discovered" for a second time. New information was unearthed not by clinicians, who had willfully blinded themselves to the reality, but by social scientists, who were relatively uninfluenced by psychoanalytic tradition. As the survey and the questionnaire came into widespread use, investigators once again conceived of the daring idea of asking women about their sexual lives and listening to their replies. Between 1940 and the present, five surveys, including the famous Kinsey report, addressed the subject of sexual encounters between female children and adults. Although incest was not a specific subject of inquiry, it was included in the more general survey data. Cumulatively, these studies recorded information from over 5000 women, from many different geographic areas, and primarily from the privileged strata of American society.
The largest of the studies, by Alfred Kinsey and his associates in 1953, was based on over 4000 personal interviews with young, white, predominantly middle-class, urban, educated women. A second study, by John Gagnon in 1965, was based on more extensive data gathered from 1200 women in Kinsey's group. Two other surveys, by Judson Landis in 1956 and David Finkelhor in 1978, recorded information from questionnaires given to approximately 2000 college students. These four studies were restricted to women in good health. The fifth study, by Carney Landis in 1940, surveyed 142 psychiatric patients and 153 "normal controls." No significant differences were recorded in the early sexual experiences of these two groups of women. In general, the poor, blacks and other minorities, rural people, and the mentally ill—those groups that are stereotypically suspected of deviant sexual activities—were conspicuous by their absence from these studies.
The results of these five surveys were remarkably consistent. One fifth to one third of all women reported that they had had some sort of childhood sexual encounter with an adult male. Between four and twelve percent of all women reported a sexual experience with a relative, and one woman in one hundred reported a sexual experience with her father or stepfather (see Table 1.1).
The data from these five studies are even more consistent than might be apparent at first glance. Much of the variation that does exist can be accounted for by differences in the types of sexual encounters reported. In Judson Landis' study, for example, over half (54.8 percent) of the incidents reported by women were single encounters with exhibitionists, in which no physical contact occurred. In these cases, the offenders were almost always strangers (87 percent) rather than trusted familiar figures, and the episodes generally left no lasting impression.
By contrast, only 20 percent of the incidents reported by women in Finkelhor's study were encounters of this type, whereas 75 percent were episodes that involved physical contact, 55 percent involved force, and 40 percent were repeated more than once. The differences in the types of events reported to these two investigators are probably attributable to differences in the questionnaires used. If contacts with exhibitionists are excluded, the data from these two surveys are congruent: 15.8 percent of the women in Landis' survey and 14.4 percent of the women in Finkelhor's study reported a childhood sexual encounter involving physical contact with an adult.
There is some reason to suspect that these estimates may actually be low when applied to the entire population, because they are based almost entirely on reports from white middle-class women. Since poor and minority women are subjected to all types of violence and abuse more frequently than the population at large, it is reasonable to suppose that these groups also suffer a higher incidence of sexual assault in childhood. There are no valid data, however, to confirm or disprove these speculations.
Applying the figures obtained from these five surveys to the general population, Finkelhor surmised that somewhere in the neighborhood of one million American women have been involved in incestuous relations with their fathers, and that some 16,000 new cases occur each year. These are conservative estimates, and the real incidence of father-daughter incest may well be considerably higher than the figure he suggested.
Less information is available on the early sexual experience of boys. Those studies that have been done make it clear, however, that boys are abused far less often than girls. Kinsey and his associates, in their exhaustive survey of over 5000 men, considered sexual contacts between boys and adults so unusual that they did not even bother to report numerical data on this type of activity. They did indicate, however, that most contacts between boys and adults were homosexual. Finkelhor, in a survey of 266 college men in 1978, found that 8.6 percent had had a childhood sexual experience with an adult. Again, most were homosexual encounters. Family members were implicated in only four cases. Only one study, carried out by Judson Landis in 1956, records an incidence of sexual abuse of boys comparable to that of girls. Thirty percent of the 467 young men in this series reported that they had had a sexual encounter, usually involving physical contact, with an adult; in this study too, however, the overwhelming majority of the aggressors (84 percent) were men.
The Kinsey studies became a household name in America and brought their authors international fame. Many of their findings on previously taboo subjects, such as masturbation, extramarital sex, and homosexual contacts among men, received enormous attention and became part of common knowledge and folklore. By contrast, the finding that grown men frequently permit themselves sexual liberties with children, while grown women do not, made virtually no impact on public consciousness, even though this finding was repeatedly confirmed by other investigators.
Kinsey himself, though he never denied the reality of child sexual abuse, did as much as he could to minimize its importance. Some 80 percent of the women who had experienced a childhood sexual approach by an adult reported to Kinsey's investigative team that they had been frightened and upset by the incident. Kinsey cavalierly belittled these reports. He hastened to assure the public that children should not be upset by these experiences. If they were, it was not the fault of the sexual aggressor, but of prudish parents and teachers who caused the child to become "hysterical":
"It is difficult to understand why a child, except for cultural conditioning, should be disturbed at having its genitalia touched, or disturbed at seeing the genitalia of other persons, or disturbed at even more specific sexual contacts... Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police officers, and other adults who discover that the child has had such a contact, may disturb the child more seriously than the sexual contacts themselves."
Kinsey and his colleagues might have found it less difficult to understand why a child would be disturbed by the imposition of adult sexual demands if they had had greater respect for the personal integrity of the child. If the Kinsey researchers had shown any sensitivity toward the child's need for autonomy or recognized the child's right to privacy, it was not apparent in their writings. By contrast, this group demonstrated a keen sensitivity toward the adult offender. As scientists and leaders in the struggle for enlightened sexual attitudes, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to plead the offender's case. They pointed out, quite correctly, that existing laws regarding sex were so restrictive and so out of touch with the realities of human behavior that a large portion of the population lived their lives in technical violation of the law. However, in their plea for greater tolerance, they failed to distinguish between essentially harmless acts committed by consenting adults, "nuisance" acts such as exhibitionism, and frankly exploitative acts such as the prostitution of women and the molesting of children. Ignoring issues of dominance and power, they took a position that amounted to little more than advocacy of greater sexual license for men. Kinsey, in fact, saw the unfortunate male as in need of defense against the persecution of malicious females, old and young:
"In many instances, the law, in the course of punishing the offender, does more damage to more persons than was ever done by the individual in his illicit sexual activity. The histories which we have accumulated contain many such instances. The intoxicated male who accidentally exposes his genitalia before a child may receive a prison sentence which leaves his family destitute for some period of years, breaks up his marriage, and leaves three or four children wards of the state and without the sort of guidance which the parents might well have supplied. The older, unmarried women who prosecute the male whom they find swimming nude may ruin his business or professional career, bring his marriage to divorce, and do such damage to his children as the observation of his nudity could never have done to the woman who prosecuted him. The child who has been raised in fear of all strangers and all physical manifestations of affection may ruin the lives of the married couple who had lived as useful and honorable citizens through half or more of a century, by giving her parents and the police a distorted version of the old man's attempt to bestow grandfatherly affection upon her."
While Kinsey and his associates dared to describe a vast range of sexual behaviors in exhaustive detail, they declined to specify what might be involved in the "bestowing" of grandfatherly—or fatherly—affection upon little girls. On the subject of incest, apparently, they felt the less said the better. This was in spite of the fact that they had accumulated the largest body of data on overt incest that had ever appeared in scientific literature. Extrapolating from Kinsey's statistics, we estimate that these researchers interviewed over forty women who reported incestuous relations with their fathers and an additional two hundred women who had sexual experiences with older brothers, uncles, or grandfathers. To date, this remains the largest number of incest cases ever collected from the population at large, rather than from advertisements, clinic files, or court records. The wealth of information contained in these interviews remained buried in the files of the Institute for Sex Research. In the judgment of these men, the public was not ready to hear about incest.
Perhaps they were right. In 1955, two years after the publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, S. Kirson Weinberg, a sociologist, published a thorough and scholarly study, Incest Behavior, based on 203 cases reported by the courts and social agencies in the Chicago area. No sensation, in fact no public response of any kind, attended its publication. Weinberg went on to study other, more acceptable subjects, and Incest Behavior quietly went out of print. Wider public discussion of the subject would have to wait another twenty years.
Incest was rediscovered for a third time in the 1970s by the women's liberation movement. As feminists brought the reality of sexual oppression to public consciousness, many previously forbidden or ignored subjects, such as rape, wife-beating, and sexual abuse of children, became legitimate topics for serious research. And this time, the information could not be suppressed once it was uncovered, for it began to reach those who stood in the greatest need of knowledge—namely, the victims themselves.
Between 1970 and the present, four large surveys of over fifty incest cases and many smaller studies appeared in the professional literature. Popular, confessional accounts by incest victims also began to proliferate. These works confirmed many of the observations that Weinberg had made twenty years earlier. In particular, they confirmed the fact that incest follows the general pattern of child sexual abuse, in which the majority of victims are female and the majority of offenders are male. In Weinberg's series of 203 cases, 164 were instances of father-daughter incest; only two involved a mother and son. Subsequent studies in this country and in France, Germany, Japan, and Ireland conformed to the same general pattern. A review of the five largest studies of parent-child incest, documenting a total of 424 cases, indicates that the father was the offender in 97 percent of the cases, while the mother was the offender in only three percent.
Incest between mother and son is so extraordinary that a single case is considered worthy of publication, and we have been able to find a grand total of only twenty-two documented cases in the entire literature. Another eight cases reported as mother-son incest might more accurately be described as rape, as they involved situations in which an adolescent or adult son subjected his mother to forced intercourse. In most of these cases, the son was psychotic, mentally retarded, or otherwise severely disturbed. Where incest was initiated by the mother, a nonsexual motive was sometimes involved, as in this case report from Japan:
"He suffered meningitis when three years old and has an advanced degree of feeble-mindedness which is more or less equivalent to imbecility."
He developed sexual desires when in the fifth grade of primary school and made sexual advances towards dogs, cats, pigs, and other domestic animals and chased after girls in the neighborhood. Finally, he began threatening women with a knife. His mother could not bear to allow him to carry on and offered her body so that he would not perform such acts outside. These incestuous acts between mother and son continued until her death when he was age 14.
In this case, one might surmise that the mother's sacrifice was motivated in part by a desire to protect her brain-damaged child and fear that his uncontrolled aggressions against others would eventually lead to his incarceration. She need not have troubled herself on that score. After her death, the son remained at liberty, and a new victim was found for him:
After his mother's death, his abnormal sex drive returned and he had intercourse with anything possible. He assaulted women on several occasions, masturbated in public, and committed sodomy; and therefore he was married to a feeble-minded woman, but there was no stop to the above-mentioned acts. He was seen fondling his daughter's private parts.
The feelings of the woman to whom this man was married and the child he fathered were not recorded.
This pitiable story is by no means the most grotesque among recorded instances of mother-son incest. Almost all the cases involve marked social deviance and severe psychopathology in either the son, the mother, or both. Many cases involve violence. The most extreme instance, recorded by Wenzel Brown, culminated in the son's murder of his mother. Apparently the taboo against mother-son incest is breached only in bizarre circumstances.
When a boy is molested by a parent, the aggressor is as likely to be a father as a mother. Altogether, we were able to discover thirty-two cases of father-son incest in the literature. In one recent clinical report, ten cases of father-son incest were identified within the population of a single child-guidance clinic in Ohio. The authors were not looking for incest and were astonished by the large number of cases they encountered. The cases lacked the bizarre features of most documented cases of mother-son incest and resembled the much more common cases of father-daughter incest. The authors were led to the conclusion that father-son incest may be significantly under-reported.
The enormous difference in the behavior of mothers and fathers toward their children, by now amply documented, would seem to call for some commentary. Very few investigators, however, have made any attempt to explain why fathers quite commonly molest their children while mothers hardly ever do so. Most authors simply accept this as part of the natural order of things. Others attempt to deny the discrepancy. For instance, Blair and Rita Justice, a team of psychologists who have treated many incestuous families, attribute their overwhelming preponderance of cases of father-daughter incest to differential reporting. Why reports of sexual aggressions by fathers should exceed those of mothers by thirtyfold or more is a puzzle these authorities leave unsolved.
Perhaps the most ingenious denial of the realities of incestuous child abuse was suggested by a psychiatrist of our acquaintance who advanced the theory that mother-son incest is rampant before the son reaches the age of five and is thereafter repressed in the child's memory. This explanation supposes an almost preternatural cleverness on the part of mothers, who must somehow manage to desist just in time to escape detection. Even if this should prove to be the case, which is doubtful, it would still fail to explain why fathers do not exhibit any comparable restraint, since they are often reported to continue their sexual approaches well into their daughters' adolescence.
The concept of repression might be more aptly invoked to describe the social response to the reality of incest. Until the resurgence of the women's liberation movement, even the most courageous explorers of sexual mores simply refused to deal with the fact that many men, including fathers, feel entitled to use children for their sexual enjoyment. Nevertheless, this fact is established by now beyond any reasonable doubt.
FELICES FREUD KINSEY
It might be worth noting that the Kinsey data turned out to be not mainly confined to "regular" people. I believe it was mainly derived from prisons and sex workers then relabelled as "ordinary" people.