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.
Tags:
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first cousins,
first few years,
Freud,
freudian psychology,
human evidence,
incest,
mid 1960s,
mother son,
natural aversion,
sex,
sexual abuse,
sexual interaction,
sibling incest,
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