Josef Fritzl is currently on trial in Austria over the imprisonment and rape of his daughter. The case is grotesque, and because of this, I venture, also morbidly fascinating. It also brought back to The Times ‘most read’ section an article I was intrigued by over the summer – ‘I had sex with my brother but I don’t feel guilty’ – in which the author puts across the other side of the story: a relationship that was clearly consensual, and a positive experience for both.
I decided to search IBSS to look for articles on incest. There are c. 500 records dealing with the subject, and many are from the ‘abuse’ perspective, looking at how to identify and prevent cases of abuse, and how to help victims deal with their trauma. Pertinent to the Fritzl case, perhaps, is ‘Decisions to offend in men who sexually abuse their daughters’ (in the Journal of Sexual Aggression, 2007); or ‘Acting out the Oedipal wish’: father-daughter incest and the sexuality of adolescent girls in the United States, 1941-1965’, R. Devlin (2005), which takes a psychoanalytic approach. Though rarer, there is also a literature on mothers as abusers, for example ‘Speaking about the unspeakable: exploring the impact of mother-daughter sexual abuse’, Tracey Peter, (2008).
Many articles, however, take a cultural look at the subject rather than a psycho-social, and look at different attitudes to incest across diverse societies. Among them: ‘Incest between adults and children in the Medieval world’ (a chapter in the book ‘Children and sexuality: from the Greeks to the Great War’, Palgrave:2007); ‘Close relationships – incest and inbreeding in classical Arabic literature’, Gelder (2007); ‘Le bain mystérieux de la Tu’i Tonga Fefine. Germanité, inceste et mariage sacré en Polynésie’, F. Douaire-Marsaudon (2002) which looks at kinship, incest and sacred marriage in Polynesia); ‘Full brother-sister marriage in Roman Egypt: another look’, S. Parker (1996); and ‘Rudras Geburt: systematische Untersuchungen zum Inzest in der Mythologie des Brahmanas’, J. Deppert (1977) – a look at incest in Brahman mythology. I could go on – there is really a fascinating range.
Given the widely different cultural approaches to incest over time and place, an interesting question is whether the aversion most people have to incest is cultural or biological. Two sides of the coin are represented by ‘Il tabu dell’incesto: un problema culturale’ (The incest taboo – a cultural problem), G. Marucci (1975) on the one hand; and on the other ‘The biological foundations of the incest taboo’, N. Bischoff (1972). Around 20 articles look at the Westermarck thesis, which I presume, therefore, is influential: ‘Westermarck proposed that humans have an incest avoidance instinct, triggered by frequent intimate contact with family members during the first several years of life. Westermarck reasons that (1) familial incest will tend to produce less fit offspring, (2) those humans without instinctive incest avoidance would hence have tended to die off and those with the avoidance instinct would have produced more viable offspring, and hence (3) familial incest would be, as indeed it is, universally and instinctively avoided.’ (quoted from ‘Instinctive incest avoidance: a paradigm case for evolutionary psychology evaporates’, J. Leiber, 2006). However this evolutionary approach does not seem to be as popular a field of research as that of the ‘cultural taboo’ surrounding incest. Among the more off-the-wall papers dealing with this subject is ‘Crossing the final taboo: family, sexuality, and incest in Buffyverse fan fiction’, K.Busse (2002) – a reference to the issue in Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Some articles suggest that Western culture overplays the taboo, and that the line between familial love and sexual love is a rather finer one than we like to think. In her article ‘’I could eat my baby to bits’; passion and desire in lesbian mother-children love’, Jacqi Gabb (2004), asserts that ‘The legal-moral boundaries that are invoked prohibit intergenerational desire, upholding the incest taboos that dominate Western culture. However the construction of these boundaries neither stop adult-child ‘border skirmishes’ nor quash children’s ‘natural’ exploration of their sexuality. I explore how bodies and bodily boundaries are used to manage sexuality and desire in families.’ The author of the Times piece mentioned above might well agree.
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