Definition and Violation - Incest and The Incest Taboos PDF

Definition and Violation: Incest and the Incest Taboos
Author(s): Dorothy Willner

Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 134-159
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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DEFINITION AND VIOLATION: INCEST AND THE
INCEST TABOOS
DOROTHY WILLNER
University of Kansas
This article brings to bear on anthropological considerations of incest current theories and
findings about incest in contemporary Western societies. It emphasises that the defining feature of
incest is the existence of prohibitions against it. Since incest is culturally defined, evidence of
sexual avoidance in other species does not explain incest avoidance in man. The most economical
explanation of both incest prohibitions and incest still seems to be the theory of the Oedipus
complex or another 'nuclear' complex. Within the European nuclear family, father-daughter
incest is by far the most frequently detected, although brother-sister incest may be more
common. Adult behaviour towards children which is not incestuous according to European legal
and cultural definitions also can approximate incestuous seduction in its psychological effects on
the children. It appears that beliefs explicit in one culture can be part of the range of experience in
another, but of experience not explicitly conceptualised.
'The subject is incest and the fascination of incest' (Fox I980: i), begins a recent
anthropological study, one of several (van den Berghe 1979; I980; Shepher in
press) which approach incest and incest taboos from a biosocial perspective. The
'fascination' of incest and its reconsideration is not limited to anthropologists of
biosocial persuasion. Its 'meaning' has also been subject to reassessment by
those committed to an interest in cultural constructions (Needham I97I;
Wagner I972; Huntsman & Hooper 1976; Schneider I976; Shore I976). Within
the last few years another body of literature on incest has proliferated-clinical
and case studies on the sexual victimisation of children and youth in contempor-
ary Western societies.
Terms such as 'sexual victimisation' and 'child sexual abuse' (e.g. Jones &
MacFarlane I980: i) refer to behaviour and also judge it and label it. This
literature gives a 'meaning' to incest. Incest, at least the incest that adults (mostly
male) engage in with children, is sexual abuse.
Recent clinical findings include informant statements which support this
interpretation, for example, such utterances 'by 2-year-olds experiencing digital
penetration from the father' (Ortiz y Pino & Goodwin I982: 59-6i) as 'Daddy
hurt my pee pee', 'I hurt'. Utterances change in pattern as children develop and
acquire language competence. A four-year-old girl raped by her mother's lover
'said, before surgery, "That man hurt my bottom"'. By age seven, statements
become more graphic, 'He put his weiner in my thing this morning while it was
still dark and blood came out. He made me throw my panties away. My dad tells
me I have to do it with him because my mom doesn't like to do it with him any
Alan (N. S.) i8, I 3 4-59
DOROTHY WILLNER I35
more'. Confessional accounts add substantial detail about incest experienced by

girls, mostly daughters, as abuse and victimisation (Armstrong I978; Brady
I979; Butler I979; Allen I980).
Child sexual abuse is obviously not the only meaning incest has in contem-
porary Western cultures. However diverse the incest laws between the Amer-
ican states, Heider found 'the common American folk feeling that the closer the
relationship, the less proper is marriage' (I969: 701). Incestuous sexual activity
between consenting adults is prohibited no less than that between adult and
child; and families suspected of incest generally are stigmatised. However, the
meaning of their incest to incestuous fathers involves more than stigma. Even
while enjoining secrecy on their daughters, they prefer not to see themselves as
abusers. They commonly represent themselves as contributing to their daugh-
ters' education (Karpman I954: 416-57; Weiner I964; Ortiz y Pino & Goodman
I982: 70). They also may consider their daughters theirs by right (Cormier et al.
1962). This article restricts consideration of the 'meanings' of incest in Western
cultures to those found in the anthropological literature or in that of other
scholarly fields. However relevant an analysis of the symbolism of erotica and
pornography may be, for instance, it would constitute another study.
Incest: the violation of a prohibition

Anthropological discussions of incest have traditionally been peripheral to
discussions of incest taboos. One reason may be ethnographic visibility. Since
incest is prohibited behaviour, the prohibitions are much more visible and
accessible to investigation than their occasional violation. Indeed, a society's
incest prohibitions are integrally related to such key foci of research as its system
of kinship and marriage and its moral and legal injunctions. Thus, incest
prohibitions have held a major place in anthropological theory. However
diverse they may be in cultural context, traditionally they have been viewed as a
cultural universal, and have had the attraction of a subject about which
species-wide generalisations could be made.
The allure of theorising about species-wide institutions has survived repeated
evidence that incest taboos are neither unitary nor universal (Schroeder i9i5;
Slotkin I947; Goody i956; Fox I962; Middleton I962; Goggin & Sturtevant
I964; Hopkins I980; Sturtevant I98I). Indeed, in a classic statement, Murdock
(I949: I2-I3) lists half-a-dozen exceptions to the universality of nuclear family
incest prohibitions even while asserting the invariable applicability of such
prohibitions. In recent years a paradox has developed. On the one hand, it is
recognised that nuclear family incest taboos are neither equivalent to one
another nor universal. On the other hand, however, the notion of incest is being
extended to other species.
The discovery that many species besides man avoid inbreeding has led to
reassessments of its basis in man (Aberle et al. I963; Lindzey I967; Fox I967;
I972; I975; I980; Parker I976; van den Berghe I980; Bixler I98I). The term
'incest', already polysemic in anthropological usage, has become more so. Not
only is it applied to both marriage and sexual relations within the nuclear family
and among prohibited categories of kin, whatever the prohibitions of a particu-
I36 DOROTHY WILLNER
lar culture may be, 'incest' may also be applied to mating among animals (e.g.
Kortmulder I968; Itani I972; Bischof I975; Demarest I977). The extension of
the concept of incest to animals other than man eliminates kinship systems,
normative prohibitions and, indeed, symbolism. Incest is reduced to inbreed-
ing. Cultural prohibitions and kinship may be treated as no more than species-
specific to man and the allure of species-wide generalisation shrivels before the
seductive sweep of evolutionary biology.
This article does not take issue with evolutionary biology. It does seek to
remove incest from its sway, except in so far as incest is isomorphic with
inbreeding and findings about inbreeding apply to man. Incest may be con-
sidered isomorphic with inbreeding only as far as it can result in conception and
birth. In this respect, the findings of Adams and Need (I967) and Seemanova'
(I97I) give evidence that children of nuclear family incest are significantly more
prone to mortality and morbidity than other children.
However, incest prohibitions are not the only way to avoid possible inbreed-
ing depression (cf. Lindzey I 967). Children die easily where modern medicine is
lacking. Infanticide is widely practised in societies with diverse systems of
kinship and marriage. Demographic factors which could virtually preclude
nuclear family inbreeding may have been present during much ofhuman history
(Slater I969). Although biosocial anthropology is not the first grand theory to
have incest taboos at its base, incest taboos are not the only way of maintaining a
fit breeding population.
More important, incest can involve activities that cannot possibly result in
offspring (as between children of both sexes below the age ofpuberty, male with
male, the use of orifices other than the vagina of women of childbearing years,
or genital activity short of penile penetration). Incest can be discussed as
equivalent to inbreeding only when defined in such a way as to limit its sexual
component to sexual intercourse with ejaculation between a human male and a
nubile human female. This is the approach taken explicitly by Shepher (in press)
and implicitly in other discussions of sociobiological persuasion (e.g. Fox I980:
24). The sexual denotations of 'incest' as the term is used in Western cultures are
not of course limited in this way, as should be evident from the references
already cited.
It may not be redundant to emphasise that incest is not defined by its sexual
components alone in either Western legal or medical definitions or in those of
traditional anthropology. Incest has denoted marriage or sexual activity be-
tween persons prohibited because of specified kinship relations. Both Western
legal and traditional anthropological definitions of incest represent it as the
intersection of three sets: a set of sexual behaviours, a set of kinship categories
and a set of prohibitions. It follows that behaviour is not incest if it does not
involve an intersection of elements from all three sets.
The language of formal logic allows for cross-cultural comparisons with less
conceptual confusion than would follow from indiscriminate application of
Western definitions to other cultures or from identification of inbreeding with
incest. Marriages or sexual relations between legally or normatively permitted
categories of kin may be inbreeding but cannot be incest according to the
cultural constructions of the people allowing the relationships. Thus marriage
DOROTHY WILLNER I37
between full brother and sister in Roman Egypt was not incest during the
hundreds of years it was celebrated (Hopkins I980), although it would be to
sociobiologists today (van den Berghe & Mesher i980).I As Fox (I980) as well as
Levi-Strauss (I969) has emphasised, it is the fact of rules which distinguishes
culture from nature. Incest is defined by rules prohibiting it. Such rules are not
universal: they do not everywhere prohibit either marriage or mating within the
nuclear family.
The terms we translate as 'incest' may also be polysemic in other cultures.
Their multiple meanings may have limited overlap with either Western legal
definitions of incest or traditional anthropological definitions. Behaviour to
which are applied terms we translate as incest need be neither sexual nor limited
to kin (Schapera I949: II2-II3; Needham I97I: 26-27).
It has also become evident that behaviour in Western societies need not be
limited to prohibited marriage or sexual relations among kin to have the same
meaning as legally defined incest to victims and specialists. Overt sexual activity
considered incestuous by clinicians need not be only among kin. People in
family roles, even temporarily, are considered equivalent to kin in discussions of
sexual abuse involving children and adolescents (e. g. Kempe & Kempe I978:48;
Jones & MacFarlane I980; Herman with Hirschman I98I; Goodwin I982).
Also, behaviour considered incestuous need not be genital. It can include
prolonged anal or other intimate body contact or other acts which sexually
overstimulate the immature (Orgel I934; Rado i956: I97; Litin et al. i956; Lidz
et al. i965; Shengold I967; Lewis & Sarrel I969; Masters &Johnson I976; Brant
& Tisza I977).
This article presents a view of incest which emphasises only one of its
traditional defining features: the fact ofprohibition (see also Needham I97I: 29).
The prohibition is part of the social and moral order and may express sacred
values. Therefore, incest may entail the violation of such values and the relations
of trust they entail. Such violations are likely to be associated with secrecy and
shame. Incest can constitute a category of sexual sin and sexual misdemeanour,
one in a set of'such categories (Leach I976: 75). But the set of prohibitions
defining incest need not intersect with either the set of explicitly sexual acts or
the set of explicit kinship categories. It is enough that the resonance of sex and
kinship is present in at least one of the multiple definitions of a polysemic term.
It is instructive in this respect to compare the set of offences in which Leach
places incest and the set of 'forbidden subjects' with which two clinicians
(Herman with Hirschman I98I: vii) place it. Leach examines incest in a set of
'categories of sexual sin and sexual misdemeanour-incest, bestiality,
homosexuality, rape, adultery, fornication and so on' (I976: 75). The clinicians,
both women, list incest with rape, wife-beating and child abuse. Other discus-
sions of the sexual abuse of children (Geiser I979; Rush I980) may present
father-daughter incest separately from child rape and from the sexual abuse of
boys. They also deal with other 'forbidden' activities such as child prostitution
and pornography featuring children. A comparison of these lists suggests that
there is a less than uniform cultural construction of the 'meaning' of incest
among different specialists of different attributes and background in contem-
porary Anglo-American literate societies. Even within a socio-cultural universe
I38 DOROTHY WILLNER
that could be viewed as relatively homogeneous, the common element of the

sets in which incest is bracketed is the forbidden.
Incest and child abuse

Discussing incest comparatively can pose insuperable problems of meaning and
contextualisation to an anthropologist who views incest as preeminently sym-
bolic. Not only may its meanings differ for different categories of participants
within a culture (e.g., fathers and daughters and/or fathers and sons) but they
also may be different within and between classes, ethnic groups, professions and
regions in the same complex society, and may differ across time.
For the meanings of incest can entail variable meanings of sex and gender (cf.
Ortner & Whitehead i98i), kinship and kinship category, family and domestic
group, and the forbidden, within and between societies. Cultural constructions
of sex and gender are far from homogeneous in Western cultures (Brandes I 98 I)
and probably among anthropologists as well. The meanings of age, generation,
stage of life and of relative ages, genders and relative freedom or duress of
partners in an incestuous act are also variable. Childhood as well as child abuse
can be considered cultural constructions (Aries I962; deMause I974: 40; LeVine
& LeVine I98 I).
Therefore the analysis which follows has had to be built on simplifying certain
general assumptions. One is that a common human nature underlies cultural
variability or is moulded by it. However variable their symbols, conceptualisa-
tions and categories, most people recognise the existence of sex, of two sexes
and of procreation and nurture as well as of gender; they also recognise kinship
and domestic groups, and have normative prohibitions (cf. Cucciari i98i).
Thus, wherever a concept of incest exists-that is, wherever a type of sexual
behaviour, or behaviour associated with sex, and a type of kinship behaviour, or
behaviour associated with kinship and/or the household, intersect with the
forbidden-some comparability is possible.
The degree of comparability may depend on the richness and sophistication of
the available ethnography and of legal or clinical records as well as representa-
tions in erotica, myth, folklore or whatever the contexts from which the
'meanings' of incest can be adduced. Nonetheless, it seems reasonable as well as
courteous to assume that discussions of incest in other cultures on the part of
fieldworkers have some ethnographic validity. Even where data may be thin, it
could be more valorous to use comparison in the interests ofillumination than to
be discreet and withhold.
These statements may be taken as a chart or charter which informs my effort
to hear-yet steer without foundering past-the siren of a symbolic perspective
that would preclude or chasten comparison across cultures and subcultures
without substantial knowledge of the cultural meanings of all the relevant
categories entailed. Such categories not only include sex, gender and kinship
categories, but also cultural constructs of 'biogenetic substance' as they enter
into gender and kinship categories. The issue of cultural meanings could also be
extended to variable constructions of 'nature' and 'culture' (cf. Ortner I974;
MacCormack & Strathern i980), since the incest prohibition is so intimately
DOROTHY WILLNER 139
associated with these distinctions in Levi-Strauss's theory (I969: 3-4I).

My argument does not take issue with a symbolic perspective. If anything, it
accepts this perspective and is modestly informed by the grand theories about
incest prohibitions of Freud and Levi-Strauss. Nonetheless, the data discussed
here-about incest as experienced, recorded and understood by participants,
clinicians, community members and anthropologists-deal specifically with
the violation of a prohibition, more accurately of a set of related prohibitions,
which generations of anthropologists have found in some fashion in most
known cultures. If incest prohibitions are neither uniform nor universal, they
nonetheless seem to characterise the species sufficiently to call for some attempt
at explanation that goes beyond the particularity of culturally specific construc-
tions of reality.
The explanation suggested here, derived from psychoanalytic theory and
psychoanalytically informed case studies (e.g. S. Freud I936a; I936b; I936c;
I946; Ferenczi 1949; A. Freud I954; I98I; Parsons I954; Litin et al. I956;
Shengold I967; I980; Hammer I968; Katan I973; Schwartzman I974; Peters
I976) is that incest is prohibited to reduce the trauma and psychic disruption that
sexual activity can inflict on children when it is imposed by a more adult
aggressor. The evidence from Western societies suggests that fathers, father
surrogates and older brothers impose themselves on girls with a frequency
which was documented as I.9 in a million in the ig5o's (Weinberg I955), as 8oo
to I,000 in a million in I98I after child sexual abuse was 'discovered' (Roth &
Kendrick I98I), but which also can be three in a hundred (Goodwin et al. I982)
or even one in io (Geiser I979: 46, citing Woodbury & Schwartz I97I; Yates
I982). 2
Father-daughter incest is by far the most frequent in court records as well as
clinically; close to 3,000 cases have now been documented.3 The incidence of
recorded mother-son incest is infinitesimal by comparison. Indeed, it is now
equalled in the burgeoning literature by documented cases of father-son incest
(e.g. Kaslow et al. I98I). Some two dozen cases of each have now appeared.4
The frequency of recorded sibling incest varies from fewer than a third of
father-daughter cases (Meiselman I978: 58) to less than a half.
Older siblings are assimilated to fathers in respect of the destructive effects
rape or abuse can have on small children and adolescents (Weinberg I955; Katan
I973; Groth I978; Tilelli et al. I980). However, such effects are not evident in
consensual sexual activity among children or adolescents at the same develop-
mental level (cf. A. Freud I954). The distinction between consensual sibling
sexual activity in childhood and adolescence and sexual abuse imposed by a
dominant adult appears in studies of incest in Sweden (Reimer I940: 575) and in
Northern Ireland (Lukianowicz 1972:3I0-3 i), as well as in the United States
(Finkelhor I980).
It would be easy to explain the apparent predominance of father-daughter
incest over other kinds on the principle of dominance. Fathers dominate their
daughters by virtue of relative age and generation, by virtue of male dominance
over females and by virtue of household authority. A problem with this
explanation is that sibling incest probably predominates by far over father-
daughter incest, in at least some Western societies. A recent study in the United
States (Finkelhor I979; I980) supports findings from the Kinsey-Gebhard data
140 DOROTHY WILLNER
of some decades ago that brother-sister sexual experience may be five times
more common than that between fathers and daughters (Lindzey I967). Hockett
(I973: I72) refers to twenty sibling pairs discovered living as husband and wife
in one state of the United States and, furthermore, raising children and keeping
to a middle-class life style. One couple were children of a previous sibling pair.
Consensual sibling peer relations are not likely to reach therapists or the courts.5
These findings make it clear that childhood or adolescent sibling incest between
peers is different in its meanings and consequences to participants from that
between parent and child and coercive non-peer sibling incest.
The topics of sibling incest, sibling incest taboos or their absence and the
avoidance of marriage or sexual relations among people brought up in sibling-
like situations have become highly visible during the last twenty years, particu-
larly since they figure in sociobiological theory. Focus on these topics was
spurred by the evidence of two ethnographic cases in which young adults raised
together but between whom there is no incest taboo, apparently do not wish to
marry or to engage in sexual relations.
These cases, however, are far from identical. One concerns members of Israeli
collective settlements raised together in the same children's house (Spiro I958;
Talmon I964; Shepher I97I; in press) who invariably do not marry. During
childhood, nonetheless, they engage in sexual play and there also is evidence of
sexual relations in adolescence (Kaffman I977; Cohen I978). In the other case,
Taiwanese couples wed as children and brought up in the same household under
conditions of constant physical association reject their marriages where poss-
ible. Otherwise, they have fewer children, significantly more extramarital
involvements and a much greater frequency of divorce than couples wed as
strangers after puberty (Wolf I966; I968; I970). Both cases have been taken as
evidence in support of Westermarck's theory (I926) that childhood propinquity
leads to sexual indifference or aversion.
Shepher has proposed (I97I; in press) that such avoidance and sibling incest
prohibitions also represent a human expression of negative imprinting. Chil-
dren brought up together and in close physical association until the age of six are
generally predisposed to erotic distaste for one another. Fox, in contrast,
combines Westermarck's theory with Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex
into a single theory purporting to explain sibling incest, strong sibling incest
taboos, weak sibling incest taboos or the absence of such taboos and taboo-like
behaviour in the absence of either kinship or prohibition. 'Intense physical
interaction' (sexual play which can include simulated intercourse) between
children leads to sexual excitation, its frustration, pain and, finally, sexual
aversion to one another, whereas 'propinquity' but physical separation would
lead to the 'highest incest anxiety' (Fox I980: 22-9). Hence, cultures with 'stern'
sibling incest prohibitions, those associated with 'fierce' sanctions, would be
those in which children raised together, preeminently siblings, also avoid
physical contact, whereas cultures with 'lax' sibling incest prohibitions and
sanctions or without any would be those in which children raised together
engage in intense physical interaction during childhood.
In support of his theory Fox gives not only the Israeli and Taiwanese
incest-like avoidance cases but also well-known ethnographic instances. As
DOROTHY WILLNER '4'
examples of very strong sibling incest taboos, he discusses the Trobriand

Islanders and Chiracahua Apache; and as examples of lax or absent sibling incest
taboos associated with much childhood physical contact he cites Tallensi, Pondo
and Arapesh. He refers to childhood marriage among the Arapesh and their
'muted' sexual life when adult as an analogue to the Taiwanese case. He also
introduces Tikopia where there are both strong sibling incest taboos and intense
physical interaction between siblings in childhood. Close physical association
between siblings persists into adulthood and there also is a small amount of
admitted incest, explained by informants as the outcome of propinquity. Fox
sees Tikopia as an example of 'the complexities of the Westermarck effect' (I980:
44-5).
Whatever the comparability of these cases, they make it clear that consensual
sexual activity among juvenile peers may have analogous meanings to those
who engage in it whether or not it is culturally categorised as incest. Sexual
activity among siblings in childhood occurs openly where it is not prohibited. In
contrast, consensual sexual activity among sibling peers in Western cultures is
incest. It generally is neither open nor normatively tolerated, although adult
caretakers may turn a blind eye in the case of children, and adults are hardly
likely to be under surveillance.
Moreover, consensual peer sibling sexual activity, whether or not construed
as incest, does not constitute 'child sexual abuse' as this term is currently used by
clinicians. A child is not 'being used as an object of gratification for adult sexual
needs or desires' Jones & MacFarlane I980: i). In one study (Goodwin I982: iX),
the terms 'interfamiliar sexual abuse' and 'incest' are used 'interchangeably to
mean the sexual exploitation of a child by an older person in a parental role'. The
kinship component of parent refers to role rather than genealogy, and genetic
connexion is essentially irrelevant. This definition does not apply to Western
cultures alone; the psychiatrist using it discusses cases of incest she encountered
among Navajo as well as among other populations in New Mexico.
Any familiar adult may be assimilated to kin by children and parents may
encourage this. Correspondingly, it is far from easy, at least from the clinical
records, to distinguish the negative effects of incestuous child sexual abuse at
different stages in child development from the effects of sexual abuse in which
the abuser is known to the child but is not a father or father surrogate (cf. Katan
I973; Peters I976; Tsai et al. I979; Johnson I979; Steele & Alexander I98I). It
also is far from easy to distinguish the relative effects of non-incestuous rape,
incestuous rape and non-violent incest, particularly with small children.
These facts have implications for kinship theory. If sexual abuse by a father
surrogate or familiar male is no less destructive than incest imposed by a father
or older brother, this might be an element underlying the extension of kinship
categories and incest taboos to most or all adults of small local communities in
tribal societies. Whatever else they may do, such extensions also help to protect
the children from sexual abuse by adults. If the rape or seduction of children by
those more adult is an issue with species-wide implications, this could be a
reason for a cultural rule which, in effect, prohibits child sexual abuse. More-
over, incest may influence reproduction and subsequent generations indepen-
dently of the genetic effects of inbreeding.-It is possible to infer from some of the
142 DOROTHY WILLNER
clinical literature on father-daughter incest in Western societies that children

severely damaged by incest are less likely to become parents than the population
at large. If they do become parents, they are more likely to become abusive in
their turn.
Sexual molestation and incest may be among the factors conducive to certain
kinds of homosexuality (Karpman I954: I49; Meiselman I978: 245-26i).
Incestuous problems have been viewed as part of the background of schizo-
phrenia (Glueck I963; Lidz et al. i965: 22I-35) and other psychosis (e.g.
Cavenar et al. I979) and severe disturbance (e.g. Schechter and Roberge I976).
Earlier case studies refer repeatedly to victims of incest who do not marry
(Tompkins I940; Friedlander I947:173-7; Karpman I954:429-42). More recent
ones continue to indicate that incest can lead to adult avoidance of sex (Geiser
I979: 60), although there also is greater focus on sexual malfunctioning (e.g.
Meiselman I978). Some victims explicitly state that they do not dare to become
parents (Steele & Alexander I98I: 23I, see also Boekelheide I978). For some
child victims the possibility of reproduction may be organically impaired by
gonorrhoea transmitted during sexual abuse (Wells I96I; Sgroi I975; Folland et
al. I977). Some incest victims are suicidal (e.g. Molnar & Cameron I975,
Goodwin I982).
There is also clinical evidence that sexually abused children can become
sexually abusive adults (Hammer I968), more specifically, sexually abusive
parents, or mothers who tolerate their husbands' incest with their children
(Weiner I962; Machotka et al. I967; Rapheling et al. I-967; Langsley et al. I968;
Raybin I969; Oliver & Cox 1973; Berry 1975). Indeed, Goodwin et al. (1982)
found that 24 per cent. (8 of 34) of mothers of children subjected to incest had
been themselves victims of incest. This was also the case among mothers (i6 of
66) of children who were physically abused. A history of incest has also been
found among mothers of children labelled 'hyper-active' (Ryan & Swinnerton
I980). A background of child abuse and/or sexual abuse/incest in one generation
can, apparently, lead to one or the other in subsequent generations (see also
Oliver & Cox I97s; Bernstein & Ten Bensel I977). The clinical literature does
not confirm some assertions (e.g. Fox I980: I64) that incestuous daughters are
not really victims.6
A preeminently symbolic view of incest does not preclude recognition of
current genetic theory and findings about the deleterious possible effects of
inbreeding. Incest prohibitions often seem to encompass folk theories that
'nuclear family mating' produces what one reseatcher terms 'poor stock'
(Burton I973: 504-5). Widespread beliefs that incest and inbreeding can
adversely affect those subjected to them far from incompatible with culturally
specific constructions of incest as 'desecration' (Schneider I976: I66-7). Incest
may be to inbreeding as nurture is to nature.
Incestuousfamilies and their dynamics

Both the idiom of sex (whether poetic or obscene) and sexual activity used as an
idiom make statements about relationships, the social order and the order or
disorder of families in their settings and cultural systems (cf. Wagner I972;
DOROTHY WILLNER 143
Davenport I977). Incest makes such statements, although their meanings

are not necesarily explicit among participants in Western cultures, far from
homogeneous among categories of persons involved in incest, and may be less
than homogeneous within categories. Elaborated constructions about the state-
ments incest makes in Western cultures may be found among clinicians as part of
their professional culture. Much clinical theory about incest derives from or is
informed by various versions of psychoanalytic theory.
Freud focused on incest largely in terms of childhood sexual wishes of sons in
regard to their mothers and the repression of such wishes. Whatever current
elaborations may be made of Totem and taboo (Fox I980), Freud's theory of the
Oedipus complex and of the unconscious transmission of psychic processes
from one generation to the next (Freud I938a: 329) has been clinically more
significant than his evolutionary speculations. Now it has become widely
known that Freud developed this theory, at least in part, because he could not
face the incidence of father-daughter incest revealed by his female patients
(Peters I976; Rush I980: 82-I04; Herman with Hirschman I98I: 7-9).
Psychoanalytic theory and psychiatry are far from immune from cultural
assumptions expressing male dominance (cf. Chesler I973; Chodorow I978).
Denials of the frequency of father-daughter incest, like male psychoanalysts'
discomfort about actual mother-son incest (Shengold I980), are consistent with
assumptions which legitimise male dominance. Indeed, it has only recently
become widely known that some male analysts and psychiatrists engage in
sexual relations with younger female patients (e.g. Dahlberg I970; Kardener et
al. I973), although this is normatively prohibited and constitutes 'malpractice'.
It should come as no surprise that in the eyes of the women as well as in analytic
theory, this prohibited violation of trust may have the meaning of incest (cf.
Saul I962; Chesler I974; Meiselman I978).
If much clinical theory and practice accepts cultural assumptions legitimating
male dominance, nonetheless male dominance or parental domination of chil-
dren are also part of the clinical findings. The clinical data are anthropologically
significant because they exhibit, as recognisable pathology, cultural construc-
tions that are not intrinsically alien in Western societies. What is bizarre is the
familiar gone wild, the repressed florescent. Since male dominance has only
recently been questioned in the cultures which include both incestuous families
and clinicians, the dominance and violation enacted in incestuous families make
statements about the norm in going beyond the norm. Incest violates children
and also violates conventions of nurturance and domestic authority. These are
conventions through which culture works on nature as represented in universals
of human development.
Clinical interpretations during the past fifty years have also changed, to some
extent, with changes in more general cultural constructions. These changes, as
regards sexuality but not gender, have been influenced by psychoanalytic theory
itself. If father-daughter incest has remained predominant in the cases which
reach clinicians and court, the focus of clinicians has somewhat shifted.
Much earlier theory focused on fathers who initiated sexual relations with
pubescent or near-pubescent daughters. Although it was known that younger
children could be the victims of incest, the predominant image of the incestuous
144 DOROTHY WILLNER
daughter was that of a girl who has blossomed enough to elicit a male sexual
response (cf. Weinberg I953; Maisch I972: I02 sqq.). Indeed, sexually abused
children were sometimes presented as being themselves seductive (Bender &
Blau I937; Weiss et al. 1955), a representation that has continued (e. g. Krieger et
al. I980) undoubtedly with cause (Cantwell I98I; Yates I982). However, such
characterisations do not always include the explicit recognition that some
victims accept and make the best of their fate. They can develop modes of
pleasing and propitiating those to whom they are bound or who have authority
over them; they may feel they have to protect as well as to please. The image of
the incestuous victim as nubile may have minimised the apparent relevance of
clinical findings to anthropological theory. In most societies girls are either
married on reaching puberty and separated from their fathers or else they may be
incorporated into a female or peer group which effectively limits their fathers'
access to them.
During the I960's, incestuous men were increasingly viewed in the context of
their families including their wives (e. g., Weiner I964; Henderson I972). These
wives were commonly presented in the clinical literature as defective in their
family roles: physically absent, often because of illness; sexually unavailable or
unfulfilling; seeking nurture from the daughter in a reversal of roles; 'collusive'
in the incest. Incest was discussed as a 'family affair' with clear if unstated
assumptions about proper gender roles and family relations, about what
husbands could expect and should get from wives.
Since then, concern over child abuse has led to increased focus on children,
including the siblings of those involved in incest (e.g. Berry I975; deYoung
I98I; see also Heims and Kaufman I963), and on the long-term as well as
short-term effects on victims and their families (e.g. Burgess & Holmstrom
I975; Burgess et al. I978; Browning & Boatman I977; Greenberg I977, I979;
Rosenfeld et al. I977; Boekelheide I978; Kempe I978; MacFarlane I978; Meisel-
man I978; Forward & Buck I979; Tsai etal. I979; Mrazek & Mrazek I98I; Steele
& Alexander I98I; Goodwin I982; Yates I982). Findings are far from consis-
tent, although more consensus is evident now than a decade ago. A major
dispute has consistently been the extent to which victims of incest are damaged.
With mandated child abuse reporting laws in the United States, this is now an
issue in legal and clinical 'management' decisions (cf. Weitzel et al. I978; Pascoe
I979; Rosenfeld I979; Tilelli et al. I980) and in the allocation of public funds for
treatment programmes (Giaretto I976).
If much clinical literature has expressed its own cultural assumptions,
nonetheless its findings constitute 'facts' in some measure. These facts have
enough consistency for a female psychiatrist-who has cross-cultural experi-
ence of incest victims and incestuous families-to suggest that 'a single set of
symptoms' may characterise such victims and their families. These symptoms
express damage and loss-seizures, suicide and suicide attempts, 'maternal
failure' in women who had been incest victims (Goodwin I982: I70-87). This
hypothesis is consistent, although not identical, with the approach ofthis article.
Traditional clinical theory, like traditional anthropology, contrasts incest and
exogamy. The view of incest as 'neurotic endogamy' began with Abraham
(1929) and was, in part, adopted in Weinberg's (I955) landmark sociological
DOROTHY WILLNER I45
study. The psychodynamics of the endogamous incestuous father are set forth
byJones who expands Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex to implicate three
generations.
A man who displays an abnormally strong strong affection for his daughter also gives evidence of
a strong infantile fixation in regard to his mother ... In his phantasy he begets his mother ...
becomes thus her father, and so arrives at a later identification of his real daughter with his mother
Uones 1938: 523).
Jones's insight is borne out by findings from a series of case studies which began
to accumulate during the I960's. They document disturbed people and dis-
rupted family relations in the natal families of the parents of incest victims.
Incest occurs as aberrant parents rearrange the disorder they experienced as
children and add another element to the disturbance they transmit. The trans-
mission of incest itself between generations is being increasingly documented.
The first such case study (Kaufman etal. I954) was based on an examination of
the family relationships of eleven girls referred to a clinic in Boston, all of them
suffering from depression, guilt and other problems after incestuous relations
with fathers, step-fathers, foster fathers and, in several cases, a grandfather or
brother as well. These relations had begun when the girls were between 6 and I4
years old. Both the mothers and fathers of these girls turned out to have had a
history of desertion. The mothers, who withdrew from husband and daughter,
leaving the latter to assume the maternal role, had been deserted by their fathers
and rejected by their own mothers. The fathers had also been rejected and many
were alcoholic. The men's wives were involved in the situation in which the
incest occurred. One mother, for example, went to sleep in another room and
put 'her daughter in bed with her husband 'out of concern that he would be
lonely' (Kaufman et al. I956: 276). The paper presents all members of the nuclear
family as searching for a mother figure.
The facilitating role of the mother in father-daughter incest has been stressed
in other publications (e. g. Lustig et al. I966). Alcoholism as a factor in incest has
also been emphasised, especially in several studies in Europe (Schachter & Cotte
I960; Virkkunen I974).
A somewhat different scenario of the incestuous endogamous father and his
family relations is based on studies of the men involved in twenty-seven cases of
father-daughter incest occurring in Quebec (Cormier etal. I962). These men are
characterised as authoritarian heads of homes who became caricatures of
adolescents as their pubescent daughters developed. According to the authors,
the daughter became the substitute for the wife, not the actual wife but the wife
the incestuous father had courted in youth. He, himself, became a young man
again and viewed his own wife as the forbidding mother, whereas the daughter
not only had become the young wife but also the all-giving mother he had
sought when he married. 'In taking the daughter, therefore, he is at last able to
possess the mother he felt was denied to him in his childhood, and whom he can
take because he is now powerful' (Cormier et al. I962: 2I2).
Other clinicians offer variations on these interpretations. Rhinehart (I96I)
stresses role reversal between mother and daughter as a factor in father-daughter
incest. He also discusses a case in which a mother apparently used her daughter
I46 DOROTHY WILLNER
to enact a wish to give herself to her own father (see Pincus & Dare I978: 84-8).
Weiner (I962) stresses the disturbed relations men had in their families of origin,
particularly with their own fathers. His case material concerns five middle-class
men and their families in Rochester, New York; multiple incest occurred in two
of these families, in one case involving a son as well as a daughter. In discussing
twelve cases of father-daughter incest in Kansas, Cavallin (I966) adds that the
fathers of his sample, in committing incest, express an old hostility towards
their mothers as well as displaced Oedipal striving.
Rapheling et al. (I967) document three generations of incestuous relations,
brother-sister and mother-son incest, as well as father-daughter. Their case is
that of a man who observed and engaged in incestuous relations in his family of
origin and then practised them with and encouraged them among his own
children. Cases of multigenerational incest, including multigenerational
homosexual incest (Raybin I969), have multiplied in the records since then (e. g.
Miller & Mansfield I98I). One multigenerational incestuous family in England
included members considered mentally defective in childhood but really suffer-
ing from child abuse and neglect (Oliver & Cox I973).
Incest not only results from and expresses psychological disturbance and
disturbed family relations, according to these interpretations (cf. also Hersko et
al. I96I; Heims & Kaufman I963; Eist & Mandel I968; Maisch I972;
Bogopolsky & Cormier I979). It can also serve to bind together the members of
a disturbed family, however great the disturbance. In six cases of father-
daughter incest in the United States military (Lustig et al. I966), both parents
were characterised as coming from backgrounds of emotional deprivation and
desertion. The incestuous relationships are presented as a means of preserving
the families whatever the cost. Machotka et al. (I967) characterise incest 'as a
family affair' in which the non-participating members actively deny the incest
and thereby crystallise the family relations in which it occurs. Denial of a
violation helps maintain the climate which stimulates it. Gutheil & Avery (I977)
discuss how incest between a father and several of his daughters occurred as a
'family defense against loss'.
The notion of endogamy and the psychodynamics associated with it are
included in several recent classifications: clinicians working with scores to
hundreds of cases have used recurrent differences in fathers and family constella-
tions as a basis for classifying types of personal and familial disorder. The incest
taboo can apparently be broken when a father is driven by pressures he cannot or
does not wish to control. The source and nature of these pressures may vary but
incestuous parents seek nurture where they owe it.
Meiselman (I978: I09-Ii) restricts the term 'endogamous' to fathers in her
sample of thirty-eight father-daughter or stepfather-stepdaughter cases of a
total of fifty-eight cases of incest. She applies it to two distinctive sub-categories:
fathers with a personality disorder, such as those discussed above, and fathers
from an isolated subculture with some tolerance for incest, such as Riemer's
Swedish cases or the Tobacco Road stereotype in the United States. Her other
categories include: psychopathic fathers, who had a criminal history, were
sexually promiscuous and had little emotional attachment to their daughters;
psychotic fathers; drunken fathers; paedophiliac fathers; mentally defective
DOROTHY WILLNER 147
fathers; and fathers among whom incest was situational, occurring only during a
period of high stress.
Summit & Kryso (I978) approach incest from the perspective of child abuse.
Building on previous theory, they state that sexually abusive parents share two
characteristics: lack of impulse control, and confusion of roles, with the child
regarded as an object for adult needs (I978: 239). They also see these characteris-
tics as general features of child abuse. They set forth a 'spectrum of parent-child
sexuality' with twelve categories, four of them 'endogamous'. Although Sum-
mit & Kryso allude to dozens of patients and eleven years of psychiatric
community consultation in Los Angeles, they generalise from their case mate-
rial rather than use it to illustrate their categories or indicate the relative
frequency of each type of incest they distinguish.
Justice &Justice (I979), also writing from the perspective of child abuse, base
their study on a survey of I I2 families in the Houston area among whom twenty
parents were their patients. They begin their book with a discussion of intimate
physical contact which they consider incestuous. They, too, see incest as
disrupting family roles, whereas the incest taboo protects children's dependency
needs. In their classification of incestuous fathers, they do not use the category
endogamous but, instead, refer to the largest group of fathers-over 8o per cent.
according to their estimate-as 'symbiotic personalities'. This category empha-
sises features discussed above: role reversal, the fathers' need for intimacy and
inability to express this need, fixation on their own mothers and lack of
identification with their fathers. Justice &Justice's other categories are: 'psycho-
pathic personalities', who use sex, including sex with their children, to act out
aggressiveness and hostility; 'paedophiliac 'personalities'; and 'other types',
which include both psychotic fathers and those, the rural and mountain folk,
whose culture allows incest. Within their category 'symbiotic personalities',
Justice &Justice draw further subdivisions, based on the same pool of concepts
and theories as those already reviewed.
Another body of current literature, with a clinical base of 'over ioo people'
(Rosenfeld I979a: 406), also employs the concept 'endogamic incest', suggests
that incestuous relationships are a 'distorted search for caring and warmth'
(Rosenfeld et al. I977: 33 i) and makes the clinical judgement that participants in
incest suffer from abandonment anxieties and use sex in their search for nurture.
It may not be irrelevant to quote here, from another source (Ortiz y Pino &
Goodwin I982: 62), another victim (in the seven-to-ten-year old age range):
'Once I told my dad I didn't like him; he went up to his room and cried all night'.
Whatever the dynamics of father-daughter incest from the perspective of the
fathers and of clinicians looking at families, it is the daughters who are subject to
it. In the violation of a prohibition, incest violates them. This is made clear in the
confessional literature by daughters as well as in clinical literature presented
from the daughters' perspective (e.g. Herman with Hirschman I98I). As
experienced by the daughters, father-daughter incest generally involves notjust
'role reversal' but also betrayal of trust (cf. Forward & Buck I978; Tsai &
Wagner I978). The betrayal is compounded by the secrecy enjoined on the
daughters and the power of such secrets to bind their lives. Although some
daughters suffering from great maternal deprivation may find gratification in
I48 DOROTHY WILLNER
their fathers' advances and attention (cf. Rascovsky & Rascovsky I95o; Kauf-
man et al. I954; Rhineheart I96I; Bigras et al. I966), nonetheless, they generally
suffer from depression (cf. also Johnson I979; Goodwin I982) and feelings of
guilt as well (cf. also Topper I979).
However, this does not seem to be always the case. There are exceptions
which seem to prove the rule, if it is taken as a rule, that incest is preeminently
prohibited behaviour. For children subjected to father-daughter or even
mother-son sexual relations may suffer little anxiety or guilt as a result, if
parents themselves do not feel guilt about it or prohibit it. Barry & Johnson
(I958) cite the case of a son who, at the age of 23, seemed quite normal to the
psychiatrist to whom he mentioned having had sexual relations with his
mother. He lived in an isolated Kentucky mountain community and his father
was mostly absent. He also had been told by the family physician to take his
father's place 'in every way' (I958: 492). Even before the very recent con-
troversy over whether incest always devastates a child or adolescent subjected to
it (Ramey I979; DeMott I980; Herman with Hirschman I98I: 22-35), some
clinical studies suggested that severe damage was not invariable (e. g. Yorukoglu
& Kemph I966).
The absence of a known prohibition and of a concomitant bond of secrecy (cf.
Burgess & Holmstrom I975) may be key factors modifying negative effects on
youngsters of incest as legally defined. However, incest is not a homogeneous
phenomenon in Western societies nor are the attributes of those participating in
incest homogeneous. Variable factors (cf. Mrazek & Mrazek I98i) include
degree of coercion employed, age of child, type of contact and duration of the
incestuous component of the relationship and ofits emotional quality. There are
also variables about fathers and family constellations dwelt on in the typologies
mentioned above.
Types of incest other than father-daughter (or sibling peer) may be more
blatantly associated with individual or family pathology, although a reservation
must be made. These are the cases which come to the attention of clinicians.
Until I960, mother-son incest was considered so rare that a psychiatrist
(Wahl I960) assumed that it must lead to psychosis in the son and described two
cases in which this was so. 'Mother-son incest', stated Cohen (I964: I80)
'almost always and automatically suggests the presence of psychosis in one or
both persons involved (at least in Western society)'. It has become evident that
this need not be the case (cf. Barry &Johnson I958; Lukianowicz I972:309). The
more recent literature continues to indicate that consummated mother-son
incest is very rare. It also is considered unlikely to occur without damaging the
son (cf. Meiselman I978: 306-3II; Forward & Buck I978: 73-82), although
evidence to the contrary continues to be noted (Armstrong I978: 264; Catanza-
rite & Combs I980; Shengold I980).
Father-son incest, also rare but increasingly reported (e.g. Dixon et al. I978;
Kaslow et al. I98i), may also be transmitted from generation to generation
(Raybin I969). It also is considered the most devastating form of incest in its
effects on the young person subjected to it. From the perspective of this article,
the reason for such devastation should be clear: father-son incest violates a
double prohibition, on homosexuality as well as on incest (see Cory I963; Groth
DOROTHY WILLNER I49
I978; Nasjleti I980; Kaslow et al. I98I). It destroys the image of the father as a
model to emulate. In addition, sons must keep the secret of their fathers'
homosexuality as well as of the incest; and they may have been subjected to rape
as well. Such incest in Western societies is a multiple betrayal of the sons (Butler
I979: I9-24; Forward & Buck I979: I33-43).
Mother-daughter incest, the least documented of all (Forward & Buck I979:
II7-I3I; Goodwin & DiVasto I982), apparently shares characteristics of both
father-daughter and mother-son incest in that the parent is not nurturing but
rather seeks nurturance from the child. Homosexuality as well as depression,
psychosis and other symptoms have been observed in daughters subjected to
mother-daughter incest or the analogous relationship with an older sister
(Kaslow et al. I98i). Despite culturally permitted physical closeness between
mothers and daughters, not allowed to fathers and sons, the occurrence of incest
seems to affect daughters in ways not dissimlar to the effects on sons of paternal
incest (Goodwin & DiVasto I982: I2I).
In contrast to these clinical data, ethnography presents a case of two-
generation multiple family incest which does not have the dynamics discussed
above and which was not self-perpetuating. A family became incestuous in
Green Fields, an English-speaking Black and White island off South America
which appears from Wilson's article (I963) as a small-scale off-shoot of Western
society. The European primary and secondary incest prohibitions were accepted
in the society and the existence of school and fundamentalist churches are
mentioned. However, for almost thirty years, four sisters, three of whom had
developed venereal disease from sexual hospitality to visiting sailors, and their
three brothers were ostracised. Their father had arranged the hospitality; the
brothers had contributed to the sailors' comfort. Outrage in the society turned
into ostracism when the fact of venereal disease became known. The brothers
and sisters then had sexual relations with each other and their sons had sexual
relations with their mothers anid sisters.
The adult females were both sociological fathers and generalised mothers.
Given the matrifocal households common in the area, this was not an uncom-
mon situation. The children who resulted from the incestuous unions (or from
contacts with men outside the family which the women began to have after
some time) regarded all the adults of the family as parents. Household arrange-
ments came to include a communal kitchen and other huts. Wilson considers the
children to have been appropriately enough socialised to be able to take a place in
the larger society when, after many years, this became possible. It was the men,
brothers and grown sons, who seemed to suffer most from the ostracism and
limited sexual access to even the women of the family. They admitted to
engaging in bestiality and homosexuality; they became drunk whenever they
could afford it and were physically aggressive when drunk. The passage of time,
and the building of a road and light industry, providing jobs for the men,
eventually brought the family back into the larger society.
Wilson (I963: 200-I) presents this as evidence that there is not 'a universal
abhorrence of incest'. He also sees it as evidence that family members are the
most available people with whom to mate in the absence of a rule prohibiting it.
It would appear that ostracism led to a disordered family-more disordered
ISO 5DOROTHY WILLNER
than previously-in which incest prohibitions were violated. But this was not
an incestuous family in its dynamics.
A comparative perspective
Discussions of incest in non-Western societies or in settings which reach neither
clinic nor court are rare. Therefore, comparison informed by a symbolic
perspective may have to begin with sets of categories from within Western
cultures and examine the transformations to which they can be subject in
different contexts. To revert to the set of offences within which Leach brackets
incest and the list within which it is placed by the feminist clinicians, the one
item they share besides incest is rape.
However, it hardly needs emphasis in this decade that rape is a statement
about relative power and domination (cf. Brownmiller I976) as well as a
'category of sexual sin' (Leach I976: 75). Indeed, a woman may be raped as a
statement about the relative power of the rapist and another man or men-her
husband, father, brother or a category of people to whom she belongs.
Homosexual rape occurs in Western societies in prisons as well as to children;
and when it is inflicted on children, it may be incestuous as well.
Rape not only violates people physically and psychologically; it also can inflict
a demeaning change of category on them. A raped male in an Alabama prison
became a 'gal-boy' some forty years ago (Brownmiller I976: 288). In earlier
decades rape deflowered and defiled an erstwhile virgin (cf. also Mehta et al.
I979). Similarly, non-consensual non-peer incest also may be considered,
among other things, a statement about relative power and domination. Those
victimised by it experience a change in self-categorisation, as confessional
accounts make evident. If detected, all involved in incest are exposed to public
stigma.
From a clinical perspective, rape, incest and homosexuality can convert into
one another or lead from one to another (cf. Myers I982). Such transformations
can extend to bestiality as well. At least one case has been recorded (Schneck
I974) in which a beloved mare, was equated in fantasy to the patient's mother.
Victims of incest can see themselves or be seen as 'rat people' (Shengold I967).
Animal categories can intersect with sexual abuse.
However, in the absence of comparable comparative data, it is difficult to
extend the insights about the meanings of incest in Western cultures to other
cultures or to hypotheses about a common human nature. In the history of
anthropology, the most relevant body of literature may be that stemming from
Malinowski's famous transposition of Freud's Oedipus complex into a dif-
ferently patterned 'nuclear complex' to be found in matrilineal systems. Taking
issue with Freud about the universality of the Oedipus complex, Malinowski
(I927) suggested that in the Trobriand Islands the mother's brother is the target
of a boy's repressed hostility, and his sister is the object of his incestuous desires.
'The nuclear complex of the family . . . must vary with the constitution of the
family' (I927: 4). Whatever the contribution of Malinowski's findings to
cross-cultural theory about sibling incest (Fox I962; I980), his theories have had
other continuities in anthropological thought.
DOROTHY WILLNER i5i
One set of continuities deals with kinship and descent in societies with
unilineal descent groups (Goody I956; Schneider I96I). Goody, for example,
contrasts the relative significance of adultery and incest in patrilineal and
matrilineal systems. It would appear that the cultural construction of incest can
vary with-be 'transformed' by-the relative procreative significance a cate-
gory of women-'wives' and 'sisters'-have in maintaining a descent group.
The other set of continuities involves Malinowski's 'nuclear complex' con-
cept which need not be linked to matriliny nor, indeed, go beyond the European
world. The concept of a nuclear complex was brought forward again by Parsons
(I969) in relation to southern Italy and much of the Mediterranean and Latin
world. Acknowledging the Trobriand case, Parsons suggested that a third
nuclear complex exists in Mediterranean regions where the nurturing mother-
dependent son tie remains very important into adulthood. Its erotic component
is sublimated into devotion to the Madonna, the asexual virgin mother.
Complementing the mother-son relationship is that between father and daugh-
ter in which the erotic incestuous tie is close to the surface.
More recently, a psychiatrist found a nuclear complex among the matrilineal,
matrilocal Navajo (Proskauer I980). The Navajo male authority figure may be
the maternal grandfather, in contrast to the mother's brother among the
Trobriand Islanders. Furthermore, repressed brother-sister incest wishes are
seen by Proskauer as an expression of the desire to keep the extended family
together, to avoid separation and maintain emotional interdependence. Not
only are the Navajo much studied by anthropologists but they also are a people
among whom psychiatrists have worked and have encountered cases of incest.
Navajo beliefs about incest associate it with seizures and witchcraft. Both
Proskauer and Goodwin et al. (I979) encountered women suffering from
epileptic and hysterical seizures who had also been involved in incestuous
relations. Schechter and Roberge (I976: I38) mention the case of an Indian boy
who suffered a seizure after hearing a sermon against incest in which he had
engaged with his sister.
Looking beyond these cases, Goodwin et al. (I979) suggest that the Navajo
belief that incest causes epilepsy represents a valid psychological insight.
Goodwin (I982: I69-i86) has extended the list of symptoms (problems)
clinicians encounter in treating incest victims to include suicide, flight and
maternal incapacity; and she further hypothesises that these symptoms recur
across cultures. Navajo myth about incest itself expresses the desire for parents
and children to remain together. Proskauer quotes the origin myth of the Moth
Way ceremony to support his view that repressed incest wishes in Navajo
culture represent the fear of object loss, the wish for interdependent clan
members to remain together.
Interpretations of incest as a 'family defense against loss' (Gutheil & Avery
I977) or as a 'family group survival pattern' (Lustig et al. I966) are not confined
to 'clan culture' (Proskauer I980). They recur in the clinical literature and can
extend to the cases referred to by clinicians as 'endogamous' and 'symbiotic'.
Incest has also been seen as 'safeguarding the family' (Magal & Winnick I968)
among immigrants from Morocco in Israel as well as among native Israelis and
immigrants from Russia. Goodwin turns to Western mythology, to the Oedi-
152 DOROTHY WILLNER
pus myth and others, and to other mythic traditions, in a more venturesome
exploration of myth and symbol than is attempted here to explain how incest
can serve as a defence against loss.
It would appear that beliefs or diagnoses which are explicit in one culture can
be part of the range of experience in another, of experience which is not
explicitly conceptualised. Thus, it was noted above that children or adolescents
subjected to incest in Western societies may be less prone to marry or to raise
children than the general population. In appropriating their children's sexuality,
incestuous parents can also appropriate their psychological and social space (cf.
Cohen I964; Schwartzman I974). Nonetheless, this is not part of the explicit
mythological and belief system of Western cultures, unless the myths of
Oedipus and Antigone be interpreted in this light (cf. Willner I982).
Appropriation of life space is, however, given recognition by the Mohave.
Using case material and the words of informants, Devereux (I939: 572) writes:
When the Mohave see relatives 'go together' they say, 'It is a sure sign that the family will die out'
. . . 'It is Fate that wipes families out, not the Gods. They commit incest because they are going to
die out.'
In another of the few ethnographic articles which includes case material about
incest as well as discussions of incest prohibitions, Schapera (I949) describes the
Tswana belief that botlhodi, one meaning of which is incest, predicts evil. A
person engaging in it causes his relatives to die.
Although Brain (I977) has linked sex, incest and death in an imaginative
article on initiation rites,7 an explicit link between death and incest appears only
in some cultures. In others, such as our own, this explicit link is lacking.
Nonetheless, suicide and attempted suicide as well as depression and psychosis
are found among victims ofincest and their families. In still other cultures, incest
is not seen as leading to severe consequences. In Bellona, a Polynesian outlier
island in the Solomons, incest is no worse than 'ungrammatical' (Monberg
I976). In Samoa it is 'deplorable behavior' (Shore I976).
It would appear that cultural constructions of incest associate it with a variable
freight of life's fears, sorrows, and of myth and belief about them. Here we have
concentrated on the intersection of the domain of incest and nurturance and
dominance in domestic groups. Children in Western societies apparently can
undergo intergenerational incestuous seduction without experiencing direct
genital stimulation and without the seducer being a parent or other sexually
prohibited relative. Incest, psychologically experienced, need not be incest as
culturally defined. Incest as culturally defined elsewhere need not entail sexual
behaviour (Huntsman & Hooper I976). Conversely, mating between primary
kin is not incest where it is not defined as such. Intersections of cultural
constructions of incest with other more or less grievous cultural constructions,
such as witchcraft, lie beyond the scope of this article.
NOTES
Research on child abuse was aided by a grant (no. 3322) from the Wenner-
Anthropological Research. Oswald Werner and the Northwestern University Department of
Anthropology kindly provided hospitality during the final revision of this article.
DOROTHY WILLNER
I Middleton (I962) discusses father-daughter marriage among Egyptian kings during the
Pharaonic period as well as brother-sister marriage among both kings and commoners during later
periods. Marriage was allowed in classical Greece between paternal, although not maternal, brother
and sister (Lacey I967: I06). Such marriages were also permitted, at least according to the Talmud,
among the ancient Hebrews prior to the Levitical laws (Epstein I942: 222-3). Marriages were
allowed between all nuclear family categories in ancient Iran (Slotkin I947), at least among the Magi,
and also among Mormons until this was outlawed by the Utah legislature (Schroeder I9I5).
2 Until the last few years, estimates as to the frequency of incest in contemporary society were
only shadows of an obscure and clouded universe. In part, this was because much of the literature
was based on criminal court records or clinicians' reports of court-referred cases. Until the very
recent mandated reporting of child sexual abuse in the United States, it was known that criminal
court records represented only a small fraction of consummated incest (cf. Weinberg i955: 36-7,
Weiner I964: I37-9). Moreover, it was a fraction peopled conspicuously, although far from
exclusively, by the poor and disorganised. Three much cited studies, one of 203 cases in the United
States (Weinberg I95 5:36-7), one of 96 cases in France (Szabo I962), and one of 78 cases in Germany
(Maisch I972), drew their samples from court records. A recent study of 305 cases from Sweden
(Alstrom I977) used criminal psychiatric archives. Even current studies based on child abuse
treatment programmes in the United States (e.g. Greenberg 1979) generalise from a universe of
legally prohibited detected behaviour. However, the clinical and biographical literatures indicate
that far more incest occurs-perhaps as much as nine times more (Nakashima & Zakus I979)-than
ever is revealed except, years or decades later, to a therapist or researcher. Such cases are distributed
throughout the population. This is consistent with earlier surveys, carried out by Kinsey and his
collaborators, which indicated that one in i6 of the 8,ooo white, middle-class women interviewed
had, as children, experienced sexual contact with an adult relative (Kinsey et al. I953: II6-I22,
summarised in Herman & Hirschman I977: 736).
3 As of the late i960's, I,025 cases of incest had been found by Bagley (I969) in the literature; his
article gives a classification of types but not of frequencies of the different kinds of incest reported. A
review of the literature carried out a few years later (cf. Willner I975) elicited over i, I00 cases of
father-daughter incest, as compared to some 200 cases of brother-sister incest, seventeen cases of
mother-son incest, six cases of mother-daughter incest, four cases of fraternal incest, and two
references to sororal incest. Multiple incestuous relations occurred within a family in a minority of
cases. In the burgeoning literature which has appeared since then, father-daughter incest has
retained its preponderance.
4 Herman with Hirschman report finding only 22 cases of mother-son incest in the clinical
literature, with another eight cases noted in which an adolescent or adult son forced the mother
(I98I: I8). Kaslow et al. (I98I) review literature on homosexual incest. Articles which have
appeared since then add additional cases (e.g. Yates I982).
5 An exception to this may be consensual homosexual sibling incest which seems shadowed by
deep disturbance and suicide (e. g., Kaslow et al. I98I; Myers I982).
6 In addition to other negative probable consequences of incest, it should be noted that it may
reach a frequency of over 25 per cent. in the history of runaway adolescents and prostitutes (e.g.,
James & Meyerding I977, see also Flugel I926).
7 Brain's article also suggests that the domain of individual fantasy or myth in one society can be
part of the range of culture in another in regard to more than incest. Discussing Bettelheim's material
(I954) on the development of rituals among disturbed young people in Chicago, Brain indicates
(I977: I94-5) that their rituals had elements analogous to those institutionalised in the initiation rites
of such people as the Gisu and the Wogeo.
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Definition and Violation: Incest and the Incest Taboos

Author(s): Dorothy Willner

more'. Confessional accounts add substantial detail about incest experienced by

Incest: the violation of a prohibition

that could be viewed as relatively homogeneous, the common element of the

Incest and child abuse

associated with these distinctions in Levi-Strauss's theory (I969: 3-4I).

examples of very strong sibling incest taboos, he discusses the Trobriand

clinical literature on father-daughter incest in Western societies that children

Incestuousfamilies and their dynamics

Davenport I977). Incest makes such statements, although their meanings

Adams, M. S. &J. V. Neel I967. Children of incest. Pediatrics 40, 5 5-62.

Aries, P. I962. Centuries of childhood: a socia

Davenport, W. H. I977. Sex in cross-cultural perspective. In Human sexu

, et al. i982. Physical and sexual abus

Szabo, D. I962. Problemes de socialization et integration socio-culturelles: contribution

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