"Acting out the Oedipal wish": father-daughter incest and the sexuality of adolescent girls in the United States, 1941-1965

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2005 by Rachel Devlin

American psychoanalysts were open to the idea of what they called the "acting out of the Oedipal wish"--on the part of adolescent girls--in the nineteen forties and fifties for several reasons. First, it was during the postwar period that psychoanalysts began to apply themselves to the study of adolescence in general, and the social and sexual problems of teenage girls in particular. With the onset of World War II psychoanalysts became increasingly troubled by changes they were seeing in girls' behavior. Rising rates of female adolescent juvenile delinquency, the advent of "youth culture," and, not least of all the perception that paternal authority was on the wane influenced the case studies of practicing psychotherapists. In the social and sexual problems of adolescent girls, the most prominent postwar authorities on female adolescence--Helene Deutsch, Phyllis Greenacre, and Peter Blos--perceived what they thought was an alarming number of cases of Oedipal dysfunction. While in boys the Oedipus complex made only a momentary appearance at puberty, in girls the adolescent Oedipal situation was believed to be of profound complexity and psychic intensity. Hence the case histories of adolescent girls during this period are replete with Oedipal longing, frustration, conflict, and disappointment. (11)

Another reason why psychoanalysts were interested in the female Oedipus complex was because a girl's re-discovered affection for her father at puberty was believed to be an avenue of escape from her preoedipal attachment to her mother--an attachment that was increasingly perceived to be overly intense, emotionally threatening, and potentially dangerous as girls entered into adolescence. Anxieties about the impact of mothers on children were particularly acute in the United States, where David Levy's ideas about "maternal overprotection" (first published in 1943) were widely influential and studies on the impact of mothers--the "cold" mother, the "rejecting mother" and the "seductive mother"--were ascendant. (12) The advent of the peculiarly American problem of "momism"--as it was described both within the social sciences and popular culture--was part of a larger cultural attack, as Rebecca Plant has recently shown, on the idealization of motherhood that began during the interwar years. The glorification of maternal self-sacrifice, the traditional social status accorded middle-aged mothers, and even the sanctity of the mother-child bond underwent dramatic and often scathing assault in the nineteen forties. It was an attack set in motion, at least in part, by the repudiation of sentimentality itself inherent in the rising cultural power of the social sciences. (13) Psychoanalysts, then, tended to see father-daughter incest in terms that were overshadowed by larger fears of neuroses caused by "too much" mothering. When viewed, as it was, relative to the danger that the mother presented, any activity with the father--including sex--was perceived to be somewhat benign.