"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

Judges did not, as a matter of course, reveal what lead them to believe the complaining witness, though several did admit the difficulty of adjudicating cases in which the only evidence was the testimony of the complainant. One judge summed up a case tried in 1953 saying, "it is true that the case hinges on the testimony of one witness and that there is no corroboration of that witness, [however] the court is of the opinion that she was telling the truth, and the court has no reasonable doubt of the truth of her story and hence, the court has no reasonable doubt of the guilt of the defendant and there will be a finding of guilty here." (38) Judges were allowed to base a conviction on the uncorroborated statement of the complaining witness, as one judge put it, "providing it is of such a nature that it is convincing." (39) In an attempt to provide such testimony, attorneys had to provide every detail of sexual abuse that occurred on a specific date, at a given time, in a stated location. One particularly violent story, recited by a fourteen year old girl, was elicited by an attorney:

  "... I jumped off the couch and then he pulled me back and hit me in
  the forehead with his fist. And then I start hollering and running
  around the room. But then, he hit me in the chest with his fist and
  then he hit me in the stomach ... and then I ran, I got to the window
  and he stopped me and he said that if I didn't shut up that he was
  going to push me out ... and then he said he was going to do it to me,
  if he had to kill me ..." (40)

It is likely that the graphic nature of such testimony affected judges; hence the sureness with which some of them disposed of the cases before them.

The dispatch with which these judges handled their individual cases, however, needs to be considered in light of the difficulty that most girls faced in attempting to bring charges into court in the first place. Moreover, prosecutions for incest were still rare when compared to what other statistical findings tell us about the frequency of father-daughter incest during the postwar period. (41) Social workers, as we shall see, did not encourage girls to bring their claims forward, and encounters with juvenile clinics or psychiatric social workers could be a girl's only contact with figures of authority outside of her family. However, these cases show us that the state did indeed have an interest in prosecuting father-daughter incest rather than simply denying or ignoring it; that there were reasons apparent to judges to err on the side of believing girls over and above those adults who had custody over them; that, in fact, many judges had sympathy for girls who claimed incestuous abuse; and, finally, that Freudian notions of Oedipal desire and "wishful" fantasy did not lead all judges and social workers to deny girls' claims of incest. The effects of ideas about the Oedipus complex were more subtle, more complex, and far more insidious.

Incest and the Adolescent Oedipus Complex

While prosecutions for incest remained constant, and Kinsey's surprising statistics on father-daughter incest did not seem to have much effect on the general public or on criminologists, one group of thinkers did begin to pursue father-daughter incest more seriously than they had before: psychoanalysts. Within psychoanalysis a sustained, singular attention to case histories of father-daughter incest represented a departure in the priorities and interests of the field. (42) Though a few analysts considered cases of father-daughter incest before 1940, they did so only within the context of general inquires into the sexual experiences of children with adults. Prewar case histories, moreover, mostly involved girls below the age of ten. In all of the cases published between 1940 and 1965, in contrast, authors concentrated on incestuous encounters that occurred during the "prepuberty" and adolescent stages, from the ages of ten through eighteen.