"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

None of the postwar psychoanalysts stated why they chose to investigate father-daughter incest. The "sex crime panic" of the postwar period, as Estelle Freedman has shown, inspired many social scientists to study the problem of "sex psychopaths," and interest in father-daughter incest might have been inspired by the frequent and electrifying headlines in the national media about pedophiles and sexual predators. (43) But perhaps a better way to understand interest in father-daughter incest in particular (which did not garner attention in the white, mainstream media) is to examine the questions and ideas that animated the case histories themselves. For whatever appealed to psychoanalysts about the subject, the studies of incest that appeared in the nineteen forties and fifties were firmly rooted in postwar formulations of female adolescence (as opposed to ideas about adult male sexuality). Psychoanalysts unanimously believed that in order to understand father-daughter incest, one had to look at the way in which girls experienced the return of Oedipal drives at puberty. Female Oedipal desire became a way of understanding, coming to terms with, and in some striking cases, even normalizing behavior that violated what Freud termed "the horror of incest." (44)

Though Freud speculated on the role of the incest prohibition in the founding of early human culture in Totem and Taboo (1913), the problem of actual incest, particularly father-daughter incest, became somewhat of a moot point within psychoanalytic thought when, as the now familiar story goes, he rejected the "seduction theory" at the turn of the century. In 1896, at the beginning of his career, Freud published "The Aetiology of Hysteria," an article linking hysteria in adult women to memories of "sexual seduction" or "premature sexual experiences" in childhood. (45) But a few years later he began to question this theory, claiming that a "disproportionately large" number of women had reported childhood sexual abuse, and thus that much of what he had been hearing must have been "falsifications" of experience. (46) He perceived in these fabrications the traces of childhood fantasy; and it was on this fundamental insight that he based his theory of the Oedipus complex. He then proceeded to reject the theory of childhood sexual seduction, replacing it with the idea that reports of sexual abuse grew out of the fact of universal childhood incestuous fantasy. This change in outlook contributed to an emphasis in early years of the psychoanalytic movement on the nature of fantasy, as opposed to the impact of actual trauma, or "childhood experiences," sexual or otherwise, on the human psyche. (47) It is in part Freud's famous "rejection of the seduction theory"--his conclusion that memories of childhood sexual seduction, particularly incestuous seduction, were based upon childhood fantasy--that has led historians to see a similar process at work in the interpretation of incest in the nineteen forties and fifties.