"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

Given the importance of incestuous fantasy (as opposed to experience), it is all the more striking that psychoanalysts began to take up the question of what they somewhat redundantly called "consummated incest" (actual incest as opposed to the "incest wish") at this time--a moment when Freudian orthodoxy was ascendant. (48) The difficulty of addressing the topic can be felt in the air of defensiveness that pervaded some of the earlier analyses, which went to some length to prove that the cases under review were "not all fantasy." (49) The anxiety was justified. One group of authors, presenting a study of eleven cases of father-daughter incest at the annual meeting of Orthopsychiatry in 1953, was sharply criticized by a respondent who began her comments with the observation, "most of us have trained ourselves to skepticism toward the claims of young girls who maintain that they have been seduced by their fathers, since we recognize the strength and reality value such fantasies can assume particularly in adolescence." Hence it was unfortunate, she continued, that the authors "say little about the evidence on which they base their impression that incest actually occurred." (50) This criticism was put forward, it should be noted, with the knowledge that half the fathers in the study were already serving time in jail, having been tried and convicted of incest in a criminal court.

This kind of critique, however, was rare, and, more importantly, missed the point of these analyses, which did not seek to discredit the notion of adolescent incestuous fantasy so much as to re-interpret its effects in a new way. They did so by describing incest as an event that grew out of, rather than negated, the fact of female adolescent Oedipal fantasy. According to psychoanalysts studying father-daughter incest during and after World War II, instances where sex occurred between a father and daughter represented a less common, albeit more powerful, trajectory of Oedipal desire: the transformation of fantasy into reality, rather than the transformation of fantasy into falsification. Hence in these case histories incest was referred to as "acting out of the Oedipal wish" or "manifest Oedipal behavior," designations that located the genesis and trajectory of incest firmly within the developmental fantasies and desires of the adolescent girl herself. (51) In a sense, these authors were trying to show that fabrication and consummation were not mutually exclusive possibilities--at least when it came to the question of the adolescent Oedipal imagination. Whether girls fabricated incestuous sex, or incestuous sex actually occurred, an Oedipal desire was transformed into an act: in one case it was transformed into "pseudologia" or a lie, through the act of speech, in the other, it was consciously pursued through sexual "acting out." (52) These girls, according to this postwar perspective, had managed to take their incestuous fantasies and transform them into a conscious, deliberate forms of experience.