Sibling incest, madness, and the "Jews"

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Sander L. Gilman

How does one organize the categories that we call "deviance"? To examine the nosology of the deviant in modern (post-Enlightenment) culture one is constrained to use categories of analysis that arise in the spheres of law, medicine, and the social sciences. That is, the history of deviance in popular and high culture comes to be the reworking of "scientific" categories of difference that overlay the fantasies of difference, often more complex and more far-reaching than the models themselves. Incest is just such a category of deviance in modern culture. One of the most interesting phenomena in the intense, public debate over the past decade about child abuse and incest is the virtual absence of sibling incest as a topic of concern.(1) Ian Hacking has explored the history and philosophy of memory/false memory and the literature on child abuse in the context of the modern fascination with multiple personality (Hacking, 1995). The object that he is studying simply does not center on sibling incest because the contemporary debate on multiple personalities and abuse do not seem to focus on this problem. However, it was a question that dominated the debates on incest in precisely the period in French culture from 1874 to 1886 that Hacking quite correctly sees as the period in which the concatenation of relationships he is exploring is made first. Sibling incest was a touchstone for the incest and inbreeding discussions of the late-nineteenth century and one of the often cited "social problems" of that day.

Hacking evokes in the title of his book "the rewriting of the soul" and how singular and one-sided these sciences of the soul are in the discourse of the late-nineteenth century. It is the "soul," that concept that links religious imagery with the secularized language of the new science that gives us a hint as to why he represses the question of sibling incest. For virtually missing in Hacking's account of the history of child abuse and multiple personalities is the question of race--and this is also why the question of brother-sister incest vanishes. For the race question is also a question of hygiene, of the breeding of the healthy as opposed to the ill races and it is here that the problem of sibling incest seemed to be located.

In his study of the history of child abuse, Hacking does understand liminally that race is a category in the science that he is describing (pace his discussion on pp. 200-1). But he focuses on the problem of the debate about memory from Theodule Ribot, Pierre Janet, and on to Sigmund Freud as if it were all of the science of memory rather than only one of the rooms in the memory palace of nineteenth-century psychology. Hacking's choice of decades, however, should have demanded that he look into the adjacent rooms in his memory palace. For next to the theories of memory, which he provides for the reader in elegant summary, are the theories of organic memory (so ably explicated in Laura Otis's recent book on that topic [1994]). There too Ribot, Janet, and Freud play dominant roles. And all of the discussions of organic memory during the 1870s and 1980s in France led to the discussions of race and racial memory and discussions of race during the late-nineteenth century often lead to the crowning cases of child abuse on the literature of the late-nineteenth century--the various accusations of ritual murder throughout Europe and North America at the end of the nineteenth century. For "memory" and "child abuse" have other relationships with one another within the history of psychology.

Indeed, had Hacking read the Franco-Jewish psychologist Hippolyte Bernheim closely he would have found this discussion already in that work on hypnotism that so captured Sigmund Freud. Bernheim focuses on the nature of the psyche of the child in the traumatic setting of the trials concerning ritual murder in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hacking dismisses Janet's virulently anti-Semitic views about Freud as part of a squabble about priorities, rather than acknowledging it as an inherent bias among the Paris psychologists (including the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot) that shapes their basic attitude toward their science and their competition (whether in Vienna or Nancy). The assumption of the medical science of the day was the Jews harbored illnesses, including madness, because of the marriage practices (Braun, 1995, pp. 127-48). Even "child abuse"/ritual murder was seen as a reflex of the madness of the Jews. For child abuse cases in the late-nineteenth century usually have a female child victim (Christian) and a male child abuser (Jewish) who reenact the sexual fantasy of the Jewish rapist/murder and his victims that dominated the discussion of Jack the Ripper during this period. Child murder and sibling incest come to be linked in the forensic science of the period as twin signs of the madness of the Jews. The madness of the Jews is a sexual madness, whether it is focused on the body of the Christian and death or on the body of the Jew and immoral reproduction.