THIS PAPER ATTEMPTS TO DEAL with the interrelationship between three human phenomena: sexuality, the capacity to give and to receive love, and the trauma of incest between a daughter and her father or father surrogate. I shall examine this problem from the viewpoint of both psychoanalytic and more broadly based systems theory, as well as from the perspective of actual clinical examples.

Incest, as employed here, means the occurrence of sexualized behavior between non-married, related family members. It includes sexual touching, fondling, foreplay, oral, anal and genital intercourse. When these behaviors occur between a step-parent