Incest: Some Clinical Variations on a Classical Theme

The incest taboo appears in some form in every culture (Murdock 1949), yet incestuous behavior occurs among virtually all peoples of the world. Freud, in Totem and Taboo, speculated that the incest taboo was a penance for patricide committed by primeval brothers. But it is from the research of anthropologists and sociologists that the most widely accepted theory for the existence of an incest taboo has emerged. According to this theory (Weinberg 1955), the incest taboo developed gradually as cultures changed from family groupings of hunters to agrarian societies. The taboo provided for the maintenance of the integrity of the family unit, without excessive intrafamilial rivalries, and gave rise to the need for interfamilial extension and reciprocal exchanges of goods and services, precluding isolationism.

Of all the proscribed acts of incest, both heterosexual and homosexual, the taboo against mother-son incest is the most stringent and least violated (Wahl 1960). Sherfey (1972) theorizes that the process of civilization required the subduing of the “inordinate” female sexual drive. Extrapolating from Sherfey, one can draw a conclusion regarding the incest taboo: the best-suited sexual partner for the prehistoric woman, in terms of capacity and propinquity, would have been her adolescent son; perhaps the taboo against mother-son incest derives its extraordinary power from the need to oppose the primitive sexual potential for mother-son couples to engage in sexual activity to the point of exhaustion, and to the detriment of the larger demands of the civilizing process.