A Hypothesis Concerning the Incest Taboo

The taboo against incest is perhaps the most universal of all things humanly forbidden. There is no known society or culture devoid of this taboo (Sadock, 1980), and of all matters so tabooed, that against mother-son incest is the most stringent (Meiselman, 1978). Murder, theft, and bearing false witness against one's neighbor are more readily countenanced and excused throughout the world than incest. Freud, in his conclusions regarding the Oedipus complex, made the incest taboo and its ramifications a corner-stone of psychoanalysis. In Totem and Taboo (), still marvelous despite its weaknesses and invalid anthropological foundations (Kroeber, 1948), Freud ascribed the origin of the taboo to tensions arising from remorse engendered by parricidal wishes of sons, their fear of father's retribution, and murderous rivalry between the sons themselves. At the basis of this desperate predicament was the sons' sexual longings for the mother and other females who were jealously possessed by a father who was capable, for a time, of intimidating his sons singly. Freud hypothesized that the frustrated sons finally banded together and slew the tyrannical father hoping to gain access to the forbidden females. Instead, what followed was the realization that unless they all equally renounced the mother and other intensely desired females within the family, they would finally succeed in killing one another off— hence, the incest taboo, and mandatory exogamy.

The hypothesis which I should like to present does not gainsay Freud's formulations; rather it attempts to draw attention to an additional hitherto neglected possible factor. Freud's hypothesis considers the taboo against incest as originating solely from the strife between the males of the family in the course of their competition for the sexual favors of the females. The role of the females is depicted as essentially passive. They stand by and merely grant themselves to the victors.