“Freud and Jung sustain that the prohibition of incest is essential for the development of culture because it gives rise to imagination and consciousness. Robert Stein, in “Incest and Human Love”, proposes that the desire for incest and its prohibition incrementally open the world of the imagination, within which it is possible to transgress all the taboos and return to the original paradisiac state of integrity, prior to the split of one´s animal and spiritual nature. The imaginary world compensates, with advantages, the limitations of reality. All these positions are false. The desire for incest is natural and is the key to paradise.” (my translation, from the Tomos collated by ALAB)
False in which way? In the sense that reality is better than fantasy? That doing something is better than imagining doing it? Anyway, I shall leave aside the last sentence for now and try to find out more about Freud, Jung and Stein´s views on incest.
Freud and Incest
"In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. |
In this way Freud's Oedipus complex became a cover-up for sexual abuse of children, protecting the excellent reputation of perpetrators of incest from upstanding homes. Personally, these Freudian theories have always sounded quite far-fetched to me. Yes, children need love and affection. But do they really desire to have sex with their parents? Really??? No, I don't believe that the Oedipus complex is a universal phenomena and would agree with Malinowski (1) as regards the "exorbitant claims" of psychoanalysis, which he described as a "popular craze of the day".
Anyway, Lundy Bancroft continues by explaining that, “This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men. Once abuse was denied in this way, the stage was set for some psychologists to take the view that any violent or sexually exploitative behaviors that couldn’t be denied—because they were simply too obvious—should be considered mutually caused. Psychological literature is thus full of descriptions of young children who “seduce” adults into sexual encounters and of women whose “provocative” behavior causes men to become violent or sexually assaultive toward them.”
Take away message: Freud considered child sexual abuse to be one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women until he buckled under the heavy pressure from his colleagues.
Other books on this topic: The Freudian Coverup and The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
(1) In his text RT also refers to Malinowski (1884 – 1942), a Polish-British anthropologist who conducted research in the Trobriand Islands. Malinowski challenged the claim to universality of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex and demonstrated that specific psychological complexes are not universal. See also Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927).
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